During the first third of the 20th century, American ... · American Structuralism During the first...

American Structuralism

During the first third of the 20thcentury, American anthropology wasdominated by the work and ideas ofFranz Boas and his students.


An outsider to professional ethnography, Boas mounted a devastating critique of the discipline’s

racist and evolutionary assumptions culminating in 1911 with major publications in physical anthropology—which challenged racial

classification and its attendant beliefs about intelligence—linguistics and ethnology.

His anthropological critique led towards 20thcentury cultural relativism.


Boas trained most of the important anthropologists of the next two generations, many

of whom found positions in newly organized anthropology departments in American

universities.

Not only did Boas and his students replace one scientific paradigm (evolutionism) with another

(relativism), they were able tocontrol the emergent institutional power base of

anthropology.


Major changes in the study of Amerindian languages came about as a result of the influence of “Papa Franz,” and out of this research grew a new and quite distinctively American approach to

the study of language in general.


The Handbook of American Indian Languages written by Boas marks a major turning point in the

study of linguistics in America.

Originally conceived as a presentation of Amerindian language structures in greater depth

than previous studies, the work came to have much wider significance than this.


Boas’s point was that each language should be studied in its own terms rather than examined only

through the optic of some other system.

Boas’s insistence on approaching each language in terms of its individual features would become the basis for the characteristic position of later American structuralism “that languages could

differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways”.


The Handbook of American Indian Languages and its individual descriptive studies of particular

languages are not really concerned with developing a general theory of structure; what

they seek to establish is an adequate and consistent practice.

Morphology and syntax get most of the attention.


Edward Sapir was a student at Colombia, where he worked with Franz Boas and received a PhD (1909)

on the Takelma language, spoken in Oregon.

While working at Berkeley and UPenn, Sapir did fieldwork on Takelma, Chinook, Yana, Southern

Paiute and Ute.


From 1910, as an anthropologist at the Canadian National Museum in Ottawa, Sapir conducted did

fieldwork on a large number of languages including Nootka and Sarcee, an Athabaskan

language.

American StructuralismIn 1925 Sapir moved to the University of Chicago, where he continued to do fieldwork on languages

including Navajo and Hupa, where he had Benjamin Whorf as a student.

He was a colleague of Leonard Bloomfield at Chicago, and corresponded extensively with

Trubetzkoy in the 1930s.

When the International Phonological Association was established in Prague in 1932, Sapir was

elected as the sole American member of its board.


Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Sapir)

“Human beings do not live in the objective worldalone... but are very much at the mercy of the

particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.

The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with

different labels attached.”


Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Whorf)

“... the 'linguistic relativity principle,' which means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed in different evaluations of

externally similar acts of observations, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at

somewhat different views of the world.”


Whorf says that each language can process an infinite variety of experiences through a finite set

of formal categories (lexical and grammatical) and that the experiences are classified by means of a

process of analogy.


This means that the system of categories that each language offers its speakers is not universal

but particular.

Central to the hypothesis formulated by Whorf is that linguistic categories are used as guides in the

habitual thought.


The Sapirean formulation of the hypothesis gainedwide acceptance.

The influence of grammar on world view was difficult to demonstrate.

Whorf's exotic interpretations of Hopi thought were often attributed to his imaginative native

consultant.


Meanwhile the basic linguistic attitude changedfrom an orientation that 'every language must be

described in its own terms' (the structuralist paradigm)

to a preoccupation with language universalsushered in by Chomsky's transformational-

generative revolution in linguistics.

American Structuralism “The problem with Whorf's data

is simply that they are entirely linguistic; he neither collected nor reported any non-linguistic data and yet all of his assertions . . . imply the existence of

non-linguistic cognitive differences.

As the case stands in Whorf's own writings, differences of linguistic structure are said to

correspond with differences of a non-linguistic kind, but the only evidence for these latter is the

linguistic evidence with which he began.” (Roger Brown)


Linguistics was in a period of confusion in the early 1930s when Bloomfield battled Sapir for

discipline supremacy.

Bloomfield was a colleague of Sapir at Yale University, and they held opposite theoretical

positions, as Bloomfield rejected the possibility that linguistics analyze meaning, while Sapir

thought that semantics is an essential part of the study of language.


Bloomfield had originally been allied with Sapir and a supporter of Saussure's ideas.

But before Yale (at Ohio State), he was influenced by logical positivism and the related movement of behaviorism. His ideas became strictly empirical.


Bloomfield's book Language (1933) dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it he explicitly

adopted a behavioristic approach to the study oflanguage, eschewing, in the name of

scientific objectivity, all reference to mental orconceptual categories.


