Bloomfield thought that semantics, or the study of meaning, was the weak point in the scientific investigation of language and would necessarily remain so until the other sciences whose task it was to describe the universe and humanity’s place in it had advanced beyond their present state. In his textbook Language (1933), he had himself adopted a behaviouristic theory of meaning, defining the meaning of a linguistic form as “the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer.” Furthermore, he subscribed, in principle at least, to a physicalist thesis, according to ...(100 of 29428 words)