4. Leonard Bloomfield¹

4.1 Since the publication of Bloomfield's Language in 1933, according to Hockett's ‘foreword’, ‘most American linguistic investigation, and a good deal of that done elsewhere, has borne the mark of Bloomfield's synthesis’ (BL xiii). ‘It towers above all earlier works of the sort and, to date, above all more recent ones’ (BL ix). It ‘is considered by many to be the most important general treatise on language ever written’. ‘It drew together and unified’ ‘all three of the earlier traditions of language study’: ‘historical-comparative’, ‘philosophical-descriptive’, and ‘practical-descriptive’ (‘field research’) (BL xiii, ixf).

4.2 Like our other theorists, Bloomfield declares his deference to language, saluting ‘the strangeness, beauty, and import of human speech’ (BL xv) (cf. 2.8, 32; 3.1, 3; 6.2; 13.22). ‘Language plays a great part in our life’, though ‘because of its familiarity, we rarely observe it, taking it rather for granted, as we do breathing or walking’ (BL 3; cf. 3.1; 6.6; 12.9; 13.1). ‘The effects of language are remarkable, and include much of what distinguishes man from the animals’ (cf. 3.15; 7.35; 8.27; 13.12). Yet ‘the study of language is only in its beginnings’.

4.3 Bloomfield also resembles our other theorists in criticizing previous approaches to language (cf. 13.4). He was intensely bent on establishing linguistics as a ‘science’ by dissociating it from all that fell short of his standards. His book fostered in American linguistics a spirit of confrontation not merely against rival approaches, but also against prevailing philosophy, pedagogy, language teaching, and the humanities at large.

4.4 Two groups are the main targets of Bloomfield's censure. One group is the ‘philosophers’,² who indulged in ‘speculations’, as when they ‘took it for granted that the structure of their language embodies the universal forms of human thought’ or even ‘of the cosmic order’; and ‘looked for truths about the universe in what are really nothing but formal features of one or another language’ (BL 3, 5f) (cf. 13.16, 18). If they ‘made grammatical observations’, ‘they confined these to one language and stated them in philosophic terms’ (BL 5). In particular, they ‘forced their description into the scheme of Latin grammar’, holding Latin to be ‘the logically normal form of human speech’ and to ‘embody universally valid canons of logic’ (BL 8, 6) (cf. 2.5; 3.50; 5.24; 6.5; 8.5; 9.25; 12.20f). Bloomfield is far more impressed by early work on Sanskrit, notably because ‘the Hindus’ ‘were excellent phoneticians’ and ‘worked out a systematic arrangement of grammar and lexicon’ (BL 296, 11) (cf. 8.4, 54, 74; 12.20f).³

4.5 The other censured group is the ‘grammarians’ of ‘our school tradition’, who followed suit by ‘seeking to apply logical standards to language’ (BL 6) (cf. 8.5, 17; 13.16). Their ‘pseudo-grammatical doctrine’ was to ‘define categories of the English language as philosophical truths and in philosophical terms’ (BL 500). They ‘believed that the grammarian’, ‘fortified by his powers of reasoning, can ascertain the logical basis of language and prescribe how people ought to speak’ (BL 7) (cf. 4.86; 8.4; 13.50). They thus felt free to ‘ignore actual usage in favour of speculative notions’ (cf. 7.4). They promulgated ‘fanciful dogmas’, ‘doctrines’, and ‘rules’, which ‘still prevail in our schools’, e.g., about ‘“shall” versus “will”‘ (BL 500, 496, 7f).

4.6 Bloomfield's indignation has not only social and political motives, but professional ones as well. He is annoyed that ‘the knowledge’ ‘gained’ by ‘linguistics’ ‘has no place in our educational programme’, which ‘confines itself to handing on the traditional notions’ (BL 3) (cf. 4.84). Despite their ‘concentration on verbal discipline’, ‘the schools’ remain ‘utterly benighted in linguistic matters’, as shown for instance by their ‘crassest ignorance of elementary phonetics’ and of ‘the relation of writing to speech’ (BL 499f). He also fears that authoritarian views may discourage or delude potential students of linguistics. ‘The conventionally educated person discusses linguistic matters’ by ‘appealing to authority’ or by applying ‘a kind of philosophical reasoning’ that ‘derives, at no great distance, from the speculations of ancient and medieval philosophers’ (BL 3). ‘Many people have difficulty at the beginning of language study’ ‘in stripping off the preconceptions that are forced on us by our popular-scholastic doctrine’ (BL 3f). Worse yet, ‘informants’ who think their own ‘forms’ are ‘inferior’ ‘are ashamed to give them to the observer’, who ‘may thus record a language entirely unrelated to the one he is looking for’ (BL 497; cf. 4.19, 86; 13.49).

4.7 Bloomfield now pleads for a linguistics that genuinely qualifies as a ‘science’, and, to drive his point home (he favours teaching by ‘constant repetition’, 4.86), he refers to it as such twenty-three times, especially when obstacles arise (cf. 4.15).⁴ It is time to conduct ‘careful and comprehensive observation’, and to ‘replace speculation with scientific induction’, which provides ‘the only useful generalizations about language’ (BL 3, 16, 20) (cf. 4.67, 76; 5²⁸; 6.16f; 7.6f; 12.8, 16, 95f; 13.45). At times, his faith in science seems extravagant: ‘science progresses cumulatively and with acceleration;’ ‘as we preserve more and more records of more and more speech-reactions of highly gifted and highly specialized individuals, we approach, as an ideal limit, a condition where all the events in the universe, past, present, and future, are reduced (in a symbolic form to which any reader may react) to the dimensions of a large library’ (BL 40) (cf. Weiss 1925). We may feel reminded here that it was Bloomfield (1949) who contributed the ‘linguistics’ portion of the positivist ‘Encylopedia of Unified Science’, a favourite collection for Pike as well (5¹).

4.8 Bloomfield's ideal model is clear: ‘the methods of linguistics, in spite of their modest scope, resemble those of a natural science, the domain in which science has been the most successful’ (BL 509) (cf. 2.13; 4.18; 7.11; 9.112; 12.14, 49, 99; 13.11). To support this assessment, he contrasts ‘two theories about human conduct, including speech’ (BL 32). ‘The mentalist theory, which is by far the older and still prevails both in the popular view and among men of science, supposes that the variability of human conduct is due to the interference of some non-physical’ (later termed ‘metaphysical’) ‘factor, a spirit or will or mind’ that ‘does not follow the patterns of succession (cause-and-effect sequences) of the material world’ (BL 32f, 508). ‘The materialistic or, better, mechanistic theory supposes that the variability of human conduct, including speech, is due only to the fact that the human body is a very complex system’ (BL 33). Here, ‘human actions’ are construed to be ‘part of cause-and-effect sequences exactly like those we may observe, say, in the study of physics and chemistry’ (cf. 2.82; 3¹⁰; 4.10, 71; 5.28, 66; 7.16, 33, 36; 8.49; 13.11). Though he disavows a ‘dependence’ on ‘any one psychological doctrine’ because ‘the findings of the linguist’ should not be ‘distorted by any prepossessions about psychology

‘, Bloomfield ordains that ‘mechanism is the necessary form of scientific discourse’ (BL xv, 32). ‘In all sciences like linguistics, which observe some specific type of human activity, the worker must proceed exactly as if he held the materialist view’ (BL 38) (cf. 8.22, 24, 30, 8²¹). This insistence on ‘observation’ lands him in difficulties when he realizes the data he addresses either cannot be observed or will become explosively large if they are (4.17ff, 26, 29, 32, 50, 58, 61, 77f, 80; 5.80f; 13.45).

4.9 In such an ambience, ‘“mental images”, “feelings”, “thoughts”, “concepts”‘, ‘“ideas”‘, or ‘“volitions”‘ ‘are merely popular names for various bodily movements’ (BL 142). These ‘movements can be roughly divided into three types: (1) large-scale processes, which are much the same in different people and, having some social importance, are represented by conventional speech-forms, such as “I'm hungry”‘; ‘(2) obscure and highly variable small-scale muscular contractions and glandular secretions, which differ from person to person’ and therefore are not ‘represented’; and ‘(3) soundless movements of the vocal organs, taking the place of speech movements’ ‘(“thinking”)’ (BL 142f). Significantly, ‘thinking’ is equated here with ‘talking to oneself’ and ‘suppressing the sound-producing movements’ in favour of ‘inaudible ones’ (BL 28) (cf. 3.10, 3⁷; 5.43; 8¹⁷).

4.10 Along similar lines, Bloomfield borrows from ‘the sciences of physiology and physics’ to suggest a model of how ‘the gap between the bodies of the speaker and the hearer -- the discontinuity of the two nervous systems -- is bridged by the sound waves’ (BL 25f, i.r.). He divides ‘the speech-event’ into ‘three parts’. ‘The speaker moves her vocal chords’ to ‘force the air into the form of sound waves’. These ‘sound waves’ ‘set the surrounding air into a similar wave motion’. Finally, ‘these sound waves’ ‘strike’ the hearer's ‘ear-drums and set them vibrating, with an effect’ on the hearer's ‘nerves’; ‘this hearing acts as a stimulus’. This account makes ‘speech’ a set of ‘substitute stimuli’ alongside ‘practical stimuli’ ‘such as hunger’. ‘The mechanisms’ for ‘responding’ to ‘speech-sounds’ ‘are a phase of our general equipment for responding to stimuli’ (BL 32). The lesson is: ‘language enables one person to make a reaction when another person has the stimulus’ (BL 24, i.r.). Bloomfield concludes: ‘the division of labour, and with it, the whole working of human society, is due to language’ (cf. 3.1; 8.28; 9.7, 14; 13.22).

4.11 For demonstration, Bloomfield proposes to ‘begin by observing an act of speech-utterance under very simple circumstances’ (BL 22). He doesn't really observe anything, but fabricates a story of ‘Jack and Jill walking down a lane’. ‘Jill is hungry’, ‘sees an apple’, and ‘makes a noise with her larynx, tongue, and lips’. ‘Jack vaults the fence, climbs the tree, takes the apple’, and ‘brings it to Jill’, who ‘eats’ it. ‘The act of speech’ is thus shown between two sets of ‘real or practical events’ (BL 26f). ‘The speech-event’, ‘worthless in itself’, is ‘a means to great ends’ (i.r.). ‘The normal human being is interested only in stimulus and response; though he uses speech and thrives by it, he pays no attention to it’, because it is ‘only a way of getting one's fellow-men to help’.⁵

4.12 Response and habit also figure in Bloomfield's account of language acquisition (cf. 7.30; 8.9, 21ff). Due to ‘an inherited trait’ and ‘under various stimuli, the child utters and repeats vocal sounds’ (BL 29). ‘This results in a habit: whenever a similar sound strikes his ear’, he makes ‘mouth-movements’ to ‘imitate’ it (BL 30). Since ‘the mother’ ‘uses her words when the appropriate stimulus is present’, ‘the child forms a new habit’ of saying the word for the object ‘in sight’. Through ‘further habits’, ‘the child’ ‘embarks upon abstract or displaced speech: he names a thing even when’ it ‘is not present’. This scheme requires no creativity: Bloomfield denies that ‘children ever invent a word’ (cf. 3³). Moreover, ‘to the end of his life, the speaker keeps doing the very things which make up infantile language-learning’ (BL 46).⁶

4.13 Such a mechanistic approach might foster a simple view of language, but Bloomfield tends in the opposite direction. ‘The human body’ and ‘the mechanism which governs speech’ are so ‘complex’ that ‘we usually cannot predict whether’ ‘a speaker’ ‘will speak or what he will say’ (BL 32f). ‘The possibilities are almost infinite’ (3.3; 5.25, 28; 8.42), and ‘the chain of consequences’ is ‘very complicated’. Therefore, ‘we do not understand the mechanism which makes people say certain things in certain situations’ and ‘makes them respond appropriately’ (BL 31f). ‘We could foretell a person's actions only if we knew the exact structures of his body at the moment’, or ‘the exact make-up of his organism at some early stage - say at birth or before - and then had a record of every change’ and ‘every stimulus that had ever affected’ it (BL 33). We would also have to note the effects of ‘private habits left over from the vicissitudes of education and other experience’ (BL 143). Hence, ‘the occurrence of speech and the practical events before and after it depend upon the entire life-history of the speaker and the hearer’ (BL 23) (cf. 5.28).

