The journey of language acquisition is difficult and remarkable at the same time.

If you observe a
child, you will notice that language acquisition goes through a number of stages that begins from
crying and finishes with adult competence of language. One of the well known theories that tried to
give a description of how language is acquired is Behaviorism.

Behaviorism was known as a theory of psychology but later it developed and covered many things
such as linguistics. At first, behaviorism dominated the world to the degree that no one
can point figure at it. Before start talking about behaviorism, a number of principles
are needed to shed light on. First, behaviorism is against anything has to do mental
issues and internal factors. Second, behaviorism points out that there is no difference
between human behavior and animal behavior. Third, behaviorism supports
empiricism. Fourth, behaviorism is connected with determinism. These four
principles are highlighted by behaviorism. However, some of these principles will turn out to
be points of criticism at the end of behaviorism dominance.

Leonard Bloomfield, a well known linguist and a behaviorist, was the one who connects linguistics
and behaviorism. Bloomfield suggested that language behavior is based on stimulus response. The
following figure illustrates Bloomfield point of view towards language roughly:

The small letters, which are "s" and "r", represent the verbal on the one hand. On the other hand, the
capital letters "S" and "R" represent the external stimulus response. As a result, Bloomfield
suggests that language is a situational verbal behavior. This means there is a context that emphasizes
the verbal behavior.

Leonard Bloomfield is an American linguist who led the development of school of linguistics that is
called Structuralism. It is also called descriptive linguistics because it is concerned with giving
detailed description of a certain language. Therefore, Structuralism concentrates on surface
structure. Structuralism believes in the application of the scientific principle of observation of human
languages. This school investigates only the observed responses of the human languages. According
to structuralism, the job of a linguist is to identify the structural features of the human language the
linguist is investigating. Another belief of structuralism is that language is divided into small parts.
These parts can be described scientifically. Focusing only on observable responses, some term like
consciousness, thinking, concept formation, intuition and so on are excluded from the framework
of behaviorism.

Behaviorism views language as part of the human behavior. In addition, behaviorism theorists
believe that language is acquired through external forces because children, according to behaviorism,
are born with blank sheeted brain. As mentioned above, Behaviorism views language as a part of
humans' habit formation. The process of habit formation starts with stimulus from the external
environment. Human beings will respond to the stimulus and then this association between stimulus
and response would be either reinforced or not. If the association is reinforced, the human being will
give the same response repeatedly. By repeating the same response, the response will be a habit. The
following figure will illustrate the previous process:

This is called conditional learning that was established by Skinner. Skinner believed that language is
acquired by stimulus response association and then reinforcement. For example, if a child feels
hungry (stimulus), the child will say, "want milk" (response) and then his or her parent will give him
or her some milk. As a result, the child will store the utterance "want milk" in his or her memory
because it fulfills the child's need and finally, the utterance becomes a part of the child's habit
formation. This brings the idea of rewarding and punishing. Thus, the response, which is rewarded,
will be repeated but the response, which is punished or ignored, will disappear at end.
At the beginning, it was mentioned that there are principles highlighted by behaviorism. The first
one was the excluding mental and internal issues. This is not adequate in explaining the process of
language. Behaviorism views language as stimulus response. As human beings, we can say million
of word without observable stimulus and this is against behaviorism. The second one was resembling
human behavior to animal behavior. This is total incorrect because human beings have different and
various responses toward one stimulus unlike animals. Chomsky in his intensive review of
behaviorism gave a good example to show that point of weakness. He said if we have a picture and a
number of people are looking at it, it is not necessary to have the same response. On the contrary,
some people will like it some will hate it and some will ignore it and so on.

Behaviorism can be criticized because they lacks adequacy of how language is acquired by human
beings. First, they lack adequate description of how language is processed in the brain excluding
notion of meaning in that sense. They also exclude mental issues like consciousness, intuition,
concept formation, and so on. These issues are impossible to investigate because Behaviorism
framework can only examine observable response. Another area of criticism is that by following
Skinner' model, human beings would be considered as parrots just repeat what they hear and
maintain sentences through reinforcement. This process can easily be refuted because one of the
human language properties is productivity. Productivity means that languages have infinite number
of utterances and sentences. This process also excludes creative language. For example, in the area of
poetry, every day we listen to hundreds poems which were produced without following the process of
stimulus response and reinforcement.

