Linguistics in the United States
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The history of linguistics in the United States begins with William Dwight Whitney, the first US-taught academic linguist, who founded the American Philological Association in 1869.
Leonard Bloomfield (1878-1949), professor at the University of Chicago from 1921, founded the Linguistic Society of America in 1924. Other linguists active in the first half of the 20th century include Edward Sapir, Benjamin Whorf.
From the 1950s, American linguistic tradition began to diverge from the de Saussurian structuralism taught in European academia, notably with Noam Chomsky's "nativist" transformational grammar and successor theories, which during the 1970s "Linguistics Wars" and the hey-day of postmodernism gave rise to a bewildering variety of competing grammar frameworks.
American linguistisics outside the Chomskian tradition includes functional grammar with proponents including Talmy Givón , and cognitive grammar advocated by Ronald Langacker and others.
linguistic typology: controversially mass lexical comparison by Joseph Greenberg.
Historical linguistics, especially Indo-European studies, is taught at Harvard, UCLA and Austin, Texas.
See also
- North American Association for Computational Linguistics
- American Association for Applied Linguistics
- SIL International
