American Structuralism 美国结构主义.docVIP

An Introduction to American Structuralism There are a lot of language schools in the history, and one of them, American structuralism, is a branch of synchronic linguistics that emerged independently in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Under the leadership of the anthropologist F. Boas (1858-1942) it developed in a different style from that of Europe. Linguistics in America started at the end of the nineteenth century. English was the dominating language in America, where there was no such a tradition as in Europe. Because there was no written record of the languages of the American Indians, when the last speaker of a language dies, the language can be said to have perished. However these languages were characterized by features of vast diversity and differences which are rarely found in other parts of the world. Boas worked as organizer of a survey of the many indigenous languages of America north of Mexico specialized in the anthropology of North America. He was a self-taught linguist, having never received any formal training in linguistics. He held that there was no ideal type or form of languages, for human languages were endlessly diverse, he strongly opposed to the view that language is the soul of a race, and he proved that the structure and form of a language has nothing to do with the evolution of a race and the development of a culture. There were only differences in language structure, while there is no difference between languages in terms of being more or less reasonable or advanced. Boas discussed the framework of descriptive linguistics in his book. He held that such descriptions consist of three parts: the sound of languages, the semantic categories of linguistic expression. He regarded linguistics as part of anthropology and failed to establish linguistics as an independent branch of science. But his basic theory, his observation, and his descriptive