Podcast episode 33: Formalism and distributionalism

History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences

In this episode, we examine the formalist aspects of the linguistic work of Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield, and see how their methods were turned into the doctrines of distributionalism by the following generation.

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References for Episode 33

Primary sources

Bloch, Bernard (1948), ‘A set of postulates for phonemic analysis’, Language 24:1, 3–46.

Bloch, Bernard, and George Trager (1942), Outline of Linguistic Analysis, Baltimore: Linguistic Society of America.

Bloomfield, Leonard (1909–1910), ‘A semasiological differentiation in Germanic secondary ablaut’, Modern Philology 7, 245–288, 345–382. (Introduction reprinted in Hockett 1970, pp. 1–6.)

Bloomfield, Leonard (1922), Review of Sapir Language, The Classical Weekly 15, 142–143. (Reprinted in Hockett 1970, pp. 95–100.)

Bloomfield, Leonard (1926), ‘A set of postulates for a science of language’, Language 2, 153–164. (Reprinted in Hockett 1970, pp. 128–138.)

Bloomfield, Leonard (1942), Outline Guide for the Practical Study of Foreign Languages, Baltimore: Linguistic Society of America.

Harris, Zellig S. (1942), ‘Morpheme alternants in linguistic analysis’, Language 18:2, 169–180.

Harris, Zellig S. (1951), Methods in Structural Linguistics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hockett, Charles F., ed. (1970), A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. archive.org

Hockett, Charles F. (1980), ‘Preserving the heritage’, in First Person Singular, ed. Boyd H. Davis and Raymond K. O’Cain, Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 97–107.

Mandelbaum, David G., ed. (1949), Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality, Berkeley: University of California Press. archive.org

Sapir, Edward (1921), Language, New York: Harcourt, Brace and co. archive.org

Sapir, Edward (1949 [1924]), ‘The grammarian and his language’, in Mandelbaum (1949), pp. 150–159. (Original published in American Mercury 1 [1924], 149–155.)

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1922 [1916]), Cours de linguistique générale, ed. by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, Paris: Payot. 3rd edition, 1931: BNF Gallica
(English translation: Ferdinand de Saussure, 1959 [1916], Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Wade Baskin, New York: Philosophical Library. 2011 edition available from archive.org)

Swadesh, Morris (1934), ‘The phonemic principle’, Language 10:2, 117–129.

Secondary sources

Darnell, Regna (1990), Edward Sapir: Linguist, anthropologist, humanist, Berkeley: University of California Press. archive.org

Darnell, Regna (1998), And along came Boas: Continuity and revolution in Americanist anthropology. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Fortis, Jean-Michel (2019), ‘On Sapir’s notion of form/pattern and its aesthetic background’, in Form and Formalism in Linguistics, ed. James McElvenny, Berlin: Language Science Press, pp. 59–88. Open access

Fought, John G. (2001), ‘The “Bloomfieldian School” and descriptive linguistics’, in History of the Language Sciences – Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaften – Histoire des sciences du langage. An International Handbook on the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present, ed. Sylvain Auroux, E. F. Konrad Koerner, Hans-Josef Niederehe, and Kees Versteegh, vol. II, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 1950–1966.

Matthews, Peter H. (1993), Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Newmeyer, Fredereick J. (2022), American Linguistics in Transition: From post-Bloomfieldian structuralism to generative grammar, Oxford: Oxford University Press.