Abstract
The computationalisation of language in the context of war culture accelerated the development of the autonomy and development of linguistics in American universities. Even if they did not do any experiments in MT (with the exception of Harris), the very possibility of automating translation had a great influence on Neo-Bloomfieldian distributionalist linguists. The attention given to the relationship between the transcription and translation of American Indian languages led to the creation of intermediary languages that constituted a new object for linguistics and natural language processing. Some methods, like procedures regularly used by Neo-Bloomfieldians, were made more rigorous by assimilating them to weak algorithmic forms. Visible and significant changes had been introduced in the graphic representations (diagrams and tables) of the process of immediate constituent analysis and its results.
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Notes
- 1.
Contrary to what Martin-Nielsen (2010) argues
- 2.
Before the war, linguistics was taught in the departments of anthropology.
- 3.
On immediate constituent analysis, see note 3 Chap. 6. Distributional analysis is a technique pioneered by structural linguists who argued that in order to arrive at a description of a language, one applies analytic procedures, sometimes called “discovery procedures” (Harris 1951a), to the various strictly separated levels of analysis (morphological, phonological, lexical, etc.). It endeavours to discover relations of units within the frame of the larger ones with the help of immediate constituent analysis. Distribution is the total of all the environments, or patterns, in which an element can occur. The goal of a distributional analysis is to try to isolate recurring patterns and try to correlate these recurring patterns with some unit of meaning.
- 4.
According to Murray (1993), Yuen Ren Chao, Einar Haugen and Roman Jakobson also belonged to that network but only peripherally.
- 5.
- 6.
Murray is referring to the group of descriptive linguists who used Bloomfield’s guiding principles to develop language teaching methods during World War II (see above Sect. 4.2).
- 7.
“The postulational method can further the study of language, because it forces us to state explicitly whatever we assume, to define our terms, and to decide what things may exist independently and what things are interdependent” (Bloomfield 1926, p. 153).
- 8.
See Chap. 3.
- 9.
For Garvin (1967), the priority given to morphophonemics by American linguists resulted from the identification of the typological properties of some families of agglutinative American languages that were unknown in Indo-European languages.
- 10.
For a historical view of translation and transcription in American linguistics, see Lahaussois and Léon (2015).
- 11.
In addition to these common works on Hidatsa, Voegelin’s doctoral work was on Tübatulabal, a language from California; with his second wife, Florence Robinett Voegelin, he worked on Shawnee (an Algonquian language). Harris worked on Kota, Navaho and on Semitic languages such as Phoenician, on which he worked for his PhD, and Moroccan Arabic. His examples in IJAL 1954 concern Korean and Hebrew (cf. Sect. 4.4).
- 12.
According to Auroux (1998), “weak formalisation” indicates abstract forms and representations developed by linguists such as transcriptions, lists, tables, etc. It should be contrasted with “strong formalisation”, that is, computable formal systems that appeared in the 1930s as part of the first mathematisation of language. The second automation-computationalisation of language, when formal languages and algorithms of the first mathematisation became directly implementable into computer programs, can be described as “dynamic formalisation”.
- 13.
See Joos (1957) for a complete overview of distributionalist works from 1935 to 1940.
- 14.
Diagrams representing sentences had existed since the beginning of the nineteenth century in American grammar. Stephen Watkins Clark (1810–1901) introduced the first comprehensive diagramming system for sentences based on agglutinated “bubbles” representing the relations between words. His Practical Grammar (1847), reprinted several times, is nowadays considered a precursor of immediate constituents analysis. As early as the 1960s, Hays sees it as a prefiguration of dependency grammar (see Mazziota 2016).
- 15.
Seuren (1998) states that Bloomfield borrowed the notion of hierarchical tree from the psychologist Wundt, without using it himself, however.
- 16.
Chomsky comments the diagram in the following way: “Evidently, description of sentences in such terms permits considerable simplification over the word-by-word model, since the composition of a complex class of expressions such as NP can be stated just once in the grammar, and this class can be used as a building block at various points in the construction of sentences. We now ask what form of grammar corresponds to this conception of linguistics structure” (Chomsky 1956, p. 117).
- 17.
Following Sapir, Harris (1962b) puts forward an international language for the sciences based on the idea that all the languages have similar structures in spite of their grammatical and lexical differences. This idea of international language led him to develop sublanguages of sciences, a project he would carry out until his death in 1992.
- 18.
Harwood published an article in Language in 1955 – thus before Chomsky’s earliest publications – which relies on Harris (1951a) and which puts forward the conception of grammar as a system organised by generative rules. By defining an axiomatic syntactic system that makes it possible to derive possible sequences and to distinguish them from the remainder, that is, impossible sequences, Harwood’s aim was to determine the goodness of fit of syntactic systems.
- 19.
The method can also be used for language teaching: Harris assumes, in a more or less hazardous way, that one can acquire a language by learning only the differences between the new language and the old one and by leaving out what they have in common. It is possible that this is an audacious interpretation of Fries’s contrastive analysis for foreign language teaching (see Chap. 3).
- 20.
The term “model” appeared in American linguistics in the 1940s–1950s, essentially in the works of Z.S. Harris, C.F. Hockett and N. Chomsky, and took a mathematical turn gradually contributing to the mathematisation of linguistics and the development of generative grammars (see Léon 2021).
- 21.
It should be noted that, as John Joseph (2002) notes, since the 1970s Chomsky has always denied Harris’s influence of any kind and claimed that in his own work “generative” merely means “explicative”.
- 22.
Chomsky was recruited by Yngve with three other linguists, Joseph R. Applegate, Fred Lukoff and Betty Shefts, the first two of whom were Harris’s students (Mechanical translation vol. 2, n° 1, 1955).
- 23.
Nevin (2009) notes that Chomsky’s criticism of the “fuzziness” of Harrissian theories aimed at the fact that they were not reducible to an algorithm programmable on computer.
- 24.
According to Wildgen (2009), the fact that Harris and Chomsky chose algebra as a scientific metalanguage is consistent with the traditional conception of language as a written language, that is, discrete, linear and reducible to a spatial combinatorics. This strategical use of mathematics is conservative as it assumes that the relevant linguistic facts are already known and that they only need to be rendered in an elegant and coherent way.
- 25.
It should be noted that the MT method, which was based on transfer grammar, was taken up by the Harrissian Morris Salkoff (2002), a member of Maurice Gross’s research team, in order to develop an English-French MT system.
- 26.
- 27.
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Léon, J. (2021). The Computational Turn and Formalisation in Neo-Bloomfieldian Distributionalism. In: Automating Linguistics. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70642-5_4
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