Bloomfield’s Concept of Meaning

Bloomfield’s book Language has long been recognized for laying down the foundation of formal descriptive linguistic analysis. However, he was criticized too often for his dismissal of serious study of meaning in linguistics. The fact is that in his 1933 book Language, a separate chapter is devoted to the discussion of meaning and some of the most important formal units of linguistic analysis introduced by Bloomfield like phoneme and morpheme could not have been properly defined without involving meaning. He forcefully challenged the contemporary popular mentalism in linguistic study, as has often been bypassed. His contention that linguistic study must start from form not meaning should not be taken at face value as neglect of meaning but in the historical context as an opposition to mentalistic subjective interpretation of meaning.