Such a view discouraged not only an inquiry into the universal properties of language, but the study of meaning as well, given the notorious difficulty of

making explicit the precise meaning of an utterance.


He adopted the behaviorist theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the

relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response.

Behaviorism was an American school of psychology founded by John B. Watson, who

insisted that all behavior is a physiological response to environmental stimuli.


Behaviorism required Bloomfield to reformulate the place of semantics within linguistics,

since that conception of language does not allow for any kind of concept or mental image

(like Saussure's signifier),

but only sets of stimuli and responses that occur in certain situations.


Bloomfield's model of language use:

S r ...... s R

S: Girl sees apples on a tree and feels hungry.r: Girl says “I'm hungry.”...... (sound waves)s: Boy hears, “I'm hungry.”R: Boy climbs tree, gets apples, gives them to Girl.


S r ...... s R

S -- Primary Stimulusr -- secondary responses -- secondary stimulusR -- Primary Response


S r ...... s R

mental activity mental activityS--------------->r.................s--------------->R

observableactivity


The advantage of speech for the human organism was that one person could receive the stimulus,

but another person carry out the response.

Therefore the division of labor and all advanced civilization results from speech.


Primitive behaviorist models of language acquisition thought it was:

1) an inherited trait2) learned by teaching and imitation3) that words offer stimulus4) habit-forming5) perfected by results

American StructuralismBloomfield's conception of science and of the

scientific method shaped his approach to linguistic matters. He thought that physics and biology

obtained scientific control over the phenomena that they study because they abandoned

teleological pseudo-explanations.

Unfortunately, the same did not happen to the human sciences: “In our universe man himself is

the one factor of which we have no scientific understanding and over which we have no

scientific control.”


Dualistic conceptions of humans assume a mental parallel to the body, a nonphysical entity such as a

mind or a will.

The monist conception, compatible with physics and biology, was taking steps in several

disciplines dedicated to the study of language, including psychology.


“The mentalistic theory … supposes that the variability of human conduct is due to the

interference of some non-physical factor, a spirit or will or mind … present in every human being.

This spirit … is entirely different from material things and accordingly follows some other kind of

causation or perhaps none at all.”


“The materialistic (or, better, mechanistic) theory supposes that the variability of human conduct, including speech, is due only to the fact that the

human body is a very complex system.

Human actions … are part of cause-and-effect sequences exactly like those … in the study of

physics or chemistry.”


Bloomfield thought that the Vienna Circle and the behaviorists took an advanced position,

considering false the question of the relation between matter and mind:

In scientific formulations, mentalistic terms should refer to linguistic events, not to a supposed

mentalistic entity.

Mentalistic statements subjected to linguistic analysis will be revealed to be statements about

language.


The linguist must observe and register carefully the facts of speech and the situations in which

they happen, without resorting to that which cannot be observed.

For linguistics to be an autonomous scientific discipline, the observations must be free from

prejudices and independent from philosophical, psychological, and commonsense assumptions.


Linguistic investigations “will be the ground where science gains its first foothold in the

understanding and control of human affairs.”


Bloomfield made important empirical contributions to three major subfields of

Linguistics: Indo-European comparative-historical linguistics

(including work on Sanskrit as well as Germanic);

the study of the Malayo-Polynesian languages, principally Tagalog;

and descriptive and comparative Algonquian linguistics (a monumental study).


Bloomfield had immense influence–the so-called Bloomfieldian era‘ lasted for more than 20 years.

During this time, linguists focused mostly on writing descriptive grammars of unwritten

languages.


Bloomfield and his followers were interested in the forms of linguistic items and in their distributional

arrangement.

Meaning, according to Bloomfield, was not observable using rigid methods of analysis, and it was therefore the weak point in language study.


This involved first, collecting sets of utterances from native speakers of these languages,

and second, analysing the corpus of collected data by studying the phonological and syntactic patterns of the language concerned, as far as

possible without reference to meaning.

Items were (in theory) identified and classifiedsolely on the basis of their distribution within the

corpus.


The 'post-Bloomfieldians' dominated American linguistics in the 1940s and 1950s. One of their

most prominent members was Chomsky's teacher Zellig Harris.

For American structuralists, the ultimate goal of linguistics was the perfection of the discovery

procedures–a set of principles which would give them a foolsproof way to discover the linguistic

units of an unwritten language.


Their goal was explicitly to 'discover' agrammar by performing a set of operations on a

corpus of data. Each successive operation was to be one step farther removed from the corpus.

