Boas—Sapir—Bloomfield

Countering evolutionary and racist notions that languages of so-called primitive peoples lacked determinate sounds, just as they were held to lack expectable categories of morphosyntax, Boas demonstrated that every language has a phonetic (i.e., phonological) system of categories of sound that serves as the apperceptional grid for the production and reception of language. Sapir elaborated the ‘psychological reality’ of a structured system of ‘true points of the phonetic pattern’ on the basis of a distributional analysis of a combinatoric grammar of sound, contrasting such an abstraction from the minutiae of token phonetic variations in measurable articulation. Bloomfield, conceptualizing phonological segments as bundles (Boolean combinations) of ‘distinctive features’, systematized and codified the synchronic phonological perspective of distributionalism, re-thinking Neogrammarian doctrine in its terms. In all their descriptive work, these theorists worked across the gradient boundaries of what later—among their students and successors—became the problematic and controversial distinction between ‘phonemic’ and ‘morphophonemic’.