An American linguist Leonard Bloomfield
who led the development of structural linguistics during 1930s was born in
1887. He is especially known for his book Language (1933)
describing the state of art of linguistics at its time.
The mechanism of
Bloomfield was closely related to behaviourism in psychology, that is human
conduct is totally predictable. Even speech must be explained by the external
conditions surrounding its productions. This theory was given a new status in
structural approach. This led to a higher degree of precision in the grammatical
description of language. For e.g. English adjective category can be more
precisely defined as: a word which can stand between the definite article ‘the’
and a noun and which never takes –s in the plural. Therefore, the American
linguistics followed certain order of the levels of grammatical description as
stated:-
(a) Phonemics
(b) Morphemic
(c) Syntax
(d) Discourse
The corpus consists of
speech, so as the first operation is phonemic. Bloomfieldians worked out the
principle of analysis in the field of phonemics which was based on the
criterion of distribution and exemplified by substitution test.
Since, language consists
of a string of phonemes which are grouped into minimal recurrent sequences or
morphs; hence, there is a morphemic operation.
Bloomfieldians most important
contribution to the theory of syntax has been the analysis of immediate
constituents. In order to discover the structure of linguistic units one
divides the utterance into two parts, which are in turn divided into two parts,
until one arrives at the minimal elements that can no longer be divided using
the same criteria. As such, one arrives at the immediate constituents. This
analysis proposed by American structuralism not only helped to reveal the
principles by which the structure of a message may be linguistically organised
but also offered the possibility of studying languages that do not need logical
categories to construct a signifying system. American structuralism introduces
the epistemological break not in explanation but by offering a flat description
of language.
Bloomfieldians
insistence on description had in fact largely emanated from their faithful
adherence to empirical conception according to which science has only to
describe phenomena. This analytical approach to structure has rendered language
static- an object without history. Thus, the Bloomfield methodology in
linguistics has made a language a speaking subject.
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