Distributionalism

Distributionalism is a general theory 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 for syntax as independent of meaning. Zellig Harris defined 'distribution' as follows.

“The DISTRIBUTION 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 of immediate constituents could be based on observing the environments in which an element, such as a word, appears in corpora.

However, in American linguistics in the 1960s, distributionalism became replaced by Noam Chomsky's proposal of transformational generative grammar. It proposed that the constituency structure is the manifestation of innate grammar, allowing the preservation of autonomous syntax.

Distributionalism can be said to have originated in the work of structuralist linguist Leonard Bloomfield and was more clearly formalised by Zellig S. Harris.

This theory emerged in the United States in the 1950s, as a variant of structuralism, which was the mainstream linguistic theory at the time, and dominated American linguistics for some time.

Using "distribution" as a technical term for a component of discovery procedure is likely first to have been done by Morris Swadesh in 1934 and then applied to principles of phonematics, to establish which observable various sounds of a language constitute the allophones of a phoneme and which should be kept as separate phonemes.

According to Turenne and Pomerol, distributionalism was in fact a second phase in the history of linguistics, following that of structuralism, as distributionalism was mainly dominant since 1935 to 1960. It is considered one of the scientific grounds of Noam Chomsky's generative grammar and had considerable influence on language teaching.

Distributionalism has much in common with structuralism. However, both appear in the United States while the theses of Ferdinand 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 of Pavlov'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.