ACTIVITY ABOUT THE TOPIC
The American Structuralism: Leonard Bloomfield
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: It 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.
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:
pThe literary standard
pThe colloquial standard
pThe provincial standard
pSub-standard
pLocal 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: given any A, B pair, however defined, the presence or absence of a value for each, however defined, can be calculated. With values of + or - :
A: + - + -
B: + + - -
Its weakness is identical with that of Plato’s technique 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, factual relations are just as complex.
Stable States
Synchronic linguistic description proceeds on the counter-factual assumption of constant and stable forms paired with meanings within an unchanging speech-community, some forms are never observable in isolated utterance. This justifies the distinction of free and bound forms, when both are established as linguistic forms. Constructed linguistic forms have at least two, so A’ linguistic form which bears a partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to some other linguistic form is a complex form and the common parts are constituents or components, while A’ linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form is a simple form or morpheme
Basic and modified meaning
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.