The new discipline of computer science and the rapid increase in computational power (for that

time) made it seem possible to examine extremely extensive corpora.


Since the physical record of the flow of speech itself was the only data considered objective enough to

serve as a starting point,

it followed that the levels of a grammatical description had to be arrived at in the following order:

phonemics, morphemics, syntax, discourse.

American StructuralismThe extreme empiricism that dominated American

linguistics from the 1930s to the 1950s was a simple reflection of the fact that this intellectual current dominated all the social and behavioral

sciences in the USA at the time.

There was no other period in American history in which there was greater respect for the methods

and results of science:

the ability to generalize laws on the basis of precise measurement of observable data.


Post-Bloomfieldian structuralismpromised to bring linguistics in accord with what was seen as the standard practices in physics,

chemistry, biology, and the other natural sciences.

They looked to behaviorist psychology for independent support for their approach to

language.


But, American psychology at this time, led by B. F. Skinner was under the grip of an extreme

empiricism

that rejected theoretical terms such as 'phoneme,' 'morpheme,' etc., which could be derived by a set

of mechanical operations.


B.F. Skinner(1904 - 1990)


Skinner believed that free will was an illusion.

Human behavior depended entirely on the consequences of actions being good or bad,

leading to those actions being repeated or not.

Behavior could be shaped and controlled by reinforcing desired behavior through rewards and

punishments.


Skinner invented the Operant Conditioning Chamber, or “Skinner Box,” where rats and

pigeons were conditioned through positive and negative reinforcement - food and electric shocks

- to push a lever or peck a disk.

American StructuralismIt's Science!

Skinner could count the rate of lever-pulling and create “schedules of reinforcement.”The adoption of the methods of natural science by human and social sciences presupposes the acceptance of determinism, the belief that events are regularly related.


The identification of regular relations will allow one to predict and control phenomena, that is, to produce them by manipulating the antecedent events regularly related.


In 1957 Skinner published Verbal Behavior, a book in which he developed a model of human

language use based on operants and reinforcement.

The verbal episode is Skinner's paradigm of what happens in verbal interactions.


In the example of a mand,

the speaker emits the verbal behavior “bread, please.”

The listener offers the bread to the speaker, who takes the bread

and says “thank you” to the listener, who finally answers with “you're welcome.”


This verbal episode is constituted by (a) the speaker's deprivation; (b) the nonverbal stimuli, mainly the two

participants and the bread; (c) the units of verbal behavior “bread, please,”

“thank you,” “you're welcome”; (d) the verbal stimuli that result from these units of

verbal behavior; (e) the nonverbal behavior of the listener of

passing the bread.


The verbal responses “thank you” and “you're welcome” are generalized reinforcers that

maintain,

first, the nonverbal behavior of the listener of reinforcing the mand and,

second, the speaker's verbal behavior of presenting this generalized reinforcer that

maintains the behavior of the listener.


In the listener's behavior of passing the bread, the reinforcer specified by the mand, Skinner locates the consequence that maintains verbal behavior.


Both Bloomfield and Skinner present (1) physicalist analyses of a verbal interaction

according to elements relevant to a functional analysis of behavior,

comprising the antecedents (deprivation and stimuli) and the consequences (reinforcers

presented by a listener) of behavior.


(2) The same basic structure, the “verbal episode” consists of two human organisms, whose

behavior is under control of deprivation or stimuli presented by their verbal and nonverbal

environment.


(3) This model conceptualizes verbal behavior as occurring because of the practical results it

produces due to the participation of a listener.


Verbal Behavior Is Mediated by a Listener to Be Effective on the Physical World

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior as Being Essentially A Functional Analysis, With Environmental Events as the Ultimate

Determinants of Verbal Behavior

Verbal Behavior as Operant Behavior, Maintained by Its Consequences


Noam Chomsky (1928 - )


In 1957 another book was published:

Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures.

American StructuralismNoam Chomsky was trained in the rigidly

empiricist linguistic tradition of post-Bloomfieldian structuralism.

But as early as his undergraduatedays, he had had doubts as to the philosophical

worth of the enterprise.

These doubts soon led him to rethink the philosophical foundations of the field and to set to

work to develop an alternative conception of linguistic theory and practice.


His revolutionary book's conceptual break withpost-Bloomfieldianism was not over the question

of whether linguistics could be a 'science'—Chomsky never questioned that it could be—

but over the more fundamental issue of what a scientific theory is and how one might be

constructed with respect to linguistic phenomena.


