9.00 Scientific has become such a prestige label that whatever is dismissed as the work of mire philoshopers, taxomomic grammarians, literateurs, descriptivists, etc. Mere is a syncategorematic expression: It lacks both sense and reference. Is not quantifiable and does not function a subject or predicate in falsifiable assertions. This expressions condemns the confusion of technical jargon and empirical trappings with whatever “real science” is. Debates depend on contemporary intutions about admissible evidence, legitimate data, and reasonable goals, or on the mere prestige of a novel approach promising better results.
9.01 Metalism and Behaviorism: At least three things seem to be involved: what its outside (A) speakers, what is inside them (B) and the speech relating the two(C).
9.02 Linguistics is talk about language: The 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.
9.03 Old and new language about language: We use language to study language. It is here that conflicting assumptions about what can be a legitimate data, what is an appropriate method, what counts as evidence and what are feasible goals, lead to fundamental differences of opinion, even when many of the facts are not in dispute.
9.04 Psychologists talk about language. Bloomfield was convinced that any form of mentalism was inimical to science. The status he wanted for linguistics was that of an autonomous discipline compatible with an ideal of united science.
9.05 Subjective talk about language: Language was clearly out of step with empirical science defined by positivists. Mentalism assumes that there are factors in mental operations exempts from physical laws and the empirical realm.
9.06 Objective talk about language: Mechanism takes it fro granted that there is a causal continuity from A through B to C. Behaviorism assumed the fundamental identity of physically determined C—behavior with any other kind of non-linguistic A—behavior.
9.07 Language as response: Language can be seen as the totality of mutually effective substitute responses. Mentalism differs from Materialism by distinguishing real potentials from their actualization. Mentalism is dualistic: recognizes two kinds (mental and material) of data, experience, perception, etc. Behaviorism is monistic as it only admits a single kind (material).
9.08 Leonard Bloomfield: Bloomfield’s early interests were in Germanic and Indo-European philology. In 1914 “Introduction to Language” he had contrasted philological concern for more conscious cultural attainments with a linguist’s interests in the unconscious communal grouping of ideas.
9.09 Starting to talking about language: Bloomfield made concrete suggestions for starting orderly study of linguistics. 1. Begin with your own language’s articulations. 2. Study phonetics. 3- Study your language’s morphology and syntax. 4- Study the history of the English language. At the same time read some modern psychology.
9.10 Postulates: Thirteen years later, ‘A set Of Postulates for The Science of Language’ updated Bloomfield’s reflections on the ongoing linguistic enterprise.
9.12 The study, used 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 and empirical object; language as a universal phenomenon can only be established inductively; one can observe actual speech, and its actual effect on hearers, without preconceptions, so the behaviorist approach provides a model.
9.13 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.
9.14 The Phoneme: Sound-production can be described empirically. Phonetics is the branch of science that deals with it. But this study demonstrated that actual sounds lack clear-cut phonetic differences, even when refined discrimination is possible in the laboratory. Language therefore must depend upon our habitually and conventionally discriminating some features of sound and ignoring others.
9.15 Presuppositions: So the unproved assumption of linguistics is that ‘in every speech-community some utterances are alike in form and meaning’, and we must ‘act as though’ science had established the situations and responses that make up these meanings.
Phonetic Basis
This predominantly phonetic account may be viewed as a kind of basis which may be modified in various ways. Modification, of course, presumes some standard from which a departure is made, and the criteria for establishing the base can very, legitimately or inconsientently. For instance, it might be inconsistent to shift, in phonology, from sunjective or objective production to subjective reception or objetive disturbance of the air, or from objective measurement to subjective tandars as Bloomfield does.
The manner in wich the vocal organs pass from inactivity to the formation of a phoneme, or from the formation of the one phoneme to that of the next, or from the formation of a phoneme to inactivity.
Contrast.
Inability to decide on how a language sounds is less important than establishing its structual contrasts: it is differences that count, since a pair of languages might have the same phonetic inventory, yet be differently structured. Such differences among identities could be found in the distribution and fuctioning of the same phonetic composition.
Meaning.
