Now known asstructuralists,these scholars, led by Boas and later by Leon-
ard Bloomfield, worked for several years to develop a new grammar, one that
did not make the same assumptions about linguistic universals that were inher-
ent in traditional grammar. They called this grammarImmediate Constituent
Analysis(ICA), a term that was so awkward that, in 1957, when Noam
Chomsky dubbed ICA “phrase-structure grammar” the name stuck.
The differences between phrase-structure grammar and traditional grammar
are many, but for our purposes we only need to focus on a few distinctive fea-
tures. One of the more important was that the new grammar subordinated many
of the notions of linguistic universals and opted instead to advocate the idea
that every language is unique, with its own structure and its own grammar. Uni-
versals were considered in a relatively abstract way: All languages have sub-
jects, all languages have ways of counting and thus making plurals, and so on.
This reorientation reflected a fundamental shift in the way American linguists
saw the study of grammar, a shift associated with different philosophies and
worldviews. Traditional grammar was based largely onrationalism,which
proposes that human knowledge is not based on the senses or experience. Ra-
tionalism can be traced back to Plato, who argued that the world of experiences
is merely a shadow of a transcendental reality that can be known only through
the powers of the intellect, guided by philosophy. The senses are incapable of
revealing more than a distorted semblance of reality, an idea that Plato devel-
oped with memorable effect inThe Republicthrough his allegory of the cave.
Transcendentalism can provide a workable model of reality with respect to
certain concepts, such as geometric figures and justice. A circle, for example, is
defined mathematically as a plane figure composed of a series of points equi-
distant from a center point. Drawing such a figure, however, is impossible ow-
ing to the problems associated with exact measurement. Thus, a perfect circle
exists only in the mind. One likewise can propose that true justice exists only in
the mind because the mundane reality of our court system is that it readily sacri-
fices justice for the sake of expediency. Nevertheless, in both cases the tran-
scendental model is sufficiently close to reality to make a comparison possible.
Thinking about a perfect circle can lead to the production of a circle that is a
very close approximation of the mental model.
This approach does not work with language. The structuralists found that
transcendentalism was so far removed from their experiences with actual lan-
guage that a comparison wasnotpossible. Justthinkingabout grammatical
forms never would allow someone to develop a correct description of the tense
system in Cherokee. Such a description required data collection, analysis, in-
terpretation, and rule formation. It required, in other words, an empirical ap-
proach to language. The orientation of the structuralists therefore was the
PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR 99