The structuralist ascendancy in American linguistics

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AbstractWhen the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) was founded in 1924, structural linguists formed a small minority of the membership. Most of the members had philological interests. Twenty years later, structuralists and structurally-oriented historical linguists had become predominant. Several factors contributed to the success of American structuralism: the conviction of its leading practitioners that they were doing ‘scientific linguistics’; the feeling that knowledge and understanding were growing by leaps and bounds; the ‘egalitarian’ message that all languages could be analyzed by the same methods; the LSA-sponsored summer institutes that helped spread knowledge of structuralist theory; the government-sponsored work in linguistics during the Second World War; and the change in the LSA leadership around 1940.