4.14 Predictably, Bloomfield ‘defines the meaning of a linguistic form’ not as a ‘mental event’, but as ‘the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer’ (BL 142, 139f; cf. BL 74, 143f, 151, 158). Since ‘everyone’ ‘acts indifferently as a speaker and a hearer’, the ‘situation’ and the ‘response are closely co-ordinated’ (BL 139). Still, because ‘the speaker's situation’ ‘usually presents a simpler aspect’, we can be content to ‘discuss and define meanings in terms of a speaker's stimulus’. Once again, however, Bloomfield's relentless reasoning leads to a projection that is far from simple: ‘the study of speakers’ situations and hearers’ responses’ ‘is equivalent to the sum total of all human knowledge’ (BL 74). ‘The situations which prompt people to utter speech include every object and happening in their universe’ (BL 139) (cf. 5.80; 13.45). ‘Almost anything in the whole world’ may be involved, plus ‘the momentary state of the nervous system’ (BL 158). So ‘to give a scientifically accurate definition of meaning for every form in the language, we should have to have a scientifically accurate knowledge of everything in the speaker's world’ -- far beyond ‘the actual extent of human knowledge’ (BL 139). Bloomfield apparently overlooks the empirical significance of the fact that ordinary speakers handle meaning with fairly modest stores of knowledge (cf. 12.60).

4.15 Bloomfield contends that ‘the meaning of any given speech utterance’ could be ‘registered’ only ‘if we had an accurate knowledge of every speaker's situation and of every hearer's response’, so the linguist would have to be ‘omniscient’ (BL 74). This argument spearheads the insistent warnings about the elusiveness of meaning -- repeated twenty times in the book -- with the lesson that ‘meaning cannot be analysed within the scope of our science’ (BL 161; cf. BL 93, 162, 167, 266, 268). Only ‘if some science’ ‘other than linguistics’ ‘furnished us with definitions of the meanings’ could ‘the meaning of the utterance be fully analysed and defined’ (BL 77, 168; cf. BL 140, 145). Meanwhile, ‘the statement of meanings’ is ‘the weak point in language study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances far beyond its present state’ (BL 140).

4.16 Bloomfield gives a further reason why ‘the practical situations that make up the meaning of a speech-form are not strictly definable’: ‘since every practical situation is in reality unprecedented’, ‘every utterance of a speech-form’ by ‘a good speaker'⁷ ‘involves a minute semantic innovation’ (BL 407, 443) (cf. 8.83; 13.39f). ‘Almost any utterance of a form is prompted by a novel situation, and the degree of novelty is not subject to precise measurement’ (BL 435). Moreover, ‘every person uses speech-forms in a unique way’ (BL 75).

4.17 This line of reasoning seems convincing enough, but creates severe problems for linguistic theorizing and entrains Bloomfield in contradictions. When he argues against performing ‘observations’ ‘in the mass’ or ‘resorting to statistics’, his reasoning is reversed. ‘The linguist is in a fortunate position: in no other respect are the activities of a group as rigidly standardized as in the forms of language’ (BL 37). ‘Language is the simplest and most fundamental of our social’ ‘activities’ (BL 38). ‘Every speaker's language’ ‘is a composite of what he has heard other people say’, and ‘a complex of habits resulting from repeated situations in early life’ (BL 42, 37, 32; cf. 4.12; 8.21ff, 25, 53, 69). ‘Large groups of people make up all their utterances out of the same stock of lexical forms and grammatical constructions’ (BL 37). Moreover, to uphold the Saussurian notion of system, Bloomfield ‘assumes that each linguistic form has a constant and definite meaning, different from the meaning of any other linguistic form in the same language’ (BL 158; cf. 2.26ff; 4.23, 26, 50). How such claims could be reconciled with universal innovation is nowhere explained.

4.18 Another perplexity is how ‘observation’, for Bloomfield the very foundation of ‘mechanism’ and of the ‘natural sciences’ he says linguistics ‘resembles’ (4.8f), could proceed on the ‘physiological’ basis he envisions (cf. 4.8, 10f, 28f, 32, 50, 58, 61, 77f, 80; 5.28; 6.7, 12, 54; 7.71; 8.19f, 22). ‘Mental processes or internal bodily processes of other people are known’ ‘only from speech-utterances and other observable actions’ (BL 143). ‘The working of the nervous system’ is capable of ‘delicate and variable adjustment’, and ‘is not accessible to observation from without’, not even by one's own ‘sense-organs’ (BL 33f; cf. 8.21). Also, ‘the fluctuating and contradictory results of the search’ for ‘“speech centres”‘ indicate that ‘the points of the cortex are surely not correlated with specific socially significant features of speech, such as words or syntax’ (BL 36) (cf. 7.31, 7⁴³; 8¹⁷). And ‘abnormal conditions in which speech is disturbed -- as in ‘stuttering’ or ‘aphasia’ -- ‘seem to reflect general maladjustments or lesions and to throw no light on the particular mechanisms of language’ (BL 34f) (but cf. 8²⁰; 9.1).

4.19 Denied such recourses, Bloomfield develops rather abstruse notions of ‘observation’. At one point, he says that ‘the speaker can observe better than anyone else’ ‘the processes’ ‘represented by conventional speech forms’ (BL 143). But not even ‘language enables a person to observe’ ‘the workings of his own nervous system’ (BL 34). Besides, ‘the normal speaker, who is not a linguist, does not describe his speech-habits, and if we are foolish enough to ask him, fails utterly to make a correct formulation’ (BL 406; cf. 4.54, 13.49). Nor can we trust ‘educated persons, who have had training in school grammar’ and the ‘philosophical tradition’ (cf. 4.4ff, 86; 13.16). ‘The speaker, short of a specialized training’, is incapable of ‘describing his speech-habits’ (BL 406). So ‘all’ ‘statements in linguistics describe the action of the speaker’ but ‘do not imply that the speaker himself could give a similar description’ (cf. 4.48; 13.49). Also ruled out are ‘appeals’ to ‘common sense or to the structure of some other language or to psychological theory’ (BL 38) (cf. 8.28; 9.7; 13.10f).

4.20 In effect, Bloomfield's scientific ambitions mix pessimism with optimism. The dilemmas of complexity and variation in human behaviour and communication are said to constitute ‘an almost insuperable hindrance’ (BL 407) so that he can justify a strategic withdrawal. Indeterminate and mutable phenomena, he argues, would resist or compromise a scientific analysis (but cf. 13.59). So he proposes to limit the scope of linguistics until such time as the sciences can fully determine meanings and hand them over in rigorously compiled forms. Meanwhile, we can ‘act as though science had progressed far enough to identify all the situations and responses that make up the meaning of speech-forms’ (BL 77).

4.21 In Bloomfield's eyes, the ‘ideal use of language’ is in ‘mathematics’, ‘where the denotations are very precise’ (BL 29, 146; cf. 2.82; 3.73; 5.86; 8.31; 12.33ff; 13.15). ‘Mathematics’ is a ‘specially accurate form of speech’, indeed, ‘the best that language can do’; ‘whole series of forms’, ‘in the way of selection, inclusion, exclusion, or numbering, elicit very uniform responses from different persons’ (BL 147, 512). ‘The use of numbers’ is ‘speech activity at its best’ and ‘the simplest and clearest case of the usefulness of talking to oneself’ -- the latter being, as we saw, Bloomfield's designation for ‘thinking’ (BL 29, 512; cf. 4.9). His reverence for ‘mathematics’ jars somewhat, though, with his attack on ‘grammarians’ for using ‘logic’ (4.4f; cf. 13.17).

4.22 Less ideal, but still a shining example, are ‘scientific terms’, whose ‘meanings’ Bloomfield deems ‘nearly free of connotative factors’ (BL 152; cf. SL 32f, 223f; 3.72). He cites the ‘terms of chemistry, mineralogy’, ‘botany’, and ‘zoology’, and contemplates getting ‘practical help’ from a ‘zoologist's definition’ of ‘meanings’ (BL 139, 162). ‘Although the linguist cannot define meanings, but must appeal for this to the students of other sciences’, yet ‘having obtained definitions for some forms, he can define the meanings of other forms in terms of these first ones’ (BL 145f). ‘Certain meanings, once they are defined, can be recognized as recurring in whole series of forms’ (BL 147). This effect is ‘plain’ in ‘mathematics’, but ‘appears also in many ordinary speech-forms’ (BL 146). Still, Bloomfield admits that ‘meaning’ ‘includes many things that have not been mastered by science’; and that ‘the meanings of language do not agree’ with ‘scientific (that is, universally recognized and accurate) classification’, witness ‘the colour-spectrum’ (BL 75, 139f, 174, 280) (cf. 5.68; 6.54; 7.31, 71; 12.60). If nothing but the ‘business-like denotations’ of ‘scientific discourse’ were allowed, ‘a great many forms in almost every language’ would ‘disappear’ (BL 387). And ‘mathematics’ too retains a ‘verbal character’ (BL 507).

4.23 Alternately, ‘since we have no way of defining most meanings and of demonstrating their constancy, we have to take the specific and stable character of language as a presupposition of linguistic study, just as we presuppose it in our everyday dealings’ (BL 144). We may state this presupposition as the fundamental assumption of linguistics’: ‘in certain communities’, ‘some speech-utterances are alike as to form and meaning’. This ‘assumption’ is claimed to ‘imply that each linguistic form has a constant and specific meaning’ (BL 145; cf. 2.26; 4.17, 26, 50; 13.54). ‘If the forms’ are ‘different, we suppose that their meanings are also different’. Bloomfield thus has to infer that ‘there are no actual synonyms’, but does admit ‘homonyms’, adding: ‘our basic assumption is true only within limits, even though its general truth is presupposed not only in linguistic study, but by all our actual use of language’. Yet to argue that ‘some’ sameness lends ‘each form’ a ‘constant meaning’ is premature and collides with the thesis of continual innovation (4.16).

4.24 Consider ‘the ordinary tie-up of phonetic form with dictionary meaning’ (BL 148). ‘Dictionary meanings’ ‘show instability’ by having numerous ‘variants’, which Bloomfield places in ‘two main classes: ‘normal (or central)’ meanings versus ‘marginal, (metaphoric or transferred)'⁸ meanings’ (later also called ‘deviant meanings’); our ‘assurance’ and ‘agreement’ about which is which come from our knowledge of ‘ideal situations’ (BL 148f, 151, 431). ‘We understand a form (that is, respond to it) in the central meaning unless some feature of the practical situation forces us to look to a transferred meaning’ (BL 149, 431) (cf. 5.66). This link to the situation aids Bloomfield's stipulation that ‘when the linguist tries to state meanings, he safely ignores displaced speech’ (in the sense of 4.12), ‘but does his best to register all cases of transferred meaning’. ‘The practical situation’ is also the guide for ‘narrowed meanings’ (e.g. ‘“car”‘ for ‘“streetcar”’) and ‘widened meanings’ (e.g. ‘“fowl”‘ for ‘any bird’) (BL 151). ‘Deviant meanings’ are described as not ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’, but specific to particular ‘cultural traditions’ (BL 150f); though I suspect all meaning arises from ‘cultural traditions’ (cf. 3.1; 9.6ff, 18; 11.8, 30, 56, 66).

4.25 Another ‘way in which meanings show instability is the presence of supplementary values we call connotations’ (BL 151) (cf. 4.72, 82; 6.52ff; 9.77; 12.19, 31). If ‘the meaning of a form for any one speaker is nothing more than a result of the situations in which he had heard this form’, Bloomfield must surmise that connotations come from ‘hearing it under very unusual circumstances’ (BL 151f) (cf. 4.82). He lists ‘social standing’, ‘local provenience’, and ‘trade or craft’; connotative forms might be ‘technical’, ‘learned’, ‘foreign’, ‘slang’, ‘improper’, ‘obscene’, ‘ominous’, ‘animated’, ‘infantile’, or ‘symbolic’ (i.e., sound-symbolism in words like ‘“snip-snap”’) (BL 152-56) (cf. 8³⁷). He imagines that ‘the chief use of our dictionaries’ is to ‘combat such personal deviations’, but concedes: ‘the varieties of connotation are countless and indefinable’ and ‘cannot be clearly distinguished from denotative meaning’ (BL 152, 155).