Finally, it is clear that behaviorism was successful in explaining some aspects of the language but it
turned out to have number of pitfalls. In addition, behaviorism is not applicable to all nations. It is
obvious that it not applicable to poetic nations like our nation Arab nations where creativity and
productivity is required. As a result, behaviorism does not account for semantics which is an
important component of the language.

References:

1- Yule, G (1996) The Study of Language. Cambridge University Press.

2- Richards, J Rodgers, T (2001) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge

University Press

3- Douglas Brown, H (2000) Principles of Language Learning. Pearson Education Company.

By Mohammed Al-Herz

Supervised by Dr Alaeddin Hussain

King Faisal University

Manchester University
Leonard Bloomfield main contributions to linguistics
Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) was an American linguistic and philologist, one of the most
important representatives of American structuralism. Bloomfield rejects the application of
all that was not directly observable for linguistic analysis; in the study of language he
marginalizes the semantic aspect. Leonard Bloomfield left his mark on the fields of
morphology and syntax. He was teacher and founder of antimentalism (a theory contrary to
the Sapirs mentalism which is an interpretation of language inextricably linked to acts of
the mind), leads to its ultimate limits the dissociation of signifiers and meanings, to exclude
these of his consideration. He claims that the linguist can only make assertions about the
system of signifiers, because the facts of meaning, mental and conceptual in nature, are not
his concern. His linguistic is concern only in analyzing formal features of language. The
significance is only taken into account as a control, to be sure that the conclusions are not
irrationals. Bloomfield was a colleague of Sapir at Yale University, after having worked in
Ohio and Chicago, both of which were located in opposite theoretical positions, as
Bloomfield rejected the possibility that linguistics analyze meaning, while for Sapir
semantics is an essential part of the studies about the language and languages. Bloomfields
main works is admittedly Language (1933), setting out his version of structuralism
linguistics. Bloomfield says that his work draws on the three main traditions in the study of
language: the comparativehistorical, philosophical and empirical, descriptive and
prescriptive. Despite this triple, Bloomfield boosted mainly descriptive field studies. That
descriptivism is limited by the fact that as he admitted, speaking communities are often not
homogeneous, an observation that history has placed as required of all socio and
ethnolinguistic studies today. One of the major concerns of Bloomfield is to give linguistics a
similar character to that of the natural sciences, which explicitly considers an
epistemological model. To do this, Bloomfield proposes to eliminate all mentalist or
psychological studies of language, focusing on materials and mechanical aspects, that is,
language is conceived by Bloomfield as a visible human behavior. Behaviors are described in
terms of response and pair of stimulus on typical situations and thats way Bloomfield is
considered a representative of behaviorism, which has had expressions in various social
sciences and humanities. Behaviorism requires Bloomfields to reformulate the place of
semantic within linguistics, since this conception of language does not have place for any
kind of concept or mental image (the definition of significance of Saussure): all that can be
seen is a set of stimuli and reactions that occur in certain situations. Bloomfield accepts the
Saussure premise that language study involves studying the correlation between sound and
meaning, but technically, the meaning is too difficult to see, so you should be outside the
scope of linguistics. For Bloomfield, then, the language begins with the phonetics and
Phonology. Bloomfield argues that are two components that should focus the study of the
correlation between sound and meaning: the lexicon and grammar. While the lexicon is the
total inventory of morphemes of a language, grammar is the combination of morphemes in
any complex form. That is, the meaning of a statement follows from the sum of the
meaning of lexical items plus something else that is the meaning provided by the
grammar. Grammar includes both syntax (e.g. the construction of phrases) and morphology
(e.g. the construction of words). Each individual language morpheme is an irregularity as
far that represents an arbitrary relationship between form and meaning that must be
memorized. Thus the lexicon is defined as a list of basic irregularities, a notion that has
been recovered in various theories. Bloomfields interest was to make linguistics a true
 science of language. This defined the task of the linguist as one that would address to study
the emissions corpus, discovering regularities and

