American structuralist phonology

NEO- OR POST-BLOOMFIELDIAN LINGUISTICS (BETWEEN BLOOMFIELDS 1933 LANGUAGE AND THE LATE 1950s)

intro
no central figure, but a variety of individuals who developed issues whose roots can be found in Bloomfields earlier statements the first generation to be employed as professional linguists linguistics claims to have a uniquely scientific approach to the study of language, based on the empiricist, logical-positivists views of contemporary philosophy of science

post-Bloomfieldians
Bernard Bloch, Charles Hockett, George Trager, Henry Lee Smith, Archibald Hill, Martin Joos, Rulon Wells solidarity and community of interests; they felt themselves to be a group of crusaders with a common mission Zellig Harris: supporter of rigorous and purely distributional methods; personally outside

successors of Sapir
Morris Swadesh, Mary Haas, Stanley Newman, Carl Voegelin attacked Sapirs mentalism

critics of Am. structuralism

Eugene Nida and Kenneth Pike, Charles Fries developed practical methods for investigating unfamiliar lgs they were especially against the (Bloomfieldian) rejection of meaning unfortunately, the lack of prestige of religiously motivated fieldwork (Nida and Pike)

The American structuralist view of language (1)

objection against a deductive explanatory system based on language universals (like that of the Prague School) universals should (if at all) be discovered as purely inductive generalizations a consequence of Boass languages could differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways

The American structuralist view of language (2)

Bloomfields rejection of semantics linguistics must proceed without reference to the mind no theorizing about the psychological implementation of linguistic structure Bloomfields rejection of theoretical status for phonetics within linguistics Trubetzkoys phonetics is to linguistics as numismatics is to economics linguistics thus cut off at both sides (semantics and phonetics) [interestingly, Hockett 1955 and Pike 1943 - treatments of phonetics, Joos 1948 acoustic analysis in phonetics]

The American structuralist view of language (3)

the only acceptable general principles were inductive generalizations based on corpus of descriptions structural descriptive extensive fieldwork, description for its own sake prohibition against mixing levels (i.e. allowing considerations from higher levels of structure to play a role in determining the relation between phonemic and phonetic representations) phonological representation could only have properties recoverable from the bare signal itself

The phoneme (1)

Swadesh 1934: the inductive procedure for discovering the phonemes of a lg begins with phonetic facts first, abstract from free variation if complementary distribution, then subtypes of the same phoneme, acc. to phonetic similarity completely specified basic variant theory phonemes should be organized into a system so as to maximize pattern congruity (e.g. symmetry along the phonetic dimensions of contrast; segments that share distributional properties are assumed to be similar)

The phoneme (2)

Twaddell 1935: challenged both conceptions of the phoneme common at the time (i.e. Sapir & B. de Courtenays psychological view vs. Jones physicalist view) phonemes are fictitious units to express contrasts in a lg as a system for transcribing utterances in that lg no mental reality (its rather informants failure to make a distinction which a trained phonetician would make): what you see is all you get

The phoneme (3)

Bloch 1941: phonemic overlapping partial overlapping, like flap assigned to /t/ in butter, and to /r/ in throw - no confusion complete overlapping, like final vless obstruents in German, Russian, Polish; such cases must logically be excluded - a necessary condition on phonemic analysis regardless of the coherence of the resulting description; later called biuniqueness (Harris 1944) also, thus, restriction that no grammatical facts (morph. or syntactic) can be used in phonological analysis (mixing levels prohibited)

The phoneme (4)

Pike 1947, 1952: grammatical prerequisites to phonemic analysis - thus against the above prohibition, the role of grammatical boundaries others did not accept Pikes view, so an alternative: juncture phonemes /+/ (distinctive conditioning effect on other phonemes)

American structuralist morphophonemics (1)

relatedness between forms which is not deducible from the facts of pronunciation alone must lie outside of phonology morphophonology or morphophonemics (acc. to Swadesh 1934): the study of the phonemic structure of morphemes (morpheme-structure rules in generative grammar) the study of interchange between phonemes as a morphological process

American structuralist morphophonemics (2)

tendency to eliminate dynamic process-like statements deriving forms from one another or from more basic forms, in favour of static descriptive accounts characterizing the range of occurring forms the method for morpheme alternants (Harris 1942): every sequence of phonemes which has meaning & which is not composed of smaller sequences having meaning is a morpheme e.g. knife-knives /naiF/- a morphoph. symbol /F/ is an abbreviation for a set of alternating phonemes and for the alternation itself: phoneme /v/ before plural /z/, phoneme /f/ elsewhere (parallel to morphophonemes posited by Trubetzkoy)

Rule interactions and the nature of descriptions

Bloomfield: rules of a morphophonemic analysis are applied in a sequence (descriptive order), each applying to the result of the previous one Sapir: sequence predictable from general principles; rules having access to organic and inorganic elements (later: nonderived & derived forms) only the forms are real; regularities are sth the linguist finds a language = a hierarchy of inventories and not a structured cognitive system