American Descriptivism ('Structuralism')

American Descriptivism ('Structuralism') a

James P. Blevins The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics Edited by Keith Allan

Abstract and Keywords

Although the heyday of the American Descriptivist school was short, spanning the time between Bloomfield and Chomsky, this period was decisive for the development of modern linguistics. It was in this time that a distinctive American school emerged with an explicit focus on synchronic analysis. The challenge of interpreting Bloomfield led the Descriptivists to define many notions that are commonly identified as "Bloomfieldian," from the structuralist phoneme and morpheme, to models of immediate constituent analysis. In the course of assembling these notions into a new science of linguistics, the Descriptivists came to focus on the techniques and devices employed to construct linguistic analyses. This shift in orientation marked the advent of a recognizably modern approach to linguistics, one in which formal tools and analytic methods are primary objects of study. Descriptivists' interest in statistical, information-theoretic, and corpus-based methods likewise has a strong contemporary resonance.