4.26 Despite all the problems he sees with meaning, Bloomfield declares that ‘to study language’ is ‘to study’ the ‘co-ordination of sounds with meanings’ (BL 27). ‘A phonetic form which has a meaning is a linguistic form’ (BL 138).⁹ Here too, he stipulates that ‘in human speech, different sounds have different meanings’ (BL 27; cf. 4.17, 23, 50). On an ‘ideal plane’, ‘linguistics’ ‘would consist of two main investigations: phonetics, in which we studied the speech-event without reference to its meaning’; and ‘semantics, in which we studied the relation’ of the event to ‘the features meaning’ (BL 74). In practice, this scheme won't work for two reasons. One reason we have already encountered (4.14f): ‘our knowledge of the world’ ‘is so imperfect that we can rarely make accurate statements about the meaning of a speech-form’. The other reason is that ‘purely phonetic observation’ cannot ‘recognize’ the difference between distinctive and non-distinctive features of a language’; we can do that ‘only when we know the meaning’. To escape this dilemma, Bloomfield counsels ‘trusting to our everyday knowledge to tell us whether speech-forms are “the same” or “different”‘ (cf. 4.31; 5.14, 61, 65; 9.27).

4.27 Predictably, Bloomfield refers the issue to the ‘distinctive’ ‘features which are common to all the situations that call forth the utterance of the linguistic form’ (BL 141; cf. BL 74; 4.14). ‘Hearing several utterances of some one linguistic form’, ‘we assume’ that ‘the situations of the several speakers contain some common features’ (BL 158). ‘The speech-sound is merely a means which enables us to respond to situations’ ‘more accurately’ (BL 74; cf. 4.11). Though the stimulus-response model is essentially causal (witness the Jack and Jill story, 4.11; cf. 5.15), Bloomfield follows the Saussurian idea that ‘the connection between linguistic forms and their meanings is wholly arbitrary’ and again illustrates it with words for the same thing (“horse”) in different languages (BL 145, 274f; cf. 2.28ff; 3.3; 9.13, 36; 11.86). Each ‘combination’ of ‘signaling-units is arbitrarily assigned to some feature of the practical world’ (a claim from which ‘graphic symbols’ are later excluded, however) (BL 162, 500). And he agrees with Saussure that ‘form classes’ seem less ‘arbitrary’ when ‘languages’ identify them by ‘markers, as in Malayan or Chinese’, and grumbles about the ‘arbitrary’ ‘form-classes’ in languages that do not, like English (BL 270f, 165, 269, 280) (cf. 4.49; 13.27, 54).

4.28 ‘The phase of language study’ in which ‘we pay no attention to meaning’ is called ‘experimental or laboratory phonetics’ (BL 75). ‘The phonetician can study either the sound-producing movements of the speaker in physiological phonetics or the resulting sound waves’ in acoustic phonetics; we have as yet’, Bloomfield adds without detectable irony, ‘no means for studying the action of the hearer's ear-drum’. Such devices as the ‘mechanical record’, the ‘laryngoscope’, and the ‘kymograph’ can be used (BL 85, 75f).¹⁰ This approach, however, ‘reveals only the gross acoustic features’; and ‘identical acoustic effects’ may be ‘produced’ by ‘very different actions of the vocal organs’ (BL 137, 108).

4.29 ‘In general’, ‘observations of the “basis of articulation” are bound to be vague’, ‘hazy, and inaccurate; we must wait for laboratory phonetics to give us precise, trustworthy statements’ (BL 127f). Yet ‘even a perfected knowledge of acoustics will not, by itself, give us the phonetic structure of a language’ (BL 128) (cf. 2.68; 3.17; 4.29; 6.7). Viewed ‘without regard to their use in communication’, ‘speech-sounds are infinitely complex and infinitely varied’ (BL 76) (cf. 3.19). ‘The phonetician finds that no two utterances are exactly alike’. ‘The importance of a phoneme’ therefore ‘lies not in the actual configuration of its sound-waves, but merely in the difference’ compared to ‘all other phonemes of the same language’ (BL 128) (cf. 2.69f; 4.33; 5¹²; 12.89; 13.26). ‘Each phoneme’ must be ‘a distinct unit’, ‘unmistakably different from all the others’; the rest of its ‘acoustic character is irrelevant’ (BL 128, 137).

4.30 Accordingly, Bloomfield decides that ‘only the phonemes of a language are relevant to its structure’ (BL 129) (cf. 2.69; 5.42f; 6.43; 8³⁵; 12.80; 13.26). ‘Gross’ or ‘acoustic features’ should not be ‘confused’ with ‘distinctive’ or ‘phonemic features’ (BL 77, 84) (cf. 3.20; 4.79; 5.42f). ‘The study of significant speech-sounds is phonology or practical phonetics'¹¹; both ‘presuppose a knowledge of meanings’ (BL 78, 137f). For Bloomfield, ‘the description of a language begins with phonology’ (BL 138) (cf. 2.17, 67, 70f; 3.18, 58f; 5.42, 44, 51; 7.46; 8.66f 12.80, 82; 13.27). Here, ‘the practical phonetician frankly accepts his everyday recognition of phonemic units’ (BL 137) (cf. 4.26).

4.31 Economy is decisive: because ‘a workable system of signals, such as a language, can contain only a small number of signalling units, whereas the things signalled about’, i.e., ‘the entire content of the practical world, may be infinitely varied’ (cf. 3.3; 4.14ff; 5.25, 28; 8.42), ‘linguistic study must always start from phonetic form and not from the meaning’ (BL 162). Anyway, the use of meaning Bloomfield advocates is quite minimal: to identify ‘phonemic distinctions’ by telling ‘which utterances are alike in meaning, and which ones are different’ (BL 93, 128) (cf. 4.26). Some circularity may be entailed here in view of the theses that ‘each linguistic form has a constant and definite meaning, different from the meaning of any other linguistic form in the same language’; and that ‘if the forms’ are ‘different’, ‘their meanings are also different’ (4.17, 23; 13.54). Such theses suggest we need merely establish a difference in form, and can then take the difference in meaning for granted.

4.32 If the scheme of units ‘lies entirely in the habits of speakers’, its description entails a ‘danger for linguistic work’ (BL 77, 84). As a listener, ‘the phonetician's equipment is personal and accidental’; he is trained to ‘hear those acoustic features which are discriminated in the languages he has observed’ (BL 84). Confronting ‘a strange language’, ‘he has no way of knowing’ which ‘features are significant’ (BL 93). So ‘his first attempts at recording contain irrelevant distinctions’ and omit ‘essential ones’. Even ‘the “exact” freehand notations of phonetic experts’ might ‘tell us little or nothing about the structure of a language’ (BL 128) (cf. 2.69; 8.75). Such admissions point toward the central dilemma of linguists: only to the extent that they also understand the language can they make worthwhile ‘observations’ of it; and they must participate in creating the data (1.8f; 2.9; 13.1). Bloomfield may have considered this problem temporary until some future super-science explains all meanings exactly (4.21f), and ‘refined physiological observation’ will be able to corroborate ‘descriptions’ ‘made in terms of a speaker's movements’ (BL 127). Meanwhile, ‘the analysis and recording of languages will remain an art or practical skill’ of ‘little scientific value’ (BL 93, 127, 137). ‘The extent of observation is haphazard, its accuracy doubtful, and the terms in which it is reported are vague’ (BL 127).

4.33 The linguist should proceed by ‘making up a list or table of the phonemes of a language’ (BL 90, 129). Bloomfield divides them into ‘primary phonemes’, the basic stock, and ‘secondary phonemes’, appearing ‘only in combinations’ -- such as ‘stress’ and ‘pitch’ (BL 90ff). The phonemes are discovered by ‘experimenting’, namely by ‘altering any one’ of the ‘parts of the word’ (BL 78). Each ‘replaceable part’ must constitute a ‘phoneme’, i.e., ‘a minimum unit of distinctive sound-feature’ (BL 79, i.r.). For example, ‘“pin”‘ is contrasted with sets like ‘“sin”/”tin”/”fin”‘, ‘“pen”/”pan”/”pun”‘, and ‘“pig”/”pill”/”pit”‘, to reveal exactly ‘three phonemes’ (BL 78f). Such contrasts impose ‘a limit to the variability’: ‘each phoneme’ is ‘kept distinct from all other phonemes’ (BL 81; 4.27, 29f). Thus, ‘we speak the vowel of a word like “pen” in a great many ways, but not in any way that belongs to the vowel of “pin”‘ (an awkward example, since in the southeastern U.S., the two words are homophones for many speakers).

4.34 Like Firth, Bloomfield says ‘the throat and mouth’ ‘are not, in a physiological sense, “organs of speech”‘, ‘for they serve biologically earlier uses’ like ‘breathing and eating’, but derives his terms for phonemes from ‘the shape of the oral cavity’ and ‘the movements of the tongue and lips’ (BL 36, 93, 87) (8.6; but cf. 2.70; 3.11, 21; 13.26). The division between ‘voiced and unvoiced speech-sounds’ is aligned with one between ‘musical sounds’ and ‘noises’ (BL 94f, 98). ‘The typical actions of the vocal organs’ may be subjected to various ‘modifications’, affecting ‘length of time’, ‘loudness’, and ‘musical pitch’ (BL 109, 114) (as we just saw, creating ‘secondary phonemes’). Also important is ‘the manner in which the vocal organs pass’ between ‘inactivity’ and ‘the formation of a phoneme, or from the formation of one phoneme to that of the next’ (BL 118).

4.35 Finally, Bloomfield proposes two more ways to treat phonemes. One is to ‘count out the relative frequencies’ (BL 136). The other is to ‘describe the phonetic structure of a language’ by ‘stating’ which ‘phonemes appear in the three possible positions’ inside the ‘syllable’: ‘initial’, ‘medial’, or ‘final’ (BL 131, i.r.). He devises an elaborate listing for English of what ‘may be followed by’ what, or ‘occurs only before’ it, or ‘never comes after’ it, and so on (BL 131ff). With those criteria, ‘we can easily show that no two’ phonemes’ ‘play exactly the same part’ ‘in the language’ (BL 130, 134).

4.36 Bloomfield goes so far as to suggest that a ‘language can be replaced’ ‘by any system of sharply distinct signals’ (BL 128). Gestures might be an instance, but (like Sapir, 3.10), he views them as a mere ‘derivative of language’ (BL 144).¹² ‘Gesture accompanies all speech’ and ‘to a large extent it is governed by social convention’ (BL 39). But ‘all complicated or not immediately intelligible gestures are based on the conventions of ordinary speech’ and have ‘lost all traces of independent character’. And ‘vocal gestures serve an inferior type of communication’ (BL 147).

4.37 The strong focus on speech sounds puts ‘writing’ too in the position of a ‘mere derivative’, arisen from ‘gestures’ of ‘marking and drawing’ (BL 144, 40; cf. 4.44). Bloomfield's deprecation is much like Saussure's: ‘writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks’ (BL 21) (cf. 2.21f; 6.50; 8.72-75; 9.42f; 12.83; 13.33). ‘For the linguist, writing is merely an external device, like the use of a phonograph’ (BL 282). We do not ‘need to know something about’ ‘writing’ ‘in order to study’ ‘language’. Several arguments are deployed to marginalize writing, but Bloomfield repeatedly stumbles into inconsistencies or difficulties -- just what we noticed with Saussure (2.21-24).

4.38 One argument is that ‘the conventions of writing are a poor guide’ for ‘representing phonemes’, ostensibly because ‘alphabetic writing does not carry out’ ‘the principle of a symbol for each phoneme’, though ‘a few languages’ are commended as exceptions: Spanish, Bohemian (i.e. Czech), Polish, and Finnish (BL 79, 85f, 89, 501) (cf. 2.22; 3.54; 6.50; 8.71). ‘Philosophers’ and ‘amateurs’ are chided for ‘confusing’ ‘the sounds of speech’, the ‘phonemes’, with the ‘printed letters’ of ‘the alphabet’ (BL 8, 137). But in another passage, ‘alphabetic writing’ is judged to work ‘sufficiently well for practical purposes’, and its ‘help’ is instrumental in ‘listing’ ‘phonemes’ (BL 128, 90), a view shared by Sapir (3.19) and Firth (8.71). Bloomfield suggests ‘listing’ ‘phonemes’ in ‘alphabetical order’ and does so (BL 162, 81), which by his own argument ought to be a category mistake. In language use, at least, he sees the influence going the other way: ‘the writer utters the speech-form before or during the act of writing and the hearer utters it in the act of reading’ (BL 285).¹³ He seems annoyed at the ‘alterations’ inflicted on speech by ‘orthography’, and counsels us, on ‘aesthetic grounds’, to ‘eliminate’ ‘ugly spelling-pronunciations’ (BL 501) (cf. 2.21; 8.75).

