Distributionalism

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Distributionalism was 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.^[1]

“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. Critics of distributionalism, such as Louis Hjelmslev, pointed out that the analysis of occurrence adds nothing to traditional structure analysis, which is based on the hierarchical, step-by-step categorization of elements. Hjelmslev proposed glossematics, which combines the analysis of meaning and form. 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.^[2]