Bloomfield returns to meaning with some refinements. One way to appreciate the dimension of the problem is to try out alternative interpretations of common terms about meaning within our triangle.
Identical relations hold for sense and reference taken as state or process. Metaphor or analogy are involved when they are taken as action. Taken concretely, society cnstitutes the totality of senses and references wich match between individual speakers and hearers.
If meaning is sense-and-reference as a unity, expression is a static relation, process, or action linking an aspect of mediated sbjectively extended or restrictedwithin by. Reference is a static relation, dynamic process or action, whose terms are in and; the term in mental is a sense in behaviorist a disposition to respond; in a thing, property, rlation, satate or event of wich has partial experience.
Distinguish denotation and connotation:
Denotation is rererence and or referent; connotations are subjective or socialized relations of the referent for speaker to other referents and properties. Home and house may have the same denotation, but differ in connotations..
Bloomfield on meaning: Bloomfield says we postulate distinctive vs nondistinctive fatures of situations, but since our study ordinarly concerns only the distinctive feature or distinctive, and speak simply of forms and meanings, ignoring the existence of nondistinctive features. But speakers utter forms when there is no obvious, contemporary empirical stimulus.
The fundamental assmption of linguistics.
To Bloomfield, the difference seemed largely verbal: 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. Bloomfield decides that the fundamental assumption of linguistics´is:
In certain communities (speech-communities) some speech-utterances are alike as to form and meaning.
Bloomfield´s conclusion.
The apparent clarity of speech-forms is bought at the cost of rationality there are no actual synonyms; homonymy is undecidable; the linguist cannot define meanings extralinguistically but, accepting them from science or common knoeledge can do so intralinguistically with precision this is the notion of substitutes wich by definition share class-meaning of the substitute-type and meaning of the mode of substitute wich give rise to the specially accurate form of speech wich we call mathematics.
Sub-linguistic communication uses linguistic forms in which the ordinary meaning of the forms play o part. Hypostasis is closely related to quitation, the repetition of a speech, and like onomatopocia, consists in deviations from the ordinary tie-up of phonetic form with dictionary meaning, wich still shows considerable complexity but there i no grater bore than the enumeration and classification of thes metaphors. Dictionaries are meant to restrain connotations, science dispenses with them.
Grammatical forms
Descriptive Structuralism is frequently referref to as Binarist. This orientation is its strengh and weakness. Its weakness is identical with that of plato´s techique of the Division: in the conceptual world, we rarely know enough about any pair to establish exclusive values beyond the most generic, in the empirical world, fatual relations are just as complex
Stable States.
Synchorinc linguistic description proceeds on the counter-factual assumptions of constant and stable forms paired with meanings within an unchanging speech-community, signaled through linguistic forms containing a discrete number of combinable phonemic contrast. Experience shows the fundamental assuption of linguistics must be modified: in a speech-community some utterances are alike or partly alike i sound and meaning.
Basic and Modified Meaning
The meaning of morpheme is a sememe, constant, definite, discrete from all other semmemes; the linguistic can only analyze the signals, not the signalled, so that is why linguistics must start from the phonetics, not the semantics of language. The total stock of morphemes is a language´s lexicon. But it is not the total stock of its signals.
So grammatical forms can be grouped into three grat classes: a form uttered alone appears in some sentene type; forms uterred together as constituents of a complex form make up a cosntruction by the grammatical features by wich they are combined, and forms spoken as substitutes for a whole class are substitutions.
Sentence types.
Sentences relate throught order, position and within a sentence are distinguised by modulation, paratactic arrangement, and features of selection.
Languages show full and minor sentence type distinguished by taxemes of selection. Favorite forms are uually full; commonly distingued are actor-action and commands. Languages vary as to favorite sentence-types. Bipartite favorites are commonly called predications, with an object-like-subject and predicate.
Words
Since the word is free form, freedom of ocurrence largely determines our actitude toward parts of a language.
Boderline cases include cmpound words and uniterruptible phrase-words. Word-unity is aprocumately secured i languages in variuos ways, including stress, freedom from insertation, ability to be uttered alone, vowel harmony within th word but not acrooss words, permisible brevity or lengh, and restictions on mdulations or phonetic modifications for compounds.
