Bloomfield and semantics
Bloomfield’s position with regard to meaning and its importance in human use of language has been persistently misinterpreted. From a Wundtian, mentalistic psychology in his 1914 Introduction, he passed to a Weissian, non-mentalistic approach, as a result of which he considered it impossible to capture the totality of meaning because of its inaccessibility to scientific investigation by currently available techniques. Far from excluding considerations of meaning from our study of language, he regarded them as nevertheless essential. The author finds both Bloomfield’s and his critics’ views of the nature of meaning unsatisfactory, because they regard meaning as existent somewhere outside of the individual speaker. In this respect, Bloomfield’s point of view in his 1914 book was closer to reality than that which he expressed in his 1933 Language.
References
Bloomfield, Leonard
1914 An Introduction to the Study of Language. New York: Henry Holt. (New ed., with an introduction by
Joseph F. Kess, Amsterdam: J. Benjamins 1983.)
Bloomfield, Leonard
1933 Language. New York: Henry Holt.
Bloomfield, Leonard
1943 “
Meaning”.
Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht 351.101–106. (Repr. in
A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology ed. by
C. F. Hockett, 400–405. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press 1970.)
Bonfante, Giuliano
1976 “
Ancora il neutro italiano e rumeno”.
L’Italia Dialettale 401.287–92.
Fries, Charles Carpenter
1954 “
Meaning and linguistic analysis”.
Lg. 301.57–68.
Hall, Robert A., Jr.
1969 “
Some recent developments in American linguistics”.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 701.192–227.
Hall, Robert A., Jr.
1972 “
Why a structural semantics is impossible”.
Language Sciences 211.1–6. (Repr. in
Hall,
Language, Literature, and Life, 85–95. Lake Bluff, Ill.: Jupiter Press 1978.)
Hall, Robert A., Jr.
1973 “
The semantics of the Rumanian neuter”.
Rumanian Studies 21.189–192. Reprinted in
Hall:
Language, Literature, and Life, 96–99 (Lake Bluff, Illinois: Jupiter Press 1978).
Hall, Robert A., Jr.
Forthcoming. “
Idiolinguistics”. To appear in
Twelfth LACUS Forum (
1986).
Hockett, Charles F.
1958 A course in modern linguistics. New York: Macmillan.
Ogden, C. K. & I. A. Richards
1923 The meaning of meaning. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner; New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Heitner, Reese M.
2005.
An odd couple: Chomsky and Quine on reducing the phoneme.
Language Sciences 27:1
► pp. 1 ff.
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