American Linguistics

The history of linguistics in the United States begins with William Dwight Witney, the first US-taught academic linguistic, who founded the American Philological Association in 1869. Leonard Bloomfield professor at University of Chicago from 1921, founded the Linguistic Society of American in 1924. Other linguistist active in the half of 20th century include Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. From the 1950s, American Linguistic tradition began to diverge from the Saussurian structuralism taught in European academia, notably Noam Chomsky's nativist transformational grammar and successor theories, which during the 1970s Linguistics Wars  and Postmodernism gave rise to bewildering variety of competing grammar frameworks. The growth of American Linguistics began when European anthropologil linguists arrived in North America to study and record native-american languages before many of those languages disappeared.