Leonard Bloomfield (1st April 1887- 18th April 1949)
He is and American linguist, he developed American Structural linguistics.
His concern was studying American English (descriptive approach+ science objectivity).
His theories were about phonetics, phonology and morphology.
The theories:
1. The Bloomfieldian phonemic Analysis:
Phonetics: the scientific study of human speech sounds in term of production, transmission and perception.
Phonology: the scientific study of sound combination (study of phonemes)
Phoneme: the smallest meaningless unit of distinctive sounds.
He classified phonemes into:
1.Primary Phonemes:
• Simple phonemes: /p/ /b/ /t/
• Compound phonemes: /tS/ /dz/ /ei/
2.Secondary phonemes:
• Stress
• Pitch
3.The phonemic structure: cluster like: sm
• Initial clusters:
1st=> /s/
2nd=> /t,k,p/
3rd=> /w,j,r/
• Final clusters:
Like in: tests, texts
2. The Bloomfieldian Morphological classification:
Morphology: the scientific study of morphemes.
Morpheme: the smallest meaningful unit in language.
• Free morpheme:
=>Open class: content and lexical words=extra linguistic meaning (verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs)
=>Close class: function/grammatical words (conjunctions, determiners)
• Bound morphemes:
=>Inflectional: grammatical change
=>Derivational: lexical change
• Allomorphs: the different pronunciation of the same morpheme
Speaks /s/
Listens /z/
Wishes /iz/
• Morphemes (types of words):
Simple=> happy
Complex=> boyish (free + bound)
Compound=> open-minded (free morphemes)
3. The Bloomfieldian Structural Linguistics:
He defined 4 important concepts
• Utterance: the act of speech (the spoken form)
• Word: a minimum free form
• Sentence: a union of morphemes connected together to convey meaning.
• Speech community: a group of people communicate/interact through speech.
Sentence structure:
Constituents (morphemes) are organized immediately and successively to have a coherent meaning if one constituent is omitted, the meaning gets lost.
This process is called: The Immediate Constituents Analysis (ICA), it is the process of dividing a sentence (large construction) into smaller units using 2 ways:
• Bracketing
• Tree Diagram
For Bloomfield all sentences have the same structure, which is the following:
Sentence
Subject: Predicate
• Modifier Verb
• Head (noun) Complement
{[(Poor) (John)] [(ran) (away)]}
Poor john ran away
S
S P
M N V C
This Analysis was:
• Very Limited
• He ignored meaning
After Bloomfield came Chomsky with Generative Grammar.
Avram Noam Chomsky: born in Pennsylvania, U.S.A 1928. An American, linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist (his studies are about the human mind) and a theorist.
He is famous for cognitive grammar and language acquisition.
Generative Grammar: a language theory developed by Chomsky in the 1950’s, describing and analysing human language, which means that, Generativism is a type of grammar that generates all the possible sentences.
Its principles:
1. Language is a mental process: the linguist should give more importance to competence which people have in their minds and linguistic knowledge then the performance which is the actual use of language
2. Language rules structure+ Language creativity: human being can generate grammatical sentences from a finite number of rules.
Theories: his theories were in his book “Syntactic Structure” 1957
1. Phrasal Structural Grammar:
A set of rules to generate all the possible sentences
Sentence: NP + VP
VP: V + NP
NP: det + N
2. Transformational Generative Grammar (which was in his book “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax”)
This theory contained all the missing things and aspects in his first theory plus:
• Passive voice
• Questions
• Prepositional phrases.
Language acquisition device:
Both Skinner and Chomsky had different theories about how the kid acquire his language
• Behaviourism (1957): it is a theory that Skinner had which was based on the belief that children imitate and acquire language from their environment.
• The Innate Theory (1959): a theory by Chomsky which believed that the kid is born with an innate capacity that helps him acquire language (inherited/mentalist)= cognitive= rationalist.
