Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield

Mentalism and behaviorism.

The word “meaning” express complications at the moment of the study of a linguistic phenomenon, because imply 3 factors:

a) outsider speakers

c) speech

if we connect them differently we get different results. For example, if we connect them continuously (a, b, c) we obtain an ecological system. If none of the three factors is connected to each other, then said to lack of objectivity, and if we make connection between b and c, excluding a, we obtain what is known as subjectivity.

Linguistics is Talk about Language.

This scheme suggests that if (a) and (c) are equally, though differently, distinguishable from (b) as (outside), a method designed to study the outside can be different from another best adapted for studying the inside, perhaps a third is needed to study the triad simultaneously.

Old and new language about language.

Saussure, Boas, and Sapir has a mentalist tradition. That tradition was designed to test the consistent use or non-obvious implications of scientific concepts. But that concept of “science” itself was of an intellectual, logically deductive enterprise.

Saussure´s stress on negative, contrastive, function over positive phonetic or semantic composition changed that tradition´s perspective, not its basics. Boas´ demonstration of social determination antecedent to sensation, added a missing dimension; Sapir concluded that a minimum for human language is formation and expression of concrete and relational ideas.

Objective talk about Language.

For Behaviorists, (c)-behavior is labeled a substitute response to an immediate (a) stimulus; (c) is also a substitute stimulus for (a) responses otherwise occasioned by (a) stimuli. Speech is taken to be an objectively observable activity of an organism, a succession of substitute and responses.

Language as Response.

Mentalism is dualistic: It recognizes two kinds (mental and material) of data experience, perception, insight, causality, evidence, explanation, study goals and methods of study. Behaviorism, as a form of materialistic determinism, is monistic: It admits only a single kind (material) of data erroneously distinguished by mentalists into experience, insight, perception, causality, evidence, explanation, study goal and method of study.

Distinguish sense and reference.

Reference is a static relation, dynamic process or action linking speech to outside speakers, mediated by inside speakers, while sense, is a state or action within inside speakers, by speech is related to outside speakers.

Society constitutes the totality of senses and references between the speakers and the hearers.

Distinguish denotation and connotation.

Denotation is reference; connotations are socialized relations of the referent for speakers and their properties.

The fundamental assumption of linguistics.

to Bloomfield, the mentalist in practice defines meanings exactly as does the mechanist, in terms of actual situations.. and wherever this seems to add anything, of the hearer’s response. He says they have the same data.

Stable states.

Synchronic linguistic description proceeds on the counter-factual assumption of constant and stable forms with meanings, in an unchanging speech-community, through linguistics forms containing a discrete number of phonemic contrasts.

Basic and modified meaning.

The linguist can only analyze the signals , not the signaled., that’s why linguistics must start from the phonetics. The total stock of morphemes is a language’s lexicon.

Syntax.

The free forms of a language appear in larger free forms arranged by taxemes of modulation, phonetic, modification, selection and order. Any set of such taxemes is a syntactic construction.

Forms resultant from Free forms.

They can be said to produce a resultant phrase, of which the form-class may be determinative of the phrase’s grammatical behavior. ENDOCENTRIC.

EXOCENTRIC. Its when the phrase does not follow the grammatical behavior of either constituent.

A priori vs A posteriori.

We operate a priori, our procedure may be said to have resulted not from experience, but some vantage prior to or independent of. We could say we deduced some.

Our procedure is called a posteriori from a vantage posterior and not independent of experience. We induced the information contained in columns.

American Structuralism

The American structuralism has two ways of considering the concept of structure.

The first is that the researcher is requiring some kind of order and that order is the structure. The second is that the language already has a structure and the researcher discovers.

The American structuralism approach is the so-called descriptivism.

Point of view is the synchronous and the object of the grammar is the functions.
The steps for grammatical analysis are the following:

        - Observation

        - Operational scenarios.

        - Calculation based on assumptions.

        - Prediction.

        - Verification of predictions

 The study of meaning is excluded because aspects of the meaning depend on:

- Occurrences of linguistic forms,

- Textual combination and

- Of their interrelations in the structure of the language.

For example: the issue "Have cold" in the mouth of a beggar, it can mean "give me something to eat", and in the mouth of a chicha "embrace me".