Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
Experimental analytical procedures in structural linguistics used both to determine and portray linguistic regularities, as well as to establish and test linguistic hypotheses and theories. By deleting, replacing, adding, or reordering linguistic elements in a set context (word, sentence, or text), regularities which are at first intuitively understood can be made more objective, and these linguistic regularities can be described, based on the procedures which are used to determine them. Consider, for example, the definition of phonemes as minimal sound elements whose ‘exchange’ results in a difference in meaning (bed vs red), or the determination of major constituents as elements which can be moved (commuted). There are a number of tests which are included in the category of operational procedures: (a) the commutation test, (b) the substitution test, (c) the reduction test, and (d) the contact test. While linguistic investigations have long been based on such heuristic procedures, the concept of analysis represented by taxonomic structuralism is in the main responsible for its systematization. When these procedures are compared to experimental approaches in the natural sciences, the fact is often overlooked that in these linguistic tests, the judgment of grammaticality still relies on the intuition of the investigator or the informant, and thus is not purely ‘objective’ in the scientific sense, but a matter of the linguistic intuition of those performing the analysis. The same is the case in the study of dead languages. In the framework of generative transformational grammar, the procedures which are used in structuralist investigations as heuristic tests are formulated as elementary transformations. In this regard, the transformations deletion, adjunction, substitution, and permutation correspond to the reduction test, the contact test, the substitution test and the commutation test.
References
Bloch, B. 1948. A set of postulates for phonetic analysis. Lg 24. 3–46.
Glinz, H. 1952. Die innere Form des Deutschen. Bern.
Harris, Z.S. 1951. Methods in structural linguistics. Chicago, IL. (Repr.
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Hjelmslev, L. 1961. Prolegomena to a theory of language, trans. F.Whitfield. Madison, WI.
Longacre, R.E. 1960. String constituent analysis. Lg 36. 63–88.
——1968. Grammar discovery procedures: a field manual. The Hague.
Nida, E. 1951. A system for the description of semantic elements. Word 7. 1–14.
Postal, P.M. 1964. Constituent structure: a study of contemporary models of syntactic description. Bloomington, IN.
Wells, R.S. 1947. Immediate constituents. Lg 23. 71–117.
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