The main contribution of the American Descriptive School to modern linguistics is the elaboration of the techniques of linguistic analysis. The main methods are the Distributional method and the method of Immediate Constituents.
A recent development of Descriptive linguistics gave rise to a new method —the Transformational grammar. The TG was first suggested by Harris as a method of analysing the concrete utterances and was later elaborated by Noam Chomsky as a synthetic method of constructing sentences. The Transformational grammar refers to syntax only and presupposes the identification of such linguistic units as phonemes, morphemes and form-classes.
Bloomfield wrote but little about specific procedures and techniques of analysis. It was carried out by his followers and pupils.
The most widely known for his syntactic studies is Zellig S. Harris. A series of articles by Harris are to be found in Language—the journal of American Descriptive linguistics. Harris's main works are Method in Structural Linguistics and Co-Occurrence and Transformation in Linguistic Structure.
Charles Carpenter Fries is another prominent figure of American linguistic theory. His main work The Structure of English is widely known in our country.
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The scientists belonging to this branch of linguistics understand language as one of the semeiotic systems, that is a system of signals by which people communicate.
Animals are supposed to have semeiotic systems of their own. This problem is now under investigation.
The vocal or natural language is the most important of all the semeiotic systems used by people. A natural language is a system of vocal signals. These signals are arbitrary in the sense that they are not inherent or anyhow connected with the nature of things they refer to. Every human being learns the system of the language of his community and by and by he begins to understand what people around him say and then begins to speak himself. The task of a scientist is to observe and to describe how people actually say things, but he should not prescribe how things should be said.
The research is carried out in the synchronic plane. Languages are studied as spoken languages only, the point of view of their historical development is utterly neglected for the time being.
No comparative studies are carried out, only one language; the given language is being studied. This principle has been the basic progressive feature of Descriptive linguistics; it enabled the Descriptive linguists to do away with the traditional approach that made the scholars understand any language through the norms of Latin grammar, thus distorting the peculiar structure of the language studied.
The most important part of the study is 'field-work' that comprises three parts: (1) the work with native informants (people who speak the language studied by the linguist as their mother-tongue); (2) the filing of results (different systems of indexes and slips are used): (3) systematization.
The writing systems also receive considerable attention. This branch of linguistics is called or 'Graphonomy1.
When the methods of Descriptive linguistics were extended to the study of such languages as English and other languages well known to the linguists, the analysis was continued in such a way as if the language were unknown and the linguist was to decipher it as if it were the cracking of a code.
Descriptive theory recognises the following fundamental concepts for analysing linguistic material:
Utterance: "An utterance is any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the part of the person." Sentence: The definition given by Bloomfield is accepted. Structural meaning The structural meaning of a sentence is the meaning signaled by the parts of the sentence irrespective of their lexical meanings.
The ideas of structural meaning of a sentence-structure was introduced not only by L. Bloomfield, but also by Acad. L. V. Shcherba who gave his famous example of the structural meaning in the non-sensical sentence "Глокая куздра штеко будланула бокра и куздрячит бокренка".
Environment or position of an element is understood as a set of the neighboring elements.
Distribution: The distribution of an element is the total of all environments in which it occurs. There is a second definition used by Descriptive linguistics, namely: Distribution is the class of elements that occur in the same position.
Contrastive distribution is understood as a difference of two linguistic units occurring in the same environment and changing one linguistic form into another linguistic form.
Non-contrastive distribution is understood as a difference of two linguistic units occurring in the same environment without changing one linguistic form into another linguistic form.
Complementary distribution: Two units are said to be in complementary distribution if only one of them normally occurs in certain environments and only the other normally occurs in other surroundings, e.g. -(e)s [z], [s], [iz] in 'rooms', 'books', 'boxes', etc.
Morpheme: The morpheme is "a linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form."
Allomorph: An allomorph is a variant of a morpheme which occurs in certain environments. Thus a morpheme is a group of one or more allomorphs (or morphs).
The allomorphs of one and the same morpheme
(1) must be in complementary distribution;
(2) the sum of their environments must be equal to the sum of environments of some single morpheme in the language, e.g. the allomorphs [z], [s],[iz] together have the same set of environments as the single zero suffix: room—rooms, book—books, box—boxes, etc.;
(3) they must be similar in meaning.
Prof. A. Smirnitzky, who recognised the above mentioned criteria, pointed out that the basic phonetic variants of the three allomorphs [z]. [s]. [iz] and [d], [t], [id] are respectively [z] and [d ], as they are produced by native speakers in conditions where any variant could appear—after vowels; the voiceless variants [s], [t] are the result of assimilation to the preceding voiceless consonants, and [iz], [id] represent the historically earlier forms with an [i] preserved between two phonemes of a similar character.
We may note that the differences in the environments are the same for such series of pairs as:
| boy - boys | pay - paid |
| book - books | talk - talked |
| man - men | take - took |
| sheep - sheep | cut - cut |
The first series of minimal pairs fits in the environments:
"The - is here," "The—s are here"; the second—in the environments: "I'll — with you," "I —ed with you yesterday." From these sequences we may extract such series as 'boy, book...' and 'pay, talk...' and not only [s] or [z] and [t] or [d] but also the changes of [æ] to [e] and of [ei] to [u]. Thus we may say that the replacement of [æ] by [e] in 'man' yields 'men' in exactly the same way as the addition of [z] to 'boy' yields 'boys': and the replacement of [ei] by [u j in 'take' yields 'took' in exactly the same way as does the adding of [d ] to 'pay'.
The same criteria hold for identifying suppletive forms. According to Prof. A. Smirnitzky, the paradigm of the verb 'go' is recognised on the basis of three features (when compared to the paradigm of such a verb as 'look': (1) the lexical meaning of the forms is identical, (2) they are in complementary distribution, (3) the set of environments of suppletive forms is the same as that of the suffixed forms, namely:
| go | - | look |
| - | went | looked |
| gone | - | looked |
Instances of complementary distribution are numerous in morphology. Forms with phonemic replacement and suppletive forms can be described in terms, of complementary distribution on the basis of pattern congruity, e.g.
| book - books | look - looked |
| class - classes | start - started |
| man - men | write - wrote |
| go - went |
Form-classes or positional classes: In Structural linguistics this classification is set up on the basis of a particular choice of diagnostic co-oceurrents: 'cloth' and 'paper' both occur, say, in "The — is" where 'diminish' does not appear:
we call this class N. And 'diminish' and 'grow' both occur, say, in "It will —" where 'paper' and 'cloth' do not: we call this class V.
Construction: A construction is any significant group of words or morphemes.
Constituent: A constituent is a linguistic form that enters into some larger construction, e.g. the constituents "the old man" and "has gone to his son's house" constitute a sentence.
Immediate constituent: An immediate constituent is one of the two constituents of which the given linguistic form is directly built up. The dichoto-mous division of a construction begins with the larger elements and continues as far as possible, e.g. The old man ] went to his son's house.
The old man | went to his son's house.
The ||old man | went || to his son's house.
The || old
Man | went || to