Syntax
Grammar deals with construction under morphology and syntaz, and syntax takes as its constructions those in wich name od the immediate constituets is a bound form. The freeforms of a lenguage appear in larger free forms, arra ged by taxemes of modulatio, phonetic modification, seletion and order. Any meaningful recurrent set of such taxmes is a syntactic construction.
Forms resultant from Free Forms.
Free forms combining can be said to produce a resultant phrase, of wich the forms-class of one member may be determinative of the phrase{s grammatical behavior: in such a case, the constuction is called endocentic, otherwise, it is exocentric when the phare or construction does ot follow the grammatical behavior of either constituent. This can distinguish coordinate and subordinate constructions.
Order
Is most important in languages, grammatically and or stylistically.
Parts of Speech.
IE is peciar in having many parts of speech. Most languages show a smaller number, and in such languages, syntactic formclasses tend to appear in phrases rather than words.
Disagreement or confusion about elemetal or can pass unnoticed in seeming agreements at higher levels, or lead to reasonable suspicion that some quite literally do not know what they are talking about.
Binarism revisited.
Ambiguos or inadequate elements in cobination compound ambiguity or inadequancy. Clarity about the ambiguity or limitation of elements allows us to evaluate their manipulation.
9.29 Order is most important in languages, grammatically and/or stylistically. French has a complicated and rigid system of ordering certain substitute (conjunct) accompaniments of its verbs.
9.30 Parts of Speech. IE is peculiar in having many parts of speech. Most languages show a smaller number, and in such languages, syntactic form classes tend to appear in phrases rather than words: Chinese is the classic example (198-199). In Tagalog, the ´parts of speech´ are, as in Chinese, full word and particle.
9.31 Binarism revisited. Ambiguous or inadequate elements in combination compound ambiguity or inadequacy. Clarity about the ambiguity or limitation of elements allows us to evaluate their manipulation. The calculation of ± combinations for pairs showed what an arbitrary system is not, as we have been using that term: ´a finite number of elements in a finite number of combinations´, since all combinations are displayed. Systematicity comes from constraints on random combination. Collections are random in the sense that they display, as a state, process or action, any combination as equally likely.
9.32 Structure, Pattern, Design. The columns can be viewed as patterns or forms: Column A shows what columns I-IV have in common. Column I-IV define themselves and each other by their selection of a conventional restriction upon column A; they can be viewed as four different games, four different form, four distinct ways of organizing the same material.
9.33 Apriori vs A posteori. Two expressions often used to disparage others´work and invite approbation of one´s own are a priori (usually bad) and a posteriori (usually good). With reference to this schema, they can be illustrated: By simply stipulating or procedure beforehand the form of these games, we operate a priori; our procedure may be said to have resulted, not from experience, but from (a) some vantage prior to (priori) or independent of, experience. We could say we deduced some of the patterns latent in, intelligible about, selected from, column A, as from something given.
9.34 Rationalist and Empiricist. Bloomfield insisted that the only useful generalization about language was an inductive generalization (20). Language studies are distinguished from each other as employing predominantly inductive or deductive approaches. The a priori or deductive approach has been said to impose structure upon data; the a posteriori or inductive approach is claimed to discover structure in data.
Rationalists accuse empiricists of assuming that there are such things as bare facts. They see legitimate data as facts suspected of realizing rationally determinate patterns like colummn A.
Rationalists see statistical summaries of blind findings as representing disjointed collections, instead of the real unit-elephant one can see. Real unit elephants are beyond the empirical disciveries of a blind investigator, individually, or in a group: space and time conspire to keep the constituents of the unity as discrete objects of distinct empirical observations. What counts as data and evidence for their goal dictates a method that makes it impossible in principle to discover real unit-elephants. To ´take someone´s word for it´is to accept subjective experience instead of empirical evidence.
9.35 Binarism and constituency. The + - combinations in any of the columns above can be described exactly to anyone´s satisfactio, empirically or rationally. For some, structural description was synonymous with linguistic science. It guaranteed, perhaps constituted, the autonomy of linguistics as a science. It was to involve no disputed psychological or other theories. It might support or undermine some theory, but its findings were empirical, objective, public, falsifiable, independent, scientific.
