Chapter 1 - The State of American Linguistics in the Mid 1950s

Abstract

This chapter discusses the state of American linguistics in the mid 1950s. The linguistics practiced in the United States in the 1950s, along with that in much of Europe, owed an intellectual debt to the great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Saussure's lecture notes, published posthumously as the Cours de Linguistique Générale, represent a turning point in the history of linguistics. The central principle of the Cours is that a well-defined subpart of language can be abstracted from the totality of speech. This subpart Saussure called langue, which he contrasted with parole, or speech. The two pioneers of structural linguistics in America were Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield. Sapir, in fact, had worked out the basic principles of structuralism even before Saussure's Cours had been published, as is evidenced by his Takelma grammar of 1911. Sapir's interests were far-ranging; in addition to grammatical analysis, he concerned himself with the humanistic and cultural aspects of language and published papers on the functioning of language in creative literature, mythology, and religion. The essence of the intellectual differences between Sapir and Bloomfield can be captured nicely by Bloomfield's sobriquet for Sapir, medicine man, and by Sapir's references to Bloomfield's sophomoric psychology.