American Descriptivist Morphology in the 1950s

Abstract

The American descriptivist movement includes the work of Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, and their students, including Zellig Harris, Charles Hockett, and Kenneth Pike. Their work on morphology set the stage for much of the discussion of the subject in the years that followed, right up to today. In a number of ways they laid greater emphasis on the role of morphemes in morphological analysis when linguists in Europe focused more on the central role played by words in morphosyntactic paradigms.