Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield

It starts with the term scientific…
Language interests everyone.
a) Outside speakers
b) Inside speakers
c) Speech relating the two

Sapir concluded that a minimum for human language is formation and expression of concrete and relational ideas.
Language can be seen as the totality of mutually effective substitute responses.

Mentalism differs from materialism by distinguishing langue from parole. It opposes wholes or parts to material and formal principles; mind to brain; understanding to experiencing.
Mentalism is dualistic because it recognizes mental and material.

Behaviorism is monistic admits only a single kind of data (material)
When one speaks a sentence, the form it takes is due to the utterances which the speaker, since infancy has heard from other members of his community.
-It is dualistic because it considers both mental and material kinds of data
-It is monoistic because only considers a single kind of data(material)

The study, use and spread of language.
Bloomfield proposes that the empirical science of language should study a real rather than a fancied object.

Language conceived as a normative ideal does not constitute an empirical object; language as a universal phenomenon can only be established inductively; one can observe actual speech----and its actual effects on hearers---without preconceptions, so the Behaviorist approach provides a model

Speech communities are best observed behavioristically. Density of communication can be empirically observed, quantified, and correlated with geography, social stratification, occupation, success in cooperation, and consequences in describable speech differences.

There are behavioral correlates for determining traditional concerns about language:
The literary standard
The colloquial standard
The provincial standard
Sub-standard
Local dialect

The phoneme. Sound-production can be described empirically. Phonetics is the branch of science that deals with it.
What phonetics provides is an objective record of gross acoustic features, only part of which are distinctive for particular languages, while phonology, or practical phonetics, determines which features are the distinctive ones.

Phonetic basis. This predominantly phonetic account ‘may be viewed as a kind of basis which may be modified in various ways’.
Modification, presumes some standard from which a departure is made, and the criteria for establishing the base can vary, legitimately or inconsistently.
For instance, it might be inconsistent to shift, in phonology, from subjective, or objective production to subjective reception or objective disturbance of the air, or from objective measurement to subjective standards.

Grammatical Forms.
Descriptive Structuralism is frequently referred to as Binarist. This orientation is its strength and weakness. The strength resides in elementary calculability, an impersonal, objective, exhausting of possibilities.

The meaning of a morpheme is a sememe (the meaning of a morpheme), constant, definite, discrete from all other sememes: the linguist can only analyze the signals, not the signalled, so that is why linguistics must start from the phonetics, not the semantics, of a language. The total stocks of morphemes is a language’s lexicon.

A simple feature of grammatical arrangement is a taxeme; meaningful units of grammatical form are tagnemes and their meanings are called episememes. Tagmemes can consist of several taxemes. Statements of its lexical and grammatical forms completely describe an utterance