Linguistics

LINGUISTICS

LINGUISTICS. The early discipline of linguistics in the United States consisted in large part of the work of three eminent scholars—Franz Boas, who studied Native American languages; Edward Sapir, the most prolific of Boas's students; and Leonard Bloomfield, who was trained in Germanic philology and taught languages. Boas, Sapir, and Bloomfield were among the founders in 1924 of the Linguistic Society of America, the leading professional organization and publisher of the discipline's journal.

Bloomfield and Sapir were leaders in descriptive linguistics, now often referred to as structural linguistics. According to them, languages should be described as interlocking assemblages of basic units and as functioning wholes independent of earlier developmental stages. Such descriptions might then form the basis for comparing related languages and reconstructing their common origin. Sapir identified the phoneme as a basic unit of sound patterning and offered evidence for its psychological reality. Bloomfield, on the other hand, advocated indirect observation to identify the distinct meanings associated with units of form. His followers developed a mandatory set of discovery procedures for all valid analyses that built upon the sequential distribution of units of sound. These procedures, and strictures against mixing comparison with description, were in practice often violated, with good reason. Linguists were prepared to assume that languages might differ from one another without limit; thus, one could assume no commonalities. They were reacting in part to clumsy attempts to superimpose categories of classical grammar on descriptions of New World languages. Many of them thought that the grammatical categories of language might shape perceptions of reality.

Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, Noam Chomsky revised these ideas—including the supposed necessity of phonetically based discovery—in what became known as generative grammar. Language was for him a hypothetico-deductive system centered about Syntactic Structures, the title of his 1957 treatise. According to Chomsky, language and human cognition evolve together. Language is innate, its categories universal among humankind. It is part of children's normal development, rather than a skill learned by some and not by others, such as playing a musical instrument or driving a car. Children must ascertain the particular sound-meaning combinations and parameter settings used in their environment. The linguist can learn more about this innate capability from probing a single language rather than surveying multiple languages.

Whereas generative grammar was autonomous, with many of its constructs presuming homogeneous speech communities of identical idealized hearer-speakers, William Labov developed methods for sampling and quantifying the variation in usage by members of actual communities and by given individuals on different occasions. He showed the influence of social attitudes on language within speech communities. Some of his studies using the sound spectrograph demonstrated that speakers perpetuate distinctions they are unable to recognize.

Even as they considered the existence of a universal grammar, however, linguists in the 1990s became concerned with the high rate of language death in the modern world. An increasing number of young linguists committed themselves to studying language ecology, in hopes of preventing or curtailing the incidence of language death, and to recording and analyzing little-studied endangered languages to preserve at least a record of what had been lost. It was almost as if the discipline had come full circle from the efforts of Boas and his students nearly a century earlier.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hymes, Dell, and John Fought. American Structuralism. The Hague and New York: Mouton, 1981.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. Linguistic Theory in America. 2d ed. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1986.

Newmeyer, Frederick J., ed. Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey. 4 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Byron W. Bender / c. w.

See also Behaviorism ; Post-structuralism ; Psychology .