9.36 Valid. What is of linguistic interest about columns I-IV is the fact that these are the formulate for symbolic logical representation of some familiar structures in language.
Recognizing that ambiguity arises from assigning interpretations to these elements, rather than from their relationships, we can evaluate their manipulation.
9.37 Correct. Truth is not popularly distinguished from validity, but validity can be viewed as subsuming true and correct. E.g. statements are true, calculations correct: the correct mathematical mean for families might be 3 1/2 persons, but cannot be true of a real family. Validity is often said to be a formal consideration, truth a material matter, and pre-symbolic work distinguished material from formal logic on that basis. Ambiguity results when formal and material aspects are confused.
9.38 Suggestive Symbols. Formulations using parentheses and various kind of brackets are not as easy a Platonic either-or tree. Trees show everything noted at a single glance; parentheses and brackets require left-to-right processing with careful, repeated checks to be sure of what the scope of inclusion is. Bloomfield´s insight into the isomorphism of linguistic form, form-classes, substitutes and mathematical clarity (147) is relevant here. Unity or equality can be expressed in many complex ways: mathematical operations can cancel each other, and the most complicated results, divided etc. by themeselves, return us to unity.
The use of symbolic notation is no guarantee of validity, truth, not even of relevance, only of ready internal clarity and simplicity in calculating: this is a powerful tool.
9.39 Notation and Insight. Notation may accidentally supply insight from the perspective it forces upon us. One convention uses the symbol v- for disjunction. There is a difference between expressing disjunction as He is my father or mother and He is either my father or my mother.
9.40 Form-classes and lexicon. Some elements of language have meaning, some merely distinguish meanings; meanings are of various types, and the lexicon and grammar deal with two distinct ones.
Bloomfield ridiculed the ´person, place or thing´definition of Noun because for over a century science had been telling us that fire is a process or action, not a thing. Of course. But knowing better need not lead to a change of linguistic habits, as Bloomfield´s own use of nominal forms like action and process in his uncomprehending rejection shows.
The Modistae´s effor was to distinguish (a) from (b) from (c), yet relate the differences of concrete things from signals from concrete concepts.
9.41 Written Records. The other chapters of Bloomfield´s book are only tinged with his originality as he surveyed the findings of predecessors and contemporary linguists. There is not an idle word in it. But the facts are two many to recount.
9.42 Dialect Geography. Neatly fits his behavioral concept of Speech-Communities. Both dialect and genetic relationhip become clearer on a stimulus-response view of geographic and social contiguity. Neither he nor those whose work he reports on Phonetic Change offer explanations. The already obvious facts are covered by descriptive labels for observed changes (e.g. environmental phonetic assimilation, palatalization, compensatory lengthening and simplification). It may be a quasi-explanation to redescribe attested changes as results of a preference for one over another non-distinctive option which later becomes distinctive, possibly on the grounds of communicative efficiency or internal pattern pressure.
There is such a wealth of observational fact, that geat service is done by cataloguin, distinguish and labelling the various phenomena involved.
9.43 Borrowing. Cultural Borrowing, Intimate Borrowing and Dialect Borrowing follow this same approach, providing and objective way of describing linguistic and cultural contact, influence and evaluation.
One of the hopes of earlier work was for a linguistic typology which would justify assumptions about cultural inferiority or superiority. This could result from and historical demonstration that IE languages started from great, and had arrived at just about perfect, while less fortunate cultures could be registered somewhere on lower rungs of the ladder.
9.44 Bloomfield´s Conclusions. He concludes by saying that Linguistic findings are modest so far. But they share scientific method, therefore scientific promise. Language is the key for the ´understanding and control of human events´. The concept of understanding can be illuminated by behavioral description, but discussion of control by Behaviorists is as frightening to those convinced of the fragility of conditions permitting self-determination as it is paradoxical within the logic of Behaviorism.
9.45 Bloomfield´s influence. The objectivity Bloomfield advocated in his general writings and exemplified in particular descriptions has been of enormous influence. It was neither his discovery nor unique contribution, but the totality of his work inculcated such a healthy respect for fact over fancy among scholars, that other issues are submerged as unimportant. His taxonomy of lingustic facts with appropiate labels and hicrarchic relations has long been a solid frame into which novel language data can be reliably translated.
