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Article: Linguistics
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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LINGUISTICS
LINGUISTICS.
The early discipline of linguistics in the United States consisted in large part of the work of three eminent scholars
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Franz Boas, who studied Native American languages; Edward Sapir, the most prolific of Boas's students; and Leonard Bloomfield, who was trained in Germanic philology and taught languages. Boas, Sapir, and Bloomfield were among the founders in 1924 of the Linguistic Society of America, the leading professional organization and publisher of the discipline's journal.
Bloomfield and Sapir were leaders in descriptive linguistics, now often referred to as structural linguistics. According to them, languages should be described as interlocking ...