美国结构主义 American Structuralism.pptVIP

American Structuralism Contents The background of the American Structuralism The three Periods American tructuralism Features of American tructuralism Advantages of American tructuralism Problems with American Structuralism References The background of the American Structuralism American Structuralism，which is also called American descriptive linguistic, is a branch of synchronic linguistics that emerged in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. And it was the American anthropologists, who found that “the indigenous languages of the American Indian were dying out rapidly and they felt the urgent need to record these languages” (Hu Zhuanglin 2001:423). The background of the American Structuralism As the Native American Indian languages were of “vast diversity” and “there were no written records of these languages”, so the traditional grammar, which focuses on “prescribing the rules governed language ” proved to be infeasible to deal with the Native American Indian languages. So to “record and describe these exotic languages” without having any presuppositions about the nature of language in general seemed more suitable and much discussion on “descriptive procedures” occurred. The three Periods American Structuralism Boas-Sapir Period (1911-1932) Franz Boas Edward Sapir The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis The Bloomfieldian Period (1933-1950) The Bloomfield the man Bloomfield and Behaviourism The Post-Bloomfieldian Period (1952-1956) Boas 1858-1942, Born in Germany Anthropologist, Pioneer of the American Structuralism Handbook of American Indian Languages in 1911 “descriptive linguistics”: paved way for future American descriptive linguistics. In the preface of his book , he emphasized that during the process of describing language, the linguists should try to “discover, for each language under study, its own particular grammatical structure ” and “to develop descriptive categories appropriate to it” but not impose the rules of oth