Subject: apocryphal american structuralist assertions

there are two common , apocryphal assertions identified with american structuralist linguistics , and i am wondering if either of these assertions was actually made by an american structuralist . they are : 1 . language structures vary in infinitely many ways . this statement has been associated with boas , but it 's not in the hail intro . this statement has also been associated with martin joos , who supposedly said something along those lines attributing this view to boas ( but not necessarily endorsing it himself ) . 2 . the distributional method , applied rigorously , would yield a distinct syntactic category for every word in a language . it is possible that z s harris made such an assertion , though i have n't seen mention of it in the secondary literature . i am particularly interested in some form of these assertions made by structuralists who believed it themselves ; but if such do not exist , i am interested in attribution of these two beliefs to structuralists by others . thanks , bill croft