4.39 In any event, Bloomfield avers that ‘the effect of writing upon the forms and development of speech is very slight’ (BL 13). ‘In principle, a language is the same’, whether ‘written’ ‘or not’ (BL 282; cf. BL 501). And ‘the conventions of writing develop independently of actual speech’ (BL 486). Yet he also avers that ‘the written record exerts a tremendous effect upon the standard language’, at least ‘in syntax and vocabulary’ (BL 486). ‘In German’ in fact, ‘the spoken standard’ is ‘largely derived from the written’ (BL 487). A lesser contradiction appears when the ‘conservatism’ of ‘writing’ is claimed, and then this very claim is termed ‘superficial’ (BL 292, 488) (cf. 4.44).

4.40 Bloomfield's dim view of elitism in language (4.5, 87) is another factor. Because ‘until the days of printing, literacy was confined to a very few people’, ‘writing’ is suspected of being ‘the property of chosen few’ and hence a tool for ‘the discrimination of elegant or “correct” speech’ (BL 13, 22). The ‘native speakers’ of ‘the standard forms’ are those ‘born into homes of privilege’ (BL 48). ‘All our writing’ ‘is based on the standard forms’ (BL 48) and on the ‘literary standard’ in particular (BL 48, 52). Yet how ‘educational authorities and teachers’ can enforce ‘standard forms’ is unclear if ‘the schoolteacher, coming usually from a humbler class’, is ‘unfamiliar with the upper-class style’ (BL 500, 487). Another stumbling block is Bloomfield's unqualified praise for the work of the ‘Hindu grammarians’ (4.4), who described only ‘the upper-caste’ ‘official and literary language’, a patently ‘artificial medium for writing on learned’ ‘topics’ (BL 11, 63).

4.41 Still, Bloomfield shows far less concern for literature than Sapir did (3.68-71). He sees it ‘consisting of beautiful or otherwise noticeable utterances’, in contrast to ‘the language of all persons alike’, which is the concern of ‘the linguist’ (BL 21f). His brittle conjecture that ‘a beautiful poem’ ‘may make the hearer more sensitive to later stimuli’ includes literature among the ‘linguistic interaction’ for ‘refining and intensifying’ ‘human response’ and promoting ‘education or culture’ (BL 41). Also, ‘poetic metaphor’ is depicted as ‘an outgrowth of the transferred uses of ordinary speech’; ‘language’ is not ‘“a book of faded metaphors”‘, but ‘poetry’ is a ‘blazoned book of language’ (BL 443).

4.42 Another argument against writing is that ‘all languages were spoken through nearly all of their history by people who did not read or write’ (BL 21). ‘To most of the languages’ ‘spoken today’, ‘writing’ has been applied ‘recently or not at all’. Yet if, as Bloomfield claims, ‘writing and printing’ are instrumental for ‘the analysis of linguistic forms into words’ and if ‘words are linguistic units that are first symbolized in writing’ (BL 178, 285), the implication might be that unwritten languages lacked the notion of the word, which seems implausible.¹⁴

4.43 Still another argument is that ‘written records’ are ‘misleading’, giving ‘an imperfect and often distorted picture of past speech’, and ‘telling us little or nothing’ about the issues of concern to the linguist (BL 481, 293, 69, 486). The use of such records is ‘a handicap’; ‘we should always prefer to have the audible word’ (BL 21). Besides, they ‘acquaint us with only an infinitesimal part of the speech-forms of the past’ (BL 60, 441) (though I don't see how we can determine what proportion of speech forms were not written down). Elsewhere, however, Bloomfield says that ‘written records give direct information about the speech-habits of the past’; and we get such ‘information’ ‘largely’ from them (BL 282, 21). Also, his survey of ‘languages of the world’ (BL 57-73) continually refers us to ‘written records’, ‘manuscripts’, and ‘inscriptions’.

4.44 So ‘writing’ needs to be ‘studied’ at least in regard to issues of ‘history’ (BL 21). Bloomfield starts from the idea of ‘language’ being ‘our way of communicating the kind of things that do not lend themselves to drawing’; if meaning is defined as the speaker's situation (4.14), this idea implies that ‘most situations contain features that do not lend themselves to picturing’ (BL 284f). Although we ‘can only guess at the steps’ that came later, ‘the origin’ of ‘systems of writing’ was in ‘conventional but realistic pictures, and many of them actually denoted the name of the object which they represented’ (BL 283, 285). This ‘resemblance’ assumed ‘secondary importance’ as people developed the ‘habit’ of ‘responding’ to ‘a uniform mark or set of marks’ (BL 284). Then came ‘the device of representing unpicturable words by phonetically similar picturable words’ (BL 287). ‘The symbols in this way’ came to stand ‘not for linguistic forms, but for phonetic forms’.¹⁵ The ‘syllabary’ had a ‘small number of symbols, each representative of some one syllable’ (BL 288). Finally, ‘alphabetic writing’ used ‘one symbol for each phoneme’, though some ‘actual systems’ were ‘inadequate’ because of the ‘conservatism of the people who write’ like ‘their predecessors’ after ‘the speech-forms have undergone linguistic change’ (BL 291f).

4.45 In sum, writing is admitted as a domain for gathering evidence, but debarred from the theoretical conception, which rests on the more auspicious base of the system of sound-units (cf. 13.33). It's reassuring to envision ‘every language consisting of a number of signals, linguistic forms’, each of these being ‘a fixed combination of signalling-units, the phonemes’ (BL 158). Bloomfield goes on to draw up a more elaborate taxonomy for ‘the meaningful features of linguistic signalling’ (BL 264) (Table 5.1).

‘Meaningful units’, whether ‘simple or complex’, are divided into ‘lexical forms’ (built from ‘phonemes’) and ‘grammatical forms’ (built from ‘tagmemes’, i.e., ‘features of arrangement’). The ‘smallest and meaningless units’ are the ‘phememes’, comprising ‘lexical phonemes’ plus ‘grammatical taxemes’. The ‘smallest meaningful units’ are the ‘glossemes’, whose ‘meanings’ are ‘noemes’ and which comprise ‘lexical morphemes’, whose ‘meanings’ are ‘sememes’, plus ‘grammatical tagmemes’, whose ‘meanings’ are ‘episememes’. In most of the book, though, several of these terms (like ‘phememes’, glossemes’, and ‘noemes’) are scarcely used or illustrated -- a neglect even more pronounced in Hjelmslev's theorizing (6.4, 59).¹⁶ Both linguists take it for granted that classifications should be based on the ‘smallest’ units, but neither gives any exhaustive analysis of real language samples to show how or where we find these units, and when we stop. Therefore, aside from the well-known ‘phonemes’, the units have an indeterminate quality; even the division between ‘meaningless’ and ‘meaningful’ would not be simple to maintain.

4.46 Bloomfield's two top categories, ‘grammar’ and ‘lexicon’, are complementary. ‘If we knew the lexicon of a language’, we would notice that ‘every utterance contains some significant features that are not accounted for by the lexicon’ (BL 162). This residual aspect, ‘the meaningful arrangements of forms in a language, constitutes its grammar’ (BL 163). Yet the two top categories are also connected in several ways. One connection is that the ‘lexicon’ is ‘the total stock of morphemes in a language’, and ‘grammar’ is ‘the arrangement’ of ‘morphemes’ ‘in the complex form’ (BL 162f). Another connection arises by grouping ‘grammar’ and ‘lexicon’ together as ‘divisions’ of ‘semantics’, i.e., of ‘the description’ ‘telling what meanings are attached’ to ‘phonetic forms’ (BL 138, 513), though this scheme is not pursued very far.¹⁷

4.47 ‘Lexical form’ is further ‘connected in two directions with grammatical form’: ‘taken by itself in the abstract’, it ‘exhibits a meaningful grammatical structure’; and ‘in any actual utterance’, it has a ‘grammatical function’ defined by its ‘privileges of occurrence’, i.e., by ‘the positions in which a form can appear’ ‘in any actual utterance’ (BL 264f, 185) (cf. 7.63). ‘The functions’ ‘appear as a very complex system’, which Bloomfield traces back to a ‘complex set of habits’ (BL 265f; cf. 4.12, 32). ‘To describe the grammar of a language, we have to state the form-class of each lexical form, and to determine what characteristics make the speakers assign it to these form-classes’ (BL 266).

4.48 Bloomfield strongly recommends that ‘form-classes, like other linguistic phenomena’, be ‘defined’ ‘only in terms of linguistic (that is, lexical or grammatical) features’ (BL 268) (cf. 7.69, 71-76). More specifically, ‘the form-class of a lexical form is determined for the speakers, and consequently for the relevant description of a language, by the structure and constituents of the form’, or by the ‘inclusion of a special constituent’ or ‘marker, or by the identity of a form itself’ (BL 268). ‘Large form-classes that subdivide’ the ‘whole lexicon’ or some major part of it ‘into form-classes of approximately equal size are called categories’ (BL 270). The ‘petty form-classes’ are more ‘irregular’.

4.49 Though he claims ‘every lexical form is used only in certain conventional functions’, Bloomfield concedes that ‘different functions may create overlapping form-classes’; and ‘particular lexical forms may, by class-cleavage, exhibit unusual combinations of function’ (BL 265, i.r.) (cf. 3.16, 22, 24, 33; 7.63; 8.25, 27; 12.25, 27; 13.54). Moreover, he allows for a class of ‘lexical forms’ that ‘belong arbitrarily or irregularly to a form-class that is indicated neither by their structure nor by a marker’; these will have to be given as a ‘list’ of ‘every form’ in the ‘lexicon’ (BL 269) (cf. 4.52, 59). From here, he comes to perceive ‘the lexicon’ as ‘an appendix of grammar’ and ‘a list of basic irregularities’ (BL 274; cf. 4.52, 59; 7.70f; 13.59).

4.50 Another problem is the prospect that although ‘a morpheme can be described phonetically’ ‘as a set of one or more phonemes in a certain arrangement’ (5.36, 45; 7.46, 61; 13.27), ‘a proper analysis’ is ‘one which takes account of the meanings’ (BL 161, 167) -- just the aspect of language Bloomfield mistrusts the most. ‘School grammar’ is scolded for ‘trying to define the form-classes by the class-meanings’, which, ‘like all other meanings, elude the linguist's power of definition’ and ‘do not coincide with the meanings of strictly defined technical terms’ (BL 266). If ‘the meaning of a morpheme’ is a ‘sememe’ (4.45), Bloomfield, to be consistent, must ‘assume that each sememe is a constant and definite unit of meaning’ ‘different from all others’ ‘in the language’ (BL 162) (cf. 4.17, 23, 26, 31; 12.66). Consistent too is the idea that ‘sememes could be analysed or systematically listed only by a well-nigh omniscient observer’ (cf. 4.15). Besides, ‘the meaning of each morpheme belongs to it by an arbitrary tradition’ (BL 274f) (cf. 4.27). So ‘no matter how refined our method, the elusive nature of meanings will always cause difficulties, especially when doubtful relations of meaning are accompanied by formal irregularities’ (BL 208). For instance, some ‘affixes’ are ‘vague in meaning’, whereas for others, ‘the meaning is more palpable’ and ‘concrete’; ‘the roots’ of words are ‘relatively clear-cut as to denotation’, because they are ‘very numerous’ (BL 240f) (cf. 3.27).

4.51 These problems give Bloomfield one more occasion to voice his refrain: because ‘we cannot gauge meanings accurately enough’, ‘the meaning of a morpheme’ ‘cannot be analysed within the scope of our science’ (BL 227, 161) (cf. 4.15). ‘To accept’ ‘makeshift’ ‘definitions of meaning’ ‘in place of’ ‘formal terms is to abandon scientific discourse’ (BL 266). We are similarly cautioned against using ‘philosophical terms’, as was done in the ‘traditional’ ‘parts of speech system’ devised by the ‘mistaken method’ of ‘school grammar’ (BL 5, 196, 201, 268, 271) (4.4ff; cf. 4.19, 38, 72, 4²; 13.7). Due to such factors as ‘overlap’ and ‘overdifferentiation’, a ‘fully satisfactory’ and ‘consistent’ ‘system’ ‘cannot be set up’ (BL 196, 269f).

4.52 How the discovery of morphemes might proceed in a formal way is an intricate question. They are designated the ‘ultimate constituents’ or ‘components’ of ‘every complex form’ (BL 160f, i.r.). Each ‘morpheme’ is ‘a linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form’ (befitting the idea of the ‘lexicon’ being ‘a list of irregularities’, 4.49, 59). Therefore, we must look for ‘partial resemblance of forms’ larger than morphemes, e.g., in ‘“John ran”‘ versus ‘“John fell'“ (BL 159) (cf. 5.46).

