Structural Linguistics - History

History

Structural linguistics begins with the posthumous publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics in 1916, which was compiled from lectures by his students. The book proved to be highly influential, providing the foundation for both modern linguistics and semiotics.

After Saussure, the history of structural linguistics branches off in two directions. First, in America, linguist Leonard Bloomfield's reading of Saussure's course proved influential, bringing about the Bloomfieldean phase in American linguistics that lasted from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. Bloomfield "bracketed" all questions of semantics and meaning as largely unanswerable, and encouraged a mechanistic approach to linguistics. The paradigm of Bloomfieldean linguistics in American linguistics was replaced by the paradigm of generative grammar with the publication of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures in 1957.

Second, in Europe, Saussure influenced the Prague School of Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose work would prove hugely influential, particularly concerning phonology, and the School of Louis Hjelmslev. Structural linguistics also had an influence on other disciplines in Europe, including anthropology, psychoanalysis and Marxism, bringing about the movement known as structuralism.

Linguists who published articles on structuralism include: Leonard Bloomfield, Charles F. Hockett, John Lyons, R. H. Robins, Otto Jespersen, Émile Benveniste, Edward Sapir, André Martinet, Thomas Givon, F. R. Palmer, Ferenc Klefer, Robert D. Van Valin, Louis Hjelmslev, and Ariel Shisha-Halevy.