Bloomfield and Behaviorism

MEANING AND LANGUAGE USE
1. Bloomfield and Behaviorism
The main function of language is as the instrument of communication. Because of that
function, many people look to the process of communication for an explanation of meaning in
natural languages.
In recent time (1940), two linguists suggested the specification of meaning in the certain
situation in which the sentences are uttered. In England, that kind of suggestion is made by Firth,
while in America it was made by Bloomfield. But Bloomfields account is more considered
because it is more detailed and articulated theoretical framework.
In evaluating Bloomfields, it is important to create the attitude of scientific theory then
prevalent (non-scientific) in our mind. In addition, it is also believed that as a scientist, the most
important job is to collect some facts without having any theory before and to expect that the
facts collected and sifted carefully would in course of time lead to the correct theory. In science,
the most focus thing is objectivity because the emphasis is on collecting the data. So, there is no
subjective thing, such as opinion, intuition or others, can influence it. The consequences for
abstract theoretical constructs are only tolerated as scientific, if they could be defined in terms of
observable events.
Here, Bloomfield suggested to analyze the meaning of linguistic into two terms :
1.1 The important elements of the situation in which the speaker utters it
Bloomfield analyze the situation into three constituent parts:
a. Speakers stimulus
b. Utterence (speakers respopnse and hearers stimulus)
c. Hearers response
The practical event A consists no ideas but of the actual concrete elements of the situation.
Jill, who seeing an apple felt hungry (=A), stimulated her to respond with an utterence (=B),
which in turn acted as a stimulus to the hearer, Jack, whose response is (=C).
The explanation; an apple is an object that seen by Jill as a speaker, then she responds her
stimulation by utterance that would be I am hungry, the hearer will responds it by taking an
 apple for Jill because what the hearer understood is that Jill wants that apple. What the speaker
wants may be said as I am hungry, please get me that apple. This meaning is implicit.
1.2 The distinctive meaning
Bloomfield suggested characterizing the word meaning in terms of the distinctive features of
the situation, the meaning of the word being features common to all situations in which the word
is uttered. For a given word can be uttered without the object question being present.
Examples;Bring me shirt could be uttered with no shirt in speech situation: contemporary the
speaker might have only a pair of pants on and the stimulus which cause him to utter is not the
sight of the shirt, but the cold which causes his skin too goose-pimple.
2. Speech acts semantics
Locutionary act, Illocutionary act, and Perlocutionary act
Not at all theories of meaning in terns of the process of communication are subject to this
form of critism. In particular, speech acts semantics is not open to such as a charege of
reductionism, since it purports to characterise the nature of language not in terms of the
observable elements of the situation but in terms of an abstract concept of speech act.
Austin suggested in uttering a sentence a speaker is generally involved in three different acts.
Three-fold distinction that can then be referred to in the following way :
a. A speaker utters sentences with a particular meaning (locutionary)
b. A particular force (illocutionary)
c. To achieve a certain effect on the hearer (perlocutionary)
Locutionary act is the act of uttering a sentence with a certain meaning. In addition a speaker
may have intended his utterance to constitute an act of praise, criticism, agreement, etc. It is
called as a particular force (Illocutionary act). Finally he may have uttered the sentence he did
utter to achieve a certain consequent response from his hearer-for example to frighten or to get
him to do something (perlocutionary act).
Suppose for example my child is refusing to lie down and go to sleep and I say to him I
will turn your light off. Now the locutionary act is the utterance of the sentenceI will turn your
light off. But I may be intending the utterance to be interpreted as a threat, and this is
myillocutionary act. Quite separate from either of these is the consequent behavior by my child
that I intend to follow from my utterance, namely that he frightened into silence and sleep.
Theperlocutionary act is the consequent effect on the hearer which the speaker intends should
follow from his utterance.
Speaker-presupposition and Assertion
 Part and parcel of this recent speech act approach to meaning by linguistics is the use of
the term speaker-presupposition. This term is said to contrast with assertion, and meaning of a
sentence is said to be divided between the part that the speaker asserts and the part that he
presupposes, or assumes, to be true.
Thus we might for example say that an imperative form is appropriate if (a) the hearer is
believed to be able to carry out the action that is proposed, (b) it is no obvious that he would do
so in the normal course of events, and (c) the speaker wants the hearer to carry out this action.
This distinction has been used for example to explain the difference between sentence pairs such
as
1. Bill is addicted to morphine
2. It is morphine that Bill is addicted to
3. Bill is addicted to morphine
4. What bill is addicted to is morphine
5. My sister is at the party and my brothers in bed with flu
6. My sister is at the party but my brothers in bed with flu
In the first two pairs of cases, it is said that in second sentence the speaker is
presupposing that Bill is addicted to something and asserting that something is morphine; in the
final pair the speaker said by using but, the specific contrast in this case being carried by the
presuppose that there is some element of contrast between two sentences joined by but, the
specific contrast in this case being carried by the presupposition that my brother is not at the
party (this standing in the requisite contrast to my sister is at the party).