Bloomfield and Semantics

SUMMARYBloomfield's position with regard to meaning and its importance in human use of language has been persistently misinterpreted. From a Wundtian, mentalistic psychology in his 1914 Introduction, he passed to a Weissian, non-mentalistic approach, as a result of which he considered it impossible to capture the totality of meaning because of its inaccessibility to scientific investigation by currently available techniques. Far from excluding considerations of meaning from our study of language, he regarded them as nevertheless essential. The author finds both Bloomfield's and his critics' views of the nature of meaning unsatisfactory, because they regard meaning as existent somewhere outside of the individual speaker. In this respect, Bloomfield's point of view in his 1914 book was closer to reality than that which he expressed in his 1933 Language.RÉSUMÉLa position de Bloomfield a l'egard de la signification et de son importance dans l'emploi humain du langage a souvent ete méconnue. Apres avoir adhere a la psychologie "mentaliste" de Wundt dans son Introduction (194), il adopta l'approche "non-mentaliste" de Weiss dans ses travaux pos-terieurs. Par consequent, il nia la possibilite de saisir la signification totale d'un phenomene linguistique quelconque, a cause de son inaccessibilite a l'investigation scientifique par les moyens normalement disponibles. Loin d'exclure les aspects semantiques de l'etude du langage, Bloomfield les considerait comme neanmoins essentiels. L'auteur trouve que les vues de Bloomfield et aussi ceux de ses adversaires sur la nature de la signification sont peu satisfaisantes, parce que Ton considere le sens d'un phenomene linguistique comme ayant une existence quelque part hors de I'individu parlant. A cet egard, les vues de Bloomfield dans son Introduction (1914) etaient plus proches de la realite que celles qu'il exprima dans son livre Language (1933).