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Distributionalism is a generaltheory of language and a discovery procedure for establishing elements and structures of language based on observed usage. The purpose of distributionalism was to provide a scientific basis forsyntax as independent of meaning.Zellig Harris defined 'distribution' as follows.[1]
“TheDISTRIBUTION of an element is the total of all environments in which it occurs, i.e. the sum of all the (different) positions (or occurrences) of an element relative to the occurrence of other elements[.]”
Based on this idea, an analysis ofimmediate constituents could be based on observing the environments in which an element, such as a word, appears incorpora.
However, in American linguistics in the 1960s, distributionalism became replaced byNoam Chomsky's proposal oftransformational generative grammar. It proposed that theconstituency structure is the manifestation ofinnate grammar, allowing the preservation of autonomous syntax.[2]
Distributionalism can be said to have originated in the work ofstructuralist linguistLeonard Bloomfield and was more clearly formalised byZellig S. Harris.[1][3]
This theory emerged in theUnited States in the 1950s, as a variant ofstructuralism, which was the mainstream linguistic theory at the time, and dominated American linguistics for some time.[4]
Using "distribution" as a technical term for a component of discovery procedure is likely first to have been done by Morris Swadesh in 1934[5] and then applied to principles ofphonematics, to establish which observable various sounds of a language constitute theallophones of a phoneme and which should be kept as separate phonemes.[6]
According to Turenne and Pomerol, distributionalism was in fact a second phase in the history of linguistics, following that ofstructuralism, as distributionalism was mainly dominant since 1935 to 1960.[7] It is considered one of the scientific grounds ofNoam Chomsky'sgenerative grammar and had considerable influence on language teaching.
Distributionalism has much in common with structuralism. However, both appear in theUnited States while the theses ofFerdinand de Saussure are only just beginning to be known in Europe: distributionism must be considered as an original theory in relation to Saussurianism.
Behaviorist psychological theories which allowed the birth of distributionalism are reminiscent ofPavlov's work on animals. According to these theories, human behaviour would be totally explainable, and its mechanics could be studied. The study of reflexes, for example, should have made it possible to predict certain attitudes. Leonard Bloomfield argues that language, like behaviour, could be analysed as a predictable mechanism, explicable by the external conditions of its appearance.
The notions of "mechanism", "inductive method" and "corpus" are key terms of distributionalism.
Bloomfield calls his thesismechanism, and he opposes it tomentalism: for him, in fact, speech cannot be explained as an effect of thoughts (intentions, beliefs, feelings). Thus, one must be able to account for linguistic behaviour and the hierarchicalstructure of the messages conveyed without any assumptions about the speakers' intentions and mental states.[8]
From the behaviourist perspective, a given stimulus corresponds to a given response. However, meaning is an unstable thing for distributionists, depending on the situation, and is not observable. It must therefore be eliminated as an element of language analysis. The only regularity is of a morphosyntactic nature: it is the structuralinvariants of the morphosyntax that allow us to reconstruct the language system from an analysis of its observable elements, the words of a given corpus.
The main idea of distributionalism is that linguistic units "are what they do",[9] which means that the identity of linguistic units aredefined by their distribution. Zellig Harris used to considermeaning as too intuitive to be a reliable ground for linguistic research. Language use has to be observed directly while looking at all the environments in which a unit can occur. Harris advocated for a distributional approach, since "difference of meaning correlates with difference of distribution.".[10]
Critics of distributionalism, such asLouis Hjelmslev, pointed out that the analysis of occurrence adds nothing to traditional structure analysis, which is based on the hierarchical, step-by-stepcategorization of elements. Hjelmslev proposedglossematics, which combines the analysis of meaning and form.
