Remarks on the origins of morphophonemics in American structuralist linguistics

Abstract

As recently as 1997, Noam Chomsky has reiterated what he had affirmed on several occasions, especially during the 1970s, namely, that when working out his ideas on rule ordering for his Master's thesis on Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew in 1951, he did not have access to Bloomfield's “Menomini Morphophonemics” 1939 paper, suggesting that the generative model of linguistic analysis he developed at the time was more or less original with him. The present paper argues that even if he did not have direct access to a copy of Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague vol. 8 prior to the completion of his M.A. thesis, he had very likely absorbed the essentials of Bloomfield's ideas about rule ordering from various sources, including reaading the proofs of his supervisor Zellig S. Harris' main theoretical work, Methods in Structural Linguistics, in early 1947, in which the salient points of Bloomfield's 1939 argument are discussed in a section entitled “Morphophonemics”. Indeed, although Harris' book was not published until 1951, it had been circulating in manuscript form since 1946, and Harris' preface, signed January 1947, thanks Chomsky for helping with the proofs. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that Harris' Methods contains the essentials of the generative approach to language which is by now almost exclusively associated with Chomsky's name. A further case can be made that Harris' 1941 and 1948 articles on Hebrew provided more than simply the data of which Chomsky's 1951 M.A. thesis constitutes largely a ‘restatement’ in a much more abstract, technical form of his own making. The present paper argues that there has been much more continuity and cumulative advance in American linguistics than we have been made to believe both by the active participants in the ‘revolution’ and its historians.