4.53 Morphemes come in two types: a ‘free form’ can be ‘spoken alone’, whereas a ‘bound form’ cannot (BL 160). So ‘only free forms can be isolated in actual speech’; ‘the speaker cannot isolate bound forms by speaking them alone’ (BL 178, 208). Yet here too, methods of discovery are problematic. ‘If we are lucky, we may hear someone utter the form’ ‘without any accompaniment’, but we may also ‘wait in vain for the isolated form’ (BL 159f).

4.54 Bloomfield again has reservations about consulting native speakers (cf. 4.19; 13.49). Though he depicts ‘the categories of language’ ‘which affect morphology’ as being ‘so pervasive that anyone who reflects upon language at all is sure to notice them’, yet ‘as a practical matter, observing languages in the field’, ‘it is unwise to elicit such forms’ (BL 270, 160). ‘One cannot look to the speakers for an answer, since they’ are ‘usually unable to describe the structure of words’; ‘they do not practise morphological analysis’, and would make ‘false admissions’ or ‘give inconsistent or silly answers’ (BL 208, 160) (cf. 5.46, 48; 9¹⁵).

4.55 Bloomfield has no patent solutions either. Despite his own postulate of strict form-meaning correspondence (4.17, 23), he grants that ‘defining’ ‘linguistic categories’ ‘in formal terms’ will always leave a ‘great difficulty in defining their meaning’ (BL 271) (cf. 13.54). ‘Class-meanings are merely composites’, or ‘greatest common factors, of the grammatical meanings which accompany the forms’ (BL 266f). Alternately, ‘class-meanings’ are ‘only vague situational features, undefinable in terms of our science’ (BL 268). ‘Some linguistic categories’ may ‘agree with classes of real things’, such as ‘objects, actions’, and ‘relations’, but ‘other languages’ may not ‘recognize these classes in their part-of-speech system’ (BL 271) (cf. 2.65; 3.23; 13.24). ‘Number’, ‘gender’, ‘case’, ‘tense’, and ‘aspect’ are cited as ‘categories’ that do not conform to ‘the practical world’ (BL 271f). Also, ‘in every language’, ‘many complex forms carry specialized meanings which cannot figure in a purely linguistic description, but are practically of great importance’ (BL 276). Some forms and features are so ‘elusive’ and variable that ‘the definer’ can only ‘resort to a demonstration by examples’ (BL 280) (cf. 8.82; 9.27). Others ‘have no formal characteristic by which we could define them’ and must be ‘classified by purely practical features of meaning’ (BL 215).

4.56 And so Bloomfield too proceeds in a makeshift fashion. He invokes such ‘class-meanings’ as ‘“action”‘, ‘“strong stimulus”‘,¹⁸ and the ‘“qualitative”‘, ‘“variable”‘, or ‘“identificational character of specimens”‘ (BL 166, 267, 202f). ‘The class-meaning’ of ‘verbs’ is said to be ‘“action”‘, and that of ‘English finite verb expressions’ to be ‘“action performed by actor”‘. Particularly obtuse is the suggestion that ‘infinitive expressions’, ‘when spoken with exclamatory final pitch, have the meaning of a command’ (BL 164ff, 172). Despite its different function, the imperative is called ‘infinitive’ because the two forms happen to coincide in English and not to require a subject (cf. 9.58, 91).

4.57 A ‘set’ of related’ inflected forms’ is said to constitute a ‘paradigm’ (BL 223) (cf. 5.74; 6.34; 7.75f; 8.57; 9.31, 9¹⁷; 12.71; 13.27). Some are ‘regular’, whereas others are ‘defective’ (with missing forms) or ‘over-differentiated’ (with too many forms) (BL 223f). Yet in saying ‘even a single over-differentiated paradigm’ ‘implies homonomy in the regular paradigms’, Bloomfield hints that linguistic description should start from the most complex case, however isolated; if ‘“be”‘ has ‘“was”‘, ‘“were”‘, and ‘“been”‘, then a form like ‘“played”‘ would be actually three forms that happen to sound alike (cf. BL 224). By that reasoning, the pronoun system (with ‘I/me’, ‘he/him’, etc.) might suggest that nouns have different ‘cases’ for ‘subject’ and ‘object’ which sound the same. Such conclusions hardly fit Our aim is to get, in the long run, the simplest possible set of statements that will describe the facts of English’ (BL 213) (cf. 5.9, 38; 6.13, 21, 40; 7.36f, 50f).

4.58 What holds the ‘paradigm’ together is its ‘derivational unity’ (BL 224). ‘An English paradigm consists of an underlying word’ ‘and some secondary derivatives containing’ it. In many other languages ‘having a more complex morphology’, ‘none of the forms in a paradigm can conveniently be viewed as underlying the others’ (BL 225). For such cases, Bloomfield postulates a ‘kernel’ or a ‘theoretical underlying form’ as a ‘stem’ (BL 225f, 267) (cf. 4.69; 7.95).

4.59 A morphological ‘set of forms’ is ‘regular’ if it can be ‘covered by a general statement’ and its members can be ‘formed by a speaker who has not heard them’ (BL 213f).¹⁹ This idea suggests each separate ‘morpheme of a language’ is ‘an irregularity’ in respect to the others, so that the ‘lexicon’, i.e., the ‘stock of morphemes’, would again be ‘a list of basic irregularities’ (4.49, 52), the more so ‘if meanings are taken into consideration’ (BL 162, 274). Because in ‘morphology’, ‘any inconsistency of procedure is likely to create confusion, ‘the principle of immediate constituents’ must be applied ‘in all observation of word-structure’ (BL 209, 221) (cf. 5.21, 50, 62; 7.37f, 63; 9.33; 13.26). ‘Any complex form can be fully described (apart from its meaning) in terms of the immediate constituent forms and the grammatical features’ whereby these ‘are arranged’ (BL 167).

4.60 Although a ‘syllable’ or ‘phoneme’ can be a ‘linguistic form’, the ‘word’ constitutes ‘the smallest unit’ of ‘free form’, and ‘for purposes of ordinary life’, ‘the smallest unit of speech’ (BL 138, 183, 178) (cf. 13.29). ‘The principle’ that ‘a word cannot be interrupted by other forms, holds good almost universally’ (BL 180). ‘In the few languages with no bound forms, the word’ is also ‘the smallest unit’ of ‘linguistic form in general’ (BL 183) (a case that could confuse the taxonomy in 4.45). Bloomfield contrasts ‘primary words’, which do ‘not contain a free form’ (they either ‘consist of a single free morpheme’ or ‘contain more than one bound form’), against ‘secondary words’, which do ‘contain’ one or more ‘free forms’ (BL 209, 240ff). This prospect of the word having ‘immediate constituents’ raises a familiar problem: ‘it is impossible to distinguish consistently, on the one hand, between phrases and words and, on the other hand, between words and bound forms’ (BL 209, 179) (cf. 2.55; 3.26, 34f; 5.51, 53f; 8.57; 9.75, 9¹⁷; 11.40; 12.75; 13.28). The distinction rests on ‘grammatical features of selection’, which are ‘the commonest, but also the most varied and difficult to observe’ (BL 229). ‘Many words’ ‘lie on the border’ (BL 180f). This ‘border region’ includes ‘phrase-words (jack-in-the-pulpit)’ and ‘compound words (blackbird)’ (BL 207, 180, 184, 234f, 276) (cf. 2.61; 5.32, 54; 9.93; 13.28).

4.61 In ‘grammar’ (as in morphology), ‘most speech forms are regular in the sense that the speaker who knows the constituents and the grammatical pattern can utter them without ever having heard them’ by using ‘analogies’ and ‘habits of substitution’ (BL 275f).²⁰ Here, ‘the observer cannot hope to list’ all the forms, ‘since the possibilities of combination are practically infinite’, and many ‘may never before have been uttered’ (cf. 4.16; 7.95; 8.42; 13.26, 39f, 45). So although ‘the number of words in any language is practically infinite’, the real ‘wealth of a language’ lies in its ‘morphemes’, ‘sentence-types, constructions, and substitutions’ (BL 276f). ‘The grammar lists only the kind of irregularities that are not present in all the morphemes of a language’ (BL 274). ‘Any form which a speaker can utter only after he has heard it from other speakers, is irregular’. Yet the criterion is not too reliable: ‘when a speaker utters a complex form, we are in most cases unable to tell whether he has heard it before or created it’ by ‘analogy’ (BL 276).

4.62 Bloomfield proposes to organize linguistic description for ‘grammar’ into ‘two parts’: ‘morphology’ for ‘the construction of words’, and ‘syntax’ for ‘the construction of phrases’ (BL 183f, 207) (cf. 2.55; 5.54; 6.49; 8.57; 9.31; 11.35). To support the division, Bloomfield reverses his position about borders (in 4.60): ‘the constructions in which free forms appear in phrases differ very decidedly from the constructions in which free or bound forms appear in words’ (BL 183).²¹ ‘Syntactic constructions’ are those ‘in which none of the immediate constituents is a bound form’ (BL 184). ‘Morphological’ ‘constructions’ are those ‘in which bound forms appear among the constituents’ (BL 207). ‘In general, morphological’ ones are the ‘more elaborate’ (BL 207). ‘The features of modification and modulation are more numerous and often irregular’, i.e., ‘confined to particular’ cases rather than ‘covered by a general statement’ (BL 207, 213; cf. 4.49). ‘Features of selection’ can be ‘minute’, ‘arbitrary, and whimsical’ (BL 207, 165). ‘The order of the constituents is almost always rigidly fixed’, though this ‘criterion’ may apply to some ‘phrases’ as well (BL 207, 229). Due to all these peculiarities, ‘languages differ more in morphology than in syntax’, and ‘no simple scheme’ can classify all languages (BL 207; cf. 3.47; 4.72). Such ‘schemes’ as the one with ‘analytic’ versus ‘synthetic’, and the one with ‘isolating, agglutinative, polysynthetic, and inflecting’ are criticized because the classes were ‘relative’ and ‘never clearly defined’ (BL 207f) (cf. 3.54f).

4.63 Notwithstanding these guidelines, the border between syntax and morphology remains fuzzy, with the word caught in between. Bloomfield envisions a grey area of ‘compounds’ ranging from ‘syntactic’ to ‘semi-syntactic’ to ‘asyntactic’ (BL 207, 233ff) (4.60). Moreover, its status as ‘a free form’ (BL 178, 181, 183) does not fully identify the word, because ‘we do not mark off those segments of our speech which could be spoken alone’ (BL 181). Bloomfield is forced to turn to writing: ‘the analysis of linguistic forms into words is familiar to us because we have the custom of leaving spaces between words in our writing and printing’ (BL 178) (cf. 4.38). Printed form must be the reason why he himself considers ‘door-knob’ to be ‘English’, but not ‘door knob’ (BL 233).

4.64 ‘Grammar’ is assigned four kinds of ‘meaningful arrangements’: ‘(1) order is the succession’ of ‘constituents’; 22 ‘(2) modulation is the use of secondary phonemes’ like ‘pitch’ (4.33); ‘(3) phonetic modification is a change in the primary phonemes’; and ‘(4) selection of forms’ is controlled by certain ‘classes’ (BL 163f) (cf. 3.25-30). Yet discovering ‘arrangements’, as Bloomfield admits, is not as easy as discovering ‘phonemes, which we can pronounce or transcribe’, and ‘many students of language have been misled’ (BL 168). A similar difficulty applies to the parallel whereby ‘a taxeme’, being ‘a simple feature of grammatical arrangement’, ‘is in grammar what a phoneme is in the lexicon’ -- ‘the smallest unit of form’ (BL 167; cf. 4.45; 5²⁶; 6.42). Bloomfield warns that ‘taxemes’ can be ‘very complex’ and ‘elaborate’, involving ‘many peculiarities’ (BL 266, 210). And his examples of ‘taxemes’ suggest as much, for instance, the ‘selections’ which ‘delimit form-classes’, ‘assign certain finite verb expressions to certain nominative expressions’, or make ‘certain forms’ become ‘favourite sentence-forms’ (BL 190, 166f, 171f). I see here nothing ‘simple’ or ‘small’; ‘taxeme’ seems to be a name for any group of information the linguist needs to describe some aspect of an arrangement, witness Bloomfield's remark about one case: ‘all these facts, taken together, may be viewed as a single taxeme’ (BL 167f).