The predominantly descriptive goal Bloomfield set for Linguistics has been labelled mere taxonomy.
The goal is said to be explanation rather than more description. But without objective description, the need for, or possibility of, explanation does not exist.
American Structuralism
American and European structuralism shared a number of features. In insisting upon the necessity of treating each language as a more or less coherent and integrated system, both European and American linguists of this period tended to emphasize, if not to exaggerate, the structural uniqueness of individual languages. There was especially good reason to take this point of view given the conditions in which American linguistics developed from the end of the 19th century.
After Boas, the two most influential American linguists were Edward Sapir (died 1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949). Like his teacher Boas, Sapir was equally at home in anthropology and linguistics, the alliance of which disciplines has endured to the present day in many American universities. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American "structuralism."
When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly influenced by Wundt's psychology of language. In 1933, however, he published a drastically revised and expanded version with the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behaviouristic approach to the study of language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to mental or conceptual categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption of the behaviouristic theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Because science was still a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most stimuli, no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of meaning for some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing the grammatical analysis of a language on semantic considerations. Bloomfield's followers pushed even further the attempt to develop methods of linguistic analysis that were not based on meaning. One of the most characteristic features of "post-Bloomfieldian" American structuralism, then, was its almost complete neglect of semantics.
Characteritics of american structuralism
Characteristics of American structuralist; almost complete negligence of semantics attempt to formulate a set of discovery procedures to sum up.
Structuralism is based on the assumption that grammatical categories should be defined not in terms of meaning but in terms of distribution, and that the structure of each language should be described without reference to the alleged universality of such categories as tense, mood and parts of speech.
Firstly, structural grammar describes everything that is found in a language instead of laying down rules; Secondly, structural grammar is empirical, aiming at objectivity in the sense that all definitions and statements should be verifiable or refutable.
The task of language study “Scholarship” has approached the study of language without actually entering upon it. ”Not writing; not literature; not ‘good’ speech
We can save ourselves this detour by turning at once to the observation of normal speech. We begin by observing an act of speech-utterance under very simple circumstances.”
Why not “writing”? Writing comes later than spoken language. Literacy was confined to a very few people. Written form doesn’t affect spoken form.
Why not “literature”? The limited concerns: certain persons; the content; the unusual features. Philologist: cultural and background significance. Linguist: the language of all persons alike.
Why not ‘good speech’? “he observes all speech-forms alike.”
The history of American linguistics experienced in the first half of century XX, a radical theories of Leonard Bloomfield, who were ONE of the foundations of structuralism .Bloomfield was born on April 1, 1887 in Chicago. He began his university studying German philology at Harvard from 1909 to 1927 and had a teaching at several universities. Interested in the beginning of Indo-European languages, he soon extended his studies to other fields and, as of the main principles of behavioral psychology, formulated his theories in "An Introduction to the Study of Language" (1914, Introduction to the study of language). Then turned his attention to Amerindian languages, spoken by the indigenous peoples of America, which, being very different from Indo-European, we provided a new perspective on certain aspects of language. Bloomfield's masterpiece appeared in 1933 under the title of Language. After analyzing the speech as a phenomenon of response to certain stimuli, the linguist divided the book into four distinct parts: (1) phonics, (2) grammatical issues, (3) lexical problems, and (4) miscellaneous other topics, including which included diachronic linguistics is, studied in its evolution over time, and loans from language to language. He further stated that the study of language had to be empirical, accurate and objective, and considered that the aim of linguistics was the scientific elucidation of the tongue. This was necessary to determine its semantic structure, grammatical and phonological at a given time-synchronous-study through a descriptive process. This analysis rejected any interpretation of the meaning extra-linguistic perspective. In parallel, Bloomfield became interested in educational issues, and developed various systems for teaching reading and foreign languages. In 1940 he was appointed professor of linguistics at Yale and from that position he held until his death, created a school based on his theories, to be known as "distributionalist." Leonard Bloomfield died in New Haven Connecticut, USA on April 18 1949.
