Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was born in Chicago. He was an american linguistic and philologist, one of the most important representatives of American structuralism.

While Sapir established the basis of the phonologic structuralism, Bloomfield left mark in the study of morphology and syntax. Bloomfield was teacher and founder of antimentalism (a theory contrary to the Sapir’s mentalism which is an interpretation of language inextricably linked to acts of the mind), leads to its ultimate limits the dissociation of signifiers and meanings, to exclude these of his consideration. He claims that the linguist can only make assertions about the system of signifiers, because the facts of meaning, mental and conceptual in nature, are not his concern.

Theory publication year: Bloomfield’s main works is admittedly Language (1933), setting out his version of structuralism linguistics.

Main tenets or premises:

• It was related to Behaviorism theory, of the time of Watson and Skinner until the point of explaining the sign as the response of a intermediate stimulus. For example: It’s when a person has two reactions. The first is when we react by using the language and the second it’s through verbal expressions.

• It was thought that the structure of the language was upheld for two classes of subsystems: centrals and peripheries. The first were concerned about the grammatical system, the phonological system and the morphological systems while the other was concerned about the phonetic and the semantic systems.

• It was inspired in the empiricism. That means that it recognized experience as the unique source of language, in this case, the results of language.

• It’s usually presented as a reaction against traditional grammar.

Contributions to the study of language:

Leonard Bloomfield main contributions to linguistics. He claims that the linguist can only make assertions about the system of signifiers, because the facts of meaning, mental and conceptual in nature, are not his concern. His linguistic is concern only in analyzing formal features of language. The significance is only taken into account as a control, to be sure that the conclusions are not irrationals. Bloomfield rejected the possibility that linguistics analyze meaning, while for Sapir semantics is an essential part of the studies about the language and languages. Bloomfield’s main works is admittedly Language (1933), setting out his version of structuralism linguistics. Bloomfield says that his work draws on the three main traditions in the study of language: the comparative–historical, philosophical and empirical, descriptive and prescriptive. Despite this triple, Bloomfield boosted mainly descriptive field studies. That descriptivism is limited by the fact that as he admitted, speaking communities are often not homogeneous, an observation that history has placed as required of all socio and ethnolinguistic studies today. One of the major concerns of Bloomfield is to give linguistics a similar character to that of the natural sciences, which explicitly considers an epistemological model.

Bloomfield accepts the Saussure premise that language study involves studying the correlation between sound and meaning, but technically, the meaning is too difficult to “see”, so you should be outside the scope of linguistics. For Bloomfield, then, the language “begins” with the phonetics and Phonology. Bloomfield argues that are two components that should focus the study of the correlation between sound and meaning: the lexicon and grammar. While the lexicon is the total inventory of morphemes of a language, grammar is the combination of morphemes in any “complex form”. That is, the meaning of a statement follows from the sum of the meaning of lexical items plus “something else” that is the meaning provided by the grammar. Grammar includes both syntax (e.g. the construction of phrases) and morphology (e.g. the construction of words). Each individual language morpheme is an “irregularity” as far that represents an arbitrary relationship between form and meaning that must be memorized. Thus the lexicon is defined as “a list of basic irregularities”, a notion that has been recovered in various theories. Bloomfield’s interest was to make linguistics a true science of language. This defined the task of the linguist as one that would address to study the emissions corpus, discovering regularities and structures.

Drawbacks of the theory: While in sctructuralism the scientific method used in linguistic description it is based on observation of data (description and classification), Noam Chomsky says that a science must also explain the data and a way of doing this is through speculating, since a description of data is not enough for the explanation of many facts about language at the levels of syntax, phonology and semantics.

Also in structuralism they are concerned with the function of language i.e. communication. While generative grammar primarly concern with the knowledge of language and with the way it is represented in the mind.

In conclusion Generative Grammar’s main objective is the scientific explanation rather than the mere description of the complex grammar relations that conform a language and the problem of language acquisition.

How do you see this theory reflected in your language acquisition experience: The main fact that we can notice when we read about this theory is that is related to how we study specific carasteristic of grammar as morphemes or syntax, we study them through analyzing them and not just their function .