4.65 ‘Syntax’ is said to ‘consist largely’ of ‘taxemes of selection’ ‘stating’ ‘under what circumstances’ ‘various form-classes’ ‘appear in syntactic constructions’ (BL 190). Every ‘construction shows us two (or sometimes more) free forms combined’ in a ‘resultant phrase’ (BL 194). Bloomfield's breakdown of ‘constructions’ hinges on a certain use of recursion: whether a ‘phrase belongs’ to the same ‘form-class’ as one or more of its ‘immediate constituents’. If not, the ‘construction is ‘exocentric’ (like ‘“John ran”’); if so, it is ‘endocentric’ (like ‘“poor John”‘, where both the whole and ‘“John”‘ are ‘proper-noun expressions’ and have ‘the same functions’). The ‘endocentric’ ones, which include ‘most’ of those ‘in any language’, ‘are of two kinds’: in ‘co-ordinative (or serial) ones (e.g., ‘“boys and girls”’), the ‘phrase belongs’ to the same ‘form-class as two or more of the constituents’ (e.g. nouns); in ‘subordinative (or attributive)’ ones (e.g., ‘“very fresh milk”’), only ‘one of the constituents’ -- ‘the head’ or ‘centre’ (e.g., the noun) -- meets this requirement (BL 195). This scheme has a vaguely transformational flavor in the sense that a part is construed as being, for syntactic purposes, of the same ‘class’ as the whole (cf. 13.54). But Bloomfield limits his ideas about ‘kernels’ or ‘underlying forms’ to morphology (4.59), where ‘the structural order of constituents’ ‘may differ from their actual sequence’, and ‘the descriptive order of grammatical features is a fiction’ serving ‘our method of describing the forms’ (BL 210, 213).

4.66 ‘The formation of a phrase is usually determined, at bottom, by the form-class of one or more of the included words’ (BL 268). ‘For this reason, the speaker (and the grammarian) need not deal separately with each phrase; the form-class of almost any phrase is known if we know the syntactic constructions and the form-classes of words’ (cf. 7.95). Phrases are also held together by ‘government’: a ‘selection’ stipulating ‘the syntactic position’ of one form with respect to another (BL 192) (cf. 6¹²). ‘Agreement’ is a ‘narrower type’; ‘the simplest kind’ is ‘concord or congruence’ e.g., between ‘actor’ and ‘action’ (BL 191) (cf. 8.61; 9²⁰).

4.67 The ‘sentence’ is defined as ‘a linguistic form’ occurring in ‘absolute position’, i.e., ‘as an independent form not included in any larger’ form (BL 170). This definition places the sentence at the end-point of recursion: it includes but cannot be included (but cf. 7.52). As a result, isolation -- the inability to be in a structure -- becomes a decisive aspect for describing structures. Even a word or two (like ‘“John!”‘ or ‘“Poor John!”’) can be a ‘sentence’; only the ‘bound form’ is ‘never used’ (BL 170, 177; cf. 4.53, 61f; 5.58; 8.55; 12.77). Of course, ‘a form which in one utterance figures as a sentence, may in another utterance appear in included position’ (BL 170). Moreover, ‘an utterance may consist of more than one sentence’ if it ‘contains several linguistic forms which are not’ ‘united’ ‘by any meaningful grammatical arrangement’ (cf. 9.86). These cases collide with the criterion, mentioned later, that a sentence be ‘spoken alone’ (BL 179). The criterion wouldn't be decisive anyway: ‘the linguist cannot wait indefinitely for the chance of hearing a given form used as a sentence’, and ‘inquiry or experiment may call forth very different responses’. Bloomfield remarks here that ‘aside from’ ‘far-fetched situations, the general structure of language may make one classification more convenient than another for our purpose’ (cf. 13.40, 43).

4.68 Bloomfield postulates ‘various taxemes marking off the sentence’ and ‘distinguishing different types of sentences’ ‘in most, or possibly all languages’ (BL 170; cf. 13.28). ‘Sentence-pitch’ can mark ‘the end of sentences’ or their ‘emphatic parts’, or can ‘unite’ ‘two forms’ in ‘parataxis’, the latter including ‘juxtaposition’, ‘parenthesis’, and ‘apposition’ (BL 171). ‘Taxemes of selection’ ‘distinguish’ ‘full’ from ‘minor sentences’, or decide which are ‘favourites’ -- in English, say, ‘actor-action phrases’ and ‘commands’ (BL 171f) (cf. 9.46). ‘The meaning of the full sentence type’ (its ‘episememe’, cf. 4.45) is expounded as ‘complete and novel utterance’ or ‘full-sized’ ‘instruction’ for ‘altering the hearer's situation’; but we are warned again that ‘it is a serious mistake to try to use this meaning (or any meanings)’ ‘as a starting point for linguistic discussion’, because we cannot ‘define’ them ‘exactly’ (BL 172; cf. 4.16; 5.65).

4.69 The ‘predication’ is presented as a ‘bipartite favourite sentence form’ composed of ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ (BL 173) -- like the definition of the sentence used by school grammarians as well as linguists (cf. 3.36, 39; 5.55; 8.55; 12.78f). The ‘interrogative’ is identified both by ‘special pitch’ and ‘selection’; it ‘stimulates’ ‘the hearer to supply a speech-form’ (BL 171, 248, 204) (cf. 9.58).²³ The ‘minor’ (i.e., not ‘favourite’) sentence-types are ‘completive’ (‘supplements a situation’, as in ‘“Gladly, if I can”’) or ‘exclamatory’ (‘occur under a violent stimulus’, as in ‘“Damn it”’) (BL 176f). What a traditional grammar might call ‘sentence fragments’ are thereby subsumed under ‘minor sentence types’ (cf. 9.85).²⁴ In return, the structural status of the sentence is made almost as elusive as that of the word and depends on some indefinitely large and variegated set of ‘taxemes’ (cf. 4.64f).

4.70 Alongside ‘constructions’ and ‘sentence-types’, ‘substitution’ is ‘the third type of meaningful grammatical arrangement’ (BL 247, i.r.) (cf. 5.32; 7.73; 9.92). ‘A substitute is a linguistic form or grammatical feature which, under certain conventional circumstances, replaces one of a class of linguistic forms’ in its ‘domain’. ‘Substitutes’ ‘are often short words’, ‘atonic’, and of ‘irregular inflection and derivation’. They have great ‘usefulness’ and ‘economy’; their ‘meanings’ are ‘more inclusive’, ‘abstract’, ‘simple’, and ‘constant than the meanings of ordinary linguistic forms’ (BL 250). Being ‘one step farther removed from practical reality’ and having ‘grammatically definable’ ‘domains’, ‘substitutes’ raise fewer ‘practical questions of meaning’ (BL 250, 247). They fit such ‘simple’ ‘features of the situation’ that they could be replaced by ‘gestures’ (BL 249f; cf. 4.36). Bloomfield cites the ‘closed system of personal-definite substitutes’ (i.e., pronouns), which ‘represent elementary circumstances’ of ‘the act of speech-utterance’, such as ‘the speaker-hearer relation’ (BL 256, 248) (cf. 9.89).²⁵ For example, we may say ‘“you”‘ with ‘no practical knowledge’ of the ‘hearer’ (though this applies only to languages like English with a single pronoun of address). Also, Bloomfield is impressed by the forms for ‘numerative and identificational relations’ (like ‘“all”, “some”, “any”‘, etc.), because they remind him of ‘the language of science’ and ‘mathematics’ (BL 249; cf. 4.21f).

4.71 Bloomfield's belief in the reality or universality of the descriptive concepts reviewed so far is signalled when he remarks: ‘such features as phonemes, morphemes, words, sentences, constructions, and substitution-types appear in every language’, because ‘they are inherent in the nature of human speech’ (BL 297) (cf. 2.10, 30; 7.45; 13.27). ‘Other features, such as noun-like and verb-like form-classes’, or ‘categories of number, person, case, and tense, or grammatical positions of actor, verbal goal, and possessor, are not universal, but still so widespread that better knowledge will doubtless someday connect them with universal characters of languages’ (but cf. 3.36). Such ‘features’ could ‘exist’ as ‘realities either of physics or of human psychology’ (BL 198f, 297) (cf. 5.68; 6.12; 13¹⁶).

4.72 Yet the danger always impends, even for ‘linguists’, of ‘mistaking’ the ‘categories’ of one's ‘native language’ ‘for universal forms of speech or of human “thought”, or of the universe itself’ (BL 233, 270; cf. 3.5, 50; 4.4; 8.14). ‘A good deal of what passes for “logic” or “metaphysics” is merely an incompetent restating of the chief categories of the philosopher's language’ (BL 270) (cf. 13.16). So ‘linguistics of the future’ will have ‘to compare the categories of different languages and see which features are universal or at least widespread’. Meanwhile, we are told that at least in some areas like ‘compound words’, ‘the differences are great enough to prevent our setting up any scheme that would fit all languages’ (BL 233; cf. 3.47; 4.62).

4.73 Of course, much comparing had already been done by earlier linguists (cf. 2.5, 10, 52, 63; 3.19f; 4.1; 12.90f). But although he extols philology as ‘one of the most successful’ ‘enterprises’ ‘of European science in the nineteenth century’, he has some reservations about ‘comparative’ methods (BL 12). It ‘shows us the ancestry of languages in the form of a family tree’, yet ‘the family tree diagram was merely a statement of the method’ rather than of ‘historical realities’ (BL 311). ‘Each branch’ of the tree was assumed to ‘bear independent witness to the forms of the parent language’ (BL 310). ‘Identities or correspondences’, especially in ‘the commonest constructions and form-classes’, or in ‘intimate basic vocabulary’ of ‘everyday speech’, should ‘reveal features of the parent speech’ (BL 298, 310). ‘Differences’ which ‘follow a system’ might also indicate that ‘forms are historically connected’ (BL 300).

4.74 Yet appearances can be unreliable. ‘Universals’ may create deceptive ‘resemblances’ among ‘wholly unrelated languages’ (BL 297; cf. 2.10; 7.20). Or, confusion may result from some ‘accident’ or ‘borrowing of speech-forms’ (BL 298f, 361f). Moreover, ‘the comparative method’ makes a risky assumption that the ‘parent’ language was ‘completely uniform’ until it got ‘split suddenly and sharply into two or more’ languages (BL 310, 318). Actually, the ‘parent’ might have been ‘dialectally differentiated’, and its offshoots might ‘remain in communication’; ‘clear-cut splitting’ ‘is not usual’ (BL 321, 314). ‘In actual observation, no speech-community is ever quite uniform’ (BL 311; cf. 2.43; 3.66; 4.17, 82; 7.12, 96).

4.75 Pursuing this train of thought with his usual relentlessness leads Bloomfield to acknowledge the problems in determining what constitutes or belongs to a language. ‘The language of any speech-community appears to an observer’, ‘at any one moment’, ‘as a stable structure of lexical and grammatical habits’ (BL 281). ‘This, however, is an illusion: every language is undergoing, at all times’, a ‘process of linguistic change’ (2.44-54; 3.58-63). ‘At any one stage of a language, certain features are relatively stable and others relatively unstable’ (BL 409). ‘The systematic study’ of how ‘speech-forms change’ may offer ‘the key to most linguistic problems’ (BL 5) (cf. 3.58). Whereas Bloomfield had previously said that ‘in order to describe a language one needs no historical knowledge whatever’, he now says that ‘change’ ‘offers the only possibility of explaining the phenomena of language’ (BL 19, 281). After all, ‘our speech depends entirely on the speech of the past’ (BL 47). ‘Speakers acquire their habits from earlier speakers’ (BL 281). Thus, ‘the explanation of our present-day habit’ ‘consists’ in ‘the existence’ of ‘the earlier habit’ plus any ‘intervening change’ (BL 282). Bloomfield surmises that ‘linguistic change is far more rapid than biological change, but probably slower than the changes in other human institutions’. ‘Every speaker is constantly adapting his speech-habits to interlocutors; he gives up forms’, ‘adopts new ones’, or ‘changes the frequency’ (BL 327f) (cf. 13.39).

4.76 Bloomfield is pleased to report how, in the later 19th century,²⁶ studies of ‘language change’ ‘replaced the speculation of earlier times with scientific induction’ (BL 16; cf. 4.7, 73, 79; 13.4). ‘When no one had the key’, ‘the results of linguistic change’ seemed ‘chaotic’ (BL 346). But now ‘we have a method which brings order into the confusion of linguistic resemblances’ (BL 346). ‘The observed facts’ ‘resisted all comprehension until our method came upon the scene’ (BL 347).