Chomsky argued at length that no scientific theory had ever resulted from the scientist performing

mechanical operations on the data.

How the scientist happens to hit upon a particular theoretical notion is simply irrelevant;

all that counts is its adequacy in explaining the phenomena in its domain.


Whereas to earlier structuralists, a theory was no more than a concise taxonomy of the elements

extractable from a corpus of data,

Chomsky redefined the goal of linguistic theory to that of providing a rigorous and formal

characterization of possible human language.


In Chomsky's view, natural scien-tists set parallel tasks for themselves:

the goal of physicists is to characterize the class of possible physical processes,

that of biologists to characterize the class of possible biological processes, and so

linguistics should distinguishing as precisely as possible the class of grammatical processes that can occur in language from that which cannot.


This universal grammar specifies the limits within which all languages function.


It was Chomsky's (1959) review of B. F. Skinner'sVerbal Behavior in which he first stressed that his

theory of language is a psychological (i.e. rationalist) model of an aspect of human

knowledge.

Chomsky's review (and his 1971 review of Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity)

represents the basic refutation of behaviorist psychology.


Chomsky:

Skinner's “speculations are devoid of scientific content and do not even hint at general outlines of

a possible science of human behavior.”


Skinner's view of language

• Language learning occurs through behavioral reinforcement, and can be analyzed using the same concepts used in conditioning studies of

animals

• Verbal behavior is lawfully dependent on external stimuli


If we restrict the terms 'stimulus' and 'response' to cases in which they are lawfully related (as they

are used in animal studies), Skinner's analysis will fail to subsume most linguistic behavior.

If we use the terms 'stimulus' and 'response' to cover any event that impinges on an organism

and any linguistic behavior, there will be no lawful relationship between stimuli and responses.


To escape from this dilemma (to secure a more law-like relationship between stimuli and

responses), Skinner must covertly reintroduce mental states.


In animal studies, behavior is under law-like control of stimuli and histories of reinforcement.

A response will be strong if it has been reinforced by external conditions in the past.

Chomsky thinks this can't be true for linguistic behavior.


Objection: Response Variability

• The sentences we produce in response to a given stimulus can vary dramatically (seeing a red chair can make some one say "red" or "chair" or

any number of things)


Objection: Absent Reinforcers

• In animal studies, reinforcers are always real events that occur prior to behavior

• Factors that reinforce linguistic behavior need

not impinge on the organism (e.g. writer reinforced by response of readers centuries later)

• They need not even exist (e.g., writing a book that no one ends up reading)


Covert Mentalism. In linguistic behavior, 'reinforcement' is really a cover-term for

mental notions such as 'likes' and 'wants.'


Stimulus and reinforcement can only determine linguistic behavior if they are interpreted

mentalistically. E.g., a 'stimulus' can be defined as what a speaker notices, and 'reinforcement' can be defined as what a speaker wants to mention.

To explain linguistic behavior, we must embrace mentalism and develop a detailed theory of the mental factors and conditions that determine

speech.


Competence vs. Performance

Chomsky distinguishes between:

the underlying knowledge of language (the generative grammar that can produce all

possible sentences) - Competence

the way language is actually used in practice (e.g., the way we produce or interpret a particular utterance on a particular occasion) - Performance


Language performance may be affected by such things as attention, stamina, memory, and beliefs

about our interlocutors. All of these things lie outside of a theory of grammar proper.

• Therefore, a theory of language should be a theory of competence.


Humans are born with an innate mechanism for acquiring an understanding language.

This consists in a universal grammar (UG), which establishes the set of possible grammars,

and a language acquisition device (LAD), which allows one to select a particular grammar from

that set based on limited data.


This universal grammar is domain-specific and modular:

• Domain specific (designed specifically for language)

• Modular (not affected by other cognitive systems)


Facts to Be ExplainedLinguistic Creativity

There is an unbounded number of possible sentences:

The worm that the man squashed died.The worm that the man that wears gloves

squashed died.The worm that the man that wears gloves that

glow in the dark squashed died.


Facts to Be ExplainedLinguistic Creativity

Most sentences have never been uttered before, and will never be uttered again.

We achieve these unbounded abilities with a finite resource: the brain.


Facts to Be ExplainedGrammaticality Judgments

We can judge whether completely novel and even nonsensical sentences are grammatical.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.Vs.

Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.



'Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe:All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe.

(from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky")



'Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe:All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe.

