Leonard Bloomfield And Bloomfield Essay

previous studies like (Matos & Passos, 2004, 2006; Passos & Matos, 1998) show that leonard boomfields conceptions of phoneme and analogy and skinners verbal behavior has some similarities. this paper examines this influence in …………..

Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) is one of the most prominent American linguists of the first half of the twentieth century he was a major influence in the shift of linguistics from comparative study of languages to the description of the structure of languages in the 20th century.

Bloomfield established the school of thought that has come to be known as American structural linguistics, which dominated the field until the rise of GENERATIVE GRAMMAR in the 1960s.

Throughout his career, Bloomfield rejected the existence

Technically, meanings are to be found among the independent variables in a functional account, rather than as properties of the dependent variable’’ (1957, pp. 13–14).

There are some similarities between bloomfoeld and skinner in their prespective to the conception of meaning.

1. Both reject mentalistic conceptions of meaning as a nonphysical process.

2. Both present a physicalist conception of meaning, which consists of consequent events to which speech is related.

3. Both consider the events of the world,like sounds produced by speech, as complex situations whose analysis by the linguist or the behavior analyst is very difficult.

4. Both understand that the analysis of the world made by language is arbitrary, corresponding to the conventions adopted by the verbal community,.

Also, we can mention that Bloomfield’s conception of distinctive features of meaning is similar to Skinner’s conception of the control of behavior by properties of the stimulus. Both of these refer to common elements of many situations in which the speech form or verbal behavior happens and how these common elements control the speech form. A difference between the two authors is that Skinner does not use the term