4.77 What these ‘observed facts’ tell us is less clear than Bloomfield's confident tone suggests (cf. 4.8, 17ff). ‘The process of linguistic change has never been directly observed’; ‘observation, with our present facilities, is inconceivable’ (BL 347). Even ‘mass-observation’ made by ‘recording every form’ we ‘can find’ ‘can tell us nothing about the changes’; we would need a ‘genuinely statistical observation through a considerable period of time’ (BL 38) (cf. 2.45).²⁷ Bloomfield also sees ‘observed facts’ in ‘the results of linguistic change as they show themselves in etymologies’, i.e., in ‘the history’ of ‘speech-forms’ (BL 347, 15). Yet if ‘every word has its own history’ (BL 328, 335, i.r.),²⁸ language change would be a diffuse amalgamation of minute trends, and observation could scarcely claim generality anyway.

4.78 In the section on ‘semantic change’, ‘the student’ is counselled to ‘observe very closely the meanings of the form in all older occurrences’ and to find ‘the context in which the new meaning first appears’ (BL 440). Evidence includes ‘contexts and phrasal combinations’, ‘comparisons of related languages’, and ‘the structural analysis of forms’ (BL 425). Though he seems uneasy about the attempts of ‘earlier students’ to describe ‘classes’ of ‘logical relations that connect successive meanings’ -- ‘narrowing’, ‘widening’, ‘metaphor, ‘metonymy’, and so on (BL 426f) -- Bloomfield offers no scheme of his own. Nor does he explain how genuine semantic change differs from the ‘semantic innovation’ he attributes to ‘every utterance of a speech-form’ by ‘a good speaker’ (4.16). He predictably suggests that ‘a change in meaning’ ‘is merely the result of change in use’ (BL 426) (cf. 8.47; 12.42, 66). An ‘expansion of a form into new meanings’ entails a ‘special’ ‘rise in frequency’; but for ‘fluctuations in the frequency of forms to be accurately observed’, we would need ‘a record of every utterance that was made in a speech-community’ in a given ‘period of time’ (BL 435, 394) (cf. 4.14, 16f). And ritual warnings are sounded again: any ‘fluctuation depending on meaning’ ‘escapes a purely linguistic investigation’; in ‘the spread of linguistic features’, ‘the factor’ of ‘meaning (including connotation)’ ‘cuts off our hope’ for ‘a scientifically usable analysis’ (BL 399, 345).

4.79 Again like Saussure, Bloomfield prefers to focus on ‘phonetic change’ and declares it ‘independent of non-phonetic factors, such as the meaning’ (BL 353f; cf. 2.74). ‘The beginning of our science was made by a procedure which implied the regularity of phonetic change’ and thereby ‘enabled linguists to find order in the factual data’ (BL 355, 364) (cf. 8.67; 13.27). Saussurian too is the reluctance to see such change following ‘laws’ (BL 348, 354) (2.14f, 38). At most, the change of ‘phonemes’ was fairly ‘regular’, although the ‘actual data’ may be extremely ‘irregular’ and may include ‘deviant’ or ‘residual’ (or ‘relic’) ‘forms’ (BL 351, 352f, 360ff, 331). ‘Phonetic change’ could be ‘observed only by means of an enormous mass of mechanical records’ ‘through several generations’ (BL 365; cf. BL 38). Moreover, ‘changing’ ‘phonemes’ would have to be carefully filtered out from ‘the non-distinctive acoustic features of a language’, which ‘are at all times highly variable’ (BL 365).

4.80 ‘Since a sound-change is a historical happening’, ‘its cause cannot be found in universal considerations or by observing speakers at other times and places’ or ‘in a laboratory’; ‘we have no guarantee of its happening again’ (BL 388f, 368). Like Saussure and Sapir once more, Bloomfield is sceptical about seeing the ‘cause’ of ‘sound-change’ in ‘“race”, climate, topographic conditions, diet, occupation, and general mode of life’ (BL 386; cf. 2.76; 3²). He is also unconvinced by appeals to ‘rapidity of speech’, ‘culture and general intelligence’, or ‘imperfections in children's learning’, and above all by elitist contentions that ‘changes are due to ignorance and carelessness’ and ‘corruptions of the vulgar’ (BL 490, 8; cf. BL 469, 476) (cf. 2.46, 49). ‘Psychological explanations’ are also ruled out, on the grounds that they ‘merely paraphrase the outcome of the change’ (BL 435) (cf. 3.62; 13.14). The effects of a ‘substratum’ language formerly spoken in an occupied territory, are discounted too, as well as the notion that ‘forms of weak meaning’ are ‘slurred in pronunciation’ and ‘lost’ (BL 386ff, 469) (cf. 3.63).

4.81 Bloomfield believes ‘the general processes of change are the same in all languages’, but ‘no permanent factor’ ‘can account for specific changes’ (BL 20, 386). Instead, he attributes ‘the change of language’ partly to ‘linguistically definable characteristics’, such as ‘shortness’ of words, avoidance of ‘homonymy’, ‘patterning of recurrent phonemes’, ‘simplification of sound clusters’, ‘dissimilation’ of sounds, or preservation of ‘semantically important features’; and partly to ‘historical change in human affairs’ or ‘shifts in the practical world’, including the mechanism of receiving a ‘strong stimulus’ or making ‘a good response’ to a ‘situation’ (BL 509, 395f, 372, 390, 363, 435, 389, 399, 426, 396, 440, 401). Some ‘new forms’ may be ‘individual creations’ of ‘one speaker’ that were congenial to the ‘general formal patterns’ and ‘habits of the community’; but usually ‘it is useless to ask what person’ made the start (BL 421, 424, 443, 480) (cf. 2.45; 3.57, 64; 4⁶).

4.82 Though we may ‘ignore the lack of uniformity’ ‘when we describe a language’ ‘by confining ourselves to some arbitrarily chosen type of speech’, ‘we cannot do this’ when ‘studying linguistic change’, ‘because all changes are sure to appear at first in the shape of variant features’ (BL 311f; cf. BL 365, 480). We need to probe the ‘social conditions’ for ‘the spread of features’ in space as well as in time (BL 345) (cf. 2.43; 3.65). ‘The most important kind of social group’ is the ‘speech-community’, because ‘society’, i.e. ‘the close adjustment among individuals’, ‘is based on language’ (BL 42) (cf. 3.1; 4.10, 74f; 7.12; 8.13). ‘Every person belongs to more than one minor speech-group’ and acts as ‘a mediator between groups’, ‘as an imitator and a model’, responding to ‘the density of communication and the relative prestige of different social groups’ (BL 476f, 345) (cf. 8.77). ‘Rival forms’ ‘differ in connotation’, according to the ‘circumstances’ where ‘a speaker’ ‘has heard them’ (BL 394) (cf. 4.25).

4.83 ‘Dialect’ is a complex notion in this regard, since ‘there is no absolute distinction between dialect and language boundaries, or between dialect borrowing’ and ‘cultural borrowing’ (BL 444f, i.r.) (cf. 3.66; 4.74). ‘Dialects’ are ‘for the most part mutually intelligible’, whereas languages are not; yet ‘there are all kinds of gradations between understanding and failing to understand’ (BL 57, 44, 52f). Also, ‘dialect geography’ reveals ‘no sharp lines of linguistic demarcation’ between ‘dialect areas’, but only more ‘gradations’ (BL 51, i.r.). ‘In sum’, we see that ‘the term “speech-community” has only a relative value’ (BL 54). Still, ‘dialect study’ is useful in making ‘atlases’ and ‘maps of distribution’ for ‘lexical or grammatical differences’ (BL 323f).²⁹ This work refuted earlier doctrines that ‘the literary and upper-class standard language was older and more true to reason than the local speech-forms, which were due to the ignorance and carelessness of the common people’ (BL 321) (cf. 2.24; 3.69; 4.40). ‘The standard language’ may ‘arise’ ‘from local dialects’, or these may ‘preserve’ some ‘ancient feature’ lost in ‘the standard’.

4.84 Of course, we can still try to ‘distinguish between the upper or dominant language’ of the ‘more privileged group, and the lower language’ of ‘the subject people’ (BL 461). ‘In all cases, it is the lower language which borrows from the upper’; each ‘speech-group’ ‘imitates’ people of ‘highest “social” standing’ (BL 464, 476).³⁰ Bloomfield's ‘upper’ side includes ‘conquerors’, ‘masters’, ‘officials’, ‘merchants’, ‘lecturers’, and ‘educated persons’; his ‘lower’ side includes ‘working men’, ‘rustics’, ‘proletarians’, ‘peasants’, ‘poorest people’, ‘street-sweepers’, ‘tramps’, ‘law-breakers’, ‘criminals’, ‘Gipsies’, ‘Negro slaves’,³¹ and -- ‘in the United States’ -- ‘humble immigrants’ (BL 461, 474, 330, 47, 441, 50).

4.85 Bloomfield's concern for social differences in language is most urgently reflected in his insistent connection between language and educational policy: ‘society deals with linguistic matters through the school system’ (BL 499) (cf. 4.5f; 8.7; 9.17; 13.60, 64). ‘A few generations ago’, ‘practical matters’ seemed simple enough for the child to ‘learn without the help of the school, which needed to train him only in the three R's’ (reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic). ‘Schools have clung to this pattern’ and ‘concentrated on verbal discipline’. ‘The chief aim’ ‘is literacy’, but the ‘ignorance’ and ‘confusion’ of ‘educators’ lead to ‘primers and first reading books’ that ‘present the graphic forms in a mere hodgepodge, with no rational progression’ (BL 500) (cf. 9.16). Compared to the ‘European’ system, ‘our eight years of grammar-school represents a waste of something like four years of every child's time’ (BL 504). ‘To get a general education’, the ‘American’ ‘must still go through a four years’ college course. In all respects except formal education, he is too mature’ for ‘general and elementary studies’ and ‘turns instead to the snobberies and imbecilities which make a by-word of the American college’. ‘Selection’ is made not ‘by the pupil's aptitude’, but ‘by his parents’ economic means, combined with chance or whim’.

4.86 The ‘delay’ of ‘professional study’ ‘works most adversely upon the effectiveness of foreign-language study’ (BL 504). ‘The work’ in ‘high schools and colleges’ is ‘an appalling waste of effort: not one pupil in a hundred learns to speak and understand, or even to read, a foreign language’ (BL 503). Bloomfield blames the prevalence of ‘analysis’ and ‘puzzle-solving translation’, and ‘incompetent teachers who talk about the foreign language instead of using it’ (BL 505). He recommends ‘constant repetition’ as the only way to ‘master’ the ‘thousands of morphemes and tagmemes of the foreign language’ -- an idea that later became the backbone of the audio-lingual method, due in part to Bloomfield's (1942) own design of instructional methods for strategic languages during World War II. Since ‘the meaning of foreign forms is hard to convey’, instruction should focus on ‘practical objects and situations -- say, of the classroom or of pictures’. ‘The content’ should have ‘practical bearing’ by ‘showing the life and history of the foreign nation’ (BL 506). ‘Grammatical doctrine should be accepted only where it passes a test of usefulness’ and has been ‘re-shaped to suit the actual need’. ‘The memorizing of paradigms’ ‘bears so little relation to actual speech as to be nearly worthless’ (cf. 9¹¹).

4.87 Bloomfield assails the schools even more fiercely for their ‘authoritarian’ ‘attitude’ about ‘speech’, whereby ‘the non-standard speaker’ is ‘injured’ ‘in childhood’ by ‘the unequal distribution of privilege’ (BL 499f; cf. 4.5). Grammarians pretend that ‘one way of speaking’ ‘is inherently right, the other inherently wrong’ (BL 3) (2.5f, 32; 3.4; 4.40; 8.26). Labelling ‘undesirable variants as “incorrect” or “bad English” or even “not English”‘ makes ‘the speaker grow diffident’ and ‘ready to suspect almost any speech-form of “incorrectness”‘ (BL 496, 48). ‘It would not have been possible for “grammarians” to bluff a large part of our speech-community’ ‘if the public had not been ready for the deception’: worrying about whose ‘type of language has a higher prestige’ makes people ‘easy prey to the authoritarian’ (BL 497). They struggle to ‘revise’ their ‘speech’ to fit ‘the model of printed books’ or the ‘minor variations’ and ‘snobbery’ of ‘modish cliques’ or of a ‘small minority of over-literate persons’ (BL 497, 502). The result is ‘unnatural speech’, a mix of ‘non-current forms’ and ‘outlandish hyperforms’ (BL 497f). ‘The non-standard speaker’ should ‘rather take pride in simplicity of speech and view it as an advantage’; and should ‘substitute’ ‘without embarrassment’ ‘standard forms’ for his own (BL 499).