Adj Noun Verb

American StructuralismFacts to Be Explained

Poverty of the Stimulus:

1. Small Sample. Children are only exposed to a minute sample of sentences, and these are

consistent with numerous possible rules that the child never entertains.

a. John expects the class to end soon.b. The class is expected to end soon.

c. John expects the class will end soon.d. The class is expected will end soon.*


Poverty of the Stimulus:

2. Degraded Sample. Those sentences are often degraded (i.e., ungrammatical), and ungrammatical

sentences uttered by a child are often approved.

Child: her curl my hair [said while the mother curls her hair]

Mother: Yes, that's right [approved because of true content]

(from a study by Roger Brown)


Facts to Be ExplainedLinguistic Universals

3. Universals. The are linguistic universals, which can't be explained by 'common descent'.

(E.g., syntactic categories, phonological features, grammatical principles.)


Facts to Be ExplainedBeyond Appearances (Abstractness of Rules)

Sentences that are superficially alike have different underlying structures

E.g., Structurally ambiguous sentences

They are visiting relatives.Flying planes can be dangerous.


E.g., these look alike:

Natasha expected Boris to kill Rocky.

Natasha persuaded Boris to kill Rocky.

But only the first preserves meaning in passive:

Natasha expected Rocky to be killed by Boris.

Natasha persuaded Rocky to be killed by Boris.


Facts to Be Explained Inadequacy of Empiricist Learning Theories 1:

Domain Specific Learning Rules

4. Intelligence Independence. Vast differences in intelligence have only small effect on linguistic competence.5. Early Acquisition. Language is acquired when a child's other mental capacities are limited.6. Species Specificity. Great apes and other non-human creatures can't learn language.


Inadequacy of Empiricist Learning Theories 2: Learning Goes beyond Superficial

Properties

7. Structure Sensitive Rules. The grammatical rules we use are sensitive to underlying structure.

8. Creativity. Linguistic creativity precludes empiricist theories of language acquisition,because many novel sentences are cannot be generated by imitating sentences that have beenexperienced.


Facts to Be Explained Inadequacy of Empiricist Learning Theories 2:

Learning Goes beyond SuperficialProperties

9. Abstractness. Sentences cannot be represented as mere copies of experience.

Who is leaving?Harry appeared to Sally to leaveHarry appealed to Sally to leave


Mental Grammar

To understand and produce novel grammatical sentences, we must use generative rules

(rules that generate novel sentences from finite means)

Chomsky calls a system of such rules a "grammar.”


A "grammar" will contain:

• A syntactic component: rules for generating phase structures (and for transforming one phrase structure into another, e.g., active to passive)

• A semantic component: rules for determining meanings

• A phonological component: rules for determining sounds


Sound --->Phonlogy --->Syntax --->Semantics


Chomsky's View of Linguistics

1. Goal

The linguist should try to characterize UG and LAD.



2. Constraints.

In constructing a theory the linguist must account for:

o The range of languages people can speak

o The speed and data limitations under which languages are acquired

American StructuralismChomsky's View of Linguistics

Principles and ParametersIn recent work, Chomsky has conceived of the innate endowance as a set of: a) universal principles shared by all languages b) universal parameters with different possiblesettings.

Parameter example: prepositions can either comebefore nouns (English) orafter nouns (Japanese) in a prepositional phrase.



Originally, Chomsky proposed that meaning was categorically constrained like syntaxic and phonemic systems, that there was a formal

structure to the categories we use to interpret the world.

Later, he would reject that view: “I doubt that one can separate semantic representation from beliefs

and knowledge about the world.”



Chomsky also rejects the “truth-value” style of assigning meaning to sentences in the manner of

analytic philosophy (based on the notion of “possible worlds”).

In his view, such a theory of meaning leads either to psychological speculation or mathematic sterility; neither is appropriate to linguistics.



His recent work has focused on the modularity of grammatic structure, similar to his proposed

model of a modular language faculty.

There is much evidence supporting a physically modular “language faculty” in the brain.



There is resistance to and rejection of Chomsky's theories, although few criticisms stand on ground

as firm as his rebuttal to Skinner.

They can be broadly grouped in the positivist and anti-rationalist traditions.



The positivists claim that his tendency to make broad generalizations before having the empirical

data to support them.

Chomsky replies that his hypothetico-deductive method is “Galilean.”



Anti-rationalists claim that he is an idealist.

Chomsky fiercely defends his theory of mind and refuses to grant that it is unscientific.



For Chomsky, “human nature” is language and the language faculty itself.

One can see an obvious link between his theories of mind and language and his political anarchism.



Ultimately, Chomsky's theory about the nature of language will be falsified or proven on the basis of

further empirical data.

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