4.88 And so Bloomfield's classic book concludes with an appeal for a linguistics able to ameliorate social and educational policy though enlightenment about language. Although ‘lexical and grammatical analysis’ are not powerful enough to ‘reveal the truth or falsity of a doctrine’, ‘linguistics can’ ‘make us critical of verbal response habits’ and ‘injurious practices’ ‘rationalized’ by ‘appeal to a higher sanction’ (BL 507f, i.r.) (cf. 8⁷). Ultimately, the ‘investigation’ of ‘the languages of the world’ may provide the basis for a ‘sound knowledge of communal forms of human behaviour’. ‘It is only a prospect, but not hopelessly remote, that the study of language may help us toward the understanding and control of human events’ (BL 509).

NOTES ON BLOOMFIELD

¹ The key for Bloomfield citations is BL: Language (Bloomfield 1933). An earlier (1914) edition was much smaller and ‘based’ ‘on the psychological system of Wilhelm Wundt’, which Bloomfield now abjures in favour of ‘mechanism’ (4.8). As of the 1984 reprint, the reverent editors have still not ventured to make corrections in the 1933 version (see Hockett's ‘foreword’, BL xiiif).

² The whole ‘logic and dialectic of ancient and medieval times’ is designated ‘a mistaken effort’ (BL 507), though Bloomfield borrows from it, for instance, for defining the ‘predication’ (4.69; cf. 13.17f). Hockett's belief that Bloomfield had integrated the ‘philosophical-descriptive tradition’ (4.1) apparently refers to the latter's reliance on commonsense examples and his own intuitive judgments about them. Compare 4.19, 38, 51, 72; 7.9ff; 13.1.

³ ‘Thanks to ‘the grammar of Panini’, ‘no other language, to this day, has been so perfectly described’ as ‘Sanskrit’ (BL 11) (cf. 7.3; 8.5). Perhaps to accentuate his turn against school grammar, Bloomfield expropriates from the terminology of ‘the ancient Hindu grammarians’: ‘sandhi’, ‘samprasarana’, ‘karmadharaya’, ‘davanda’, ‘tatpurshana’, ‘amredita’, ‘bahuvrihi’, ‘dvigu’, and ‘avyayibhava’, accrediting them as ‘technical terms of linguistics’ (BL 186, 384, 235, 237). He also commends ‘the Hindus’ for ‘the apparently artificial but eminently serviceable device’ of the ‘zero element’, which he equates with ‘nothing at all’ (BL 209); but surely the difference between zero and nothing is precisely the point -- that we can ‘view’ ‘absence as a positive characteristic’ (BL 264f) (cf. 2²⁶; 5¹²; 6¹⁶; 13.28)?

⁴ The passages are found on BL xv, 3, 12, 16, 21, 32, 38, 45, 77, 140, 145, 161f, 167, 347, 355, and 508f. The usual obstacle to ‘science’ is ‘meaning’ (BL 93, 139, 161f, 167f, 174, 266), whose elucidation is consigned to some ‘other science’ (BL 77, 140, 145, 508). Compare 4.15.

⁵ Fellow-men indeed. As if the story weren't sexist enough, Bloomfield remarks: ‘the lone Jill is in much the same position as the speechless animal’; if she ‘gets the food’, she ‘has far better chances of surviving and populating the earth’ (BL 24). The traditional ‘pail of water’ was apparently dropped because it was a mentally conceived goal for ‘going up the hill’, rather than a chance reaction to the countryside.

⁶ Yet, we are told, ‘any speaker is free to invent nonsense-forms’ with ‘vague’ or ‘no denotation at all’; ‘in fact, any form he invents is a nonsense-form, unless he succeeds in the almost hopeless task of getting fellow-speakers to accept it as a signal for some meaning’ (BL 157) (cf. 2.45; 3.57; 4.81). But advertisers succeed rather often.

⁷ This referral to ‘good’ (or ‘gifted’, 4.7) speakers is a bit awkward, since Bloomfield champions ‘simplicity of speech’ and suspects that the drive to use ‘apt and agreeable forms’ may foster ‘stilted’, ‘unnatural speech’ (BL 498f).

⁸ ‘The structure of the language recognizes the transferred meaning’ if the latter is ‘linguistically determined by an accompanying form’ (BL 150). This condition fits Bloomfield's stipulation that ‘language can convey only such meanings as are attached to some formal feature’ (BL 168) (cf. 13.54). But metaphor is a strong counter-example (cf. 5.66f; 9.97ff; 11.86; 12.11, 31, 33, 83).

⁹ This definition covers ‘any English sentence, phrase’, ‘word’, ‘meaningful syllable’, or ‘phoneme’, though the ‘phoneme’ is later called a ‘meaningless unit’ (BL 138, 264, 354) (cf. 6.43).

¹⁰ The ‘laryngoscope’ is ‘a mirror device’ for ‘seeing another person's (or his own) vocal chords’; the ‘kymograph’ ‘transforms the movement’ of the ‘vocal organs’ into an ink line on a ‘strip of paper’ (BL 75). Such devices often ‘interfere with normal speech and can serve only for very limited phases of observation’. Compare 8³³.

¹¹ These two diverge in that ‘phonology pays no heed to the acoustic nature of the phonemes’ (BL 137). Compare Saussure's assessment (2.70).

¹² But surely gestures differ from language in the nature of, and constraints upon, their arbitrariness, as in ‘pointing back over one's shoulder to indicate past time’ (BL 39).

¹³ Current research is divided about whether readers recode words into a phonological representation (cf. 4¹⁵ and 10³⁵; 13.34).

¹⁴ Bloomfield says: ‘people who have not learned to read and write have some difficulty’ when ‘called upon to make word-divisions’ (BL 178). But Sapir's ‘experiences’ with ‘native speakers’ he was teaching to write found them ‘determining the words’ ‘with complete and spontaneous accuracy’ (SL 34n) (cf. 3.31).

¹⁵ ‘Real writing’ is said to require ‘the association of the characters with linguistic forms’ (BL 284). Bloomfield of course rebukes ‘the metaphysical doctrine’ that ‘connects the graphic symbols directly with “thoughts” or “ideas”‘ (BL 500) (cf. 4.9). That rebuke might be aimed at Sapir, who said: ‘the written forms are secondary symbols of the spoken ones’, ‘yet so close is the correspondence that they may’, ‘in certain types of thinking, be entirely substituted for the spoken ones’ (SL 20).

¹⁶ Hjelmslev doesn't give even one example of ‘glossemes’, the ‘minimal forms’ and ‘irreducible invariants’ of ‘glossematics’ and ‘the highest-degree invariants within a semiotic’ (PT 99f, 80; RTL 100) (6.42). To demonstrate that ‘the glossemes of different languages differ in practical value’, Bloomfield contrasts not ‘smallest units’, but whole words (BL 278f). He also oddly imagines ‘pupils’ ‘learning the arbitrary glossemes of a foreign language’ (BL 503).

¹⁷ However, the tendency of American linguists to treat ‘semantic’ as the converse of ‘formal’ is foreshadowed by Bloomfield (BL 395, 399) (cf. 13.54).

¹⁸ ‘Strong stimulus’ is also given as the ‘episememe’ of ‘the tagmeme of exclamatory final-pitch’ (BL 166) -- a picturesque admixture of behaviourism with grammar.

¹⁹ Compare the sketch of ‘innovation’ (BL 408) (4.16). Earlier, however, Bloomfield's account of language acquisition suggested that ‘every speaker's language’ is ‘a composite of what he has heard other people say’ (BL 46; 4.12). And distaste is expressed for adopting written forms ‘one has not heard’ (BL 498).

²⁰ Bloomfield compares this act to ‘the solving of a proportional equation with an indefinitely large set of ratios on the left-hand side’ (BL 276). He likes using ‘formulas’ to ‘embody’ our ‘observations’ (cf. 2.85; 3.2, 49, 59, 73; 5.40, 51f, 62; 7.48), because with them, ‘our inability to define meanings need give us no pause’ (BL 302f, 408). He waves aside the ‘objections’ of ‘psychologists’ to a ‘formula’ -- ‘that the speaker is not capable of the reasoning’ -- on the grounds that ‘the normal speaker’ is also ‘incapable of describing his speech-habits’ in any other way (BL 406) (cf. 4.19, 54; 13.49).

²¹ ‘Debate as to the usefulness of the division’ is deflected with the argument that ‘the meanings’ ‘are definable in terms of syntax’ rather than of ‘practical life’ (BL 184). The hope that ‘semantic difference’ might be ‘defined in terms of syntactic construction’ would also pervade American linguistic research (cf. 7.59, 95).

²² Another standard tactic is introduced here: showing ‘the significance of order’ with an ungrammatical example (‘“*Bill John hit”’), pressing into service the ‘asterisk’ normally reserved for ‘speech forms’ of the ‘past’ ‘known to us only by inference’ (BL 163, 299). English is contrasted against Latin, where ‘the words appear in all possible orders’ ‘with differences only of emphasis and liveliness’ (BL 197) (cf. 3.53). Understandably, its more rigid word order made English the foredestined model language for the later trend toward formal syntactic theories (cf. 7.5, 18, 41, 61, 66, 79 81, 7³⁹; 9.25; 13.7).

²³ This account is vague; most utterances ‘stimulate’ the hearer to produce ‘speech forms’. Equally obtuse is the idea that a ‘negative’ like ‘“nobody”‘ ‘excludes the possibility of a speech-form’ (BL 248f). More helpful is the statement that an ‘interrogative’ ‘prompts the hearer to supply’ ‘the identification of the individual’ (BL 260).

²⁴ Even the ‘dialogue “Is? -- No; was”‘ is judged to consist of ‘sentences’, because ‘forms’ are ‘spoken alone’ (BL 179). Further on, however, a phrase starting with a ‘relative substitute’ like ‘“which”‘ or ‘“that”‘ is judged to be ‘marked’ ‘as not constituting a full sentence’ (BL 263).

²⁵ Here, Bloomfield proposes for once to ‘leave the ground of linguistics and to examine the problems’ in ‘sociology and psychology’, in order to ‘return’ ‘bolder’ (BL 248, 250). His discussion is more commonsensical than technical, however.

²⁶ The work of Whitney (1867, 1874) and Paul (1880) is cited, but the latter's book is scolded for such ‘faults’ as ‘the neglect of descriptive language study’ and the ‘insistence upon “psychological” interpretation’ (cf. Note 1) -- plus being ‘not so well written’ and having a ‘very dry style’ (BL 16f) (look who's talking).

²⁷ Though ‘fluctuation in the frequency of a speech-form’ ‘can be observed’, its ‘disappearance cannot’, because ‘we can have no assurance that it will not be used again’ (BL 393). ‘The doctrine of our grammarians’ is of course judged ineffective in ‘banishing or establishing specific speech-forms’ (BL 498) (cf. 2.44; 8.26).

²⁸ Yet Bloomfield decries the search for ‘the motives of change in the individual word’ (BL 420). He emphasizes diversity in space as well as time when he ‘demands a statement of the topographic extent of each feature’ of a ‘dialect’, charted on ‘as many maps as possible’ (BL 323f) (cf. 2.43; 3.65; 4.82).

²⁹ However, Bloomfield is displeased that samples were often ‘written down’ by ‘schoolmasters and other linguistically untrained persons’ (BL 324; cf. 4.5, 84ff).

³⁰ To this overstatement add the ones maintaining that ‘different economic classes’ ‘differ in speech’, which is hardly true of the U.S. today; and that ‘a form used by a less privileged class’ ‘often strikes us as coarse, ugly, and vulgar’ (BL 49, 152). Bloomfield knows after all that ‘slang’ is favoured not merely by ‘vagrants’, and ‘criminals’, but by ‘young persons’ and by ‘most other speakers in their relaxed, unpretentious moods’ (BL 154; cf. BL 49, 147, 394). And the speech of ‘native servants’ and ‘slaves’ did ‘influence the language of the masters’ in ‘South Africa’ (BL 474).

³¹ Bloomfield disparages ‘creolized language’ as ‘an inferior dialect of the masters’ speech’, and a ‘desperate attempt’ greeted by ‘the English speaker's contemptuous imitation’ (BL 473f).