Unni Cathrine Eiken February 2005

section. The theory dates back to the empiricists of the mid-twentieth century. Linguistic theory
in the first half of the twentieth century was to a large degree predominated by empiricism.
Linguistic thought, particularly in the United States, but also in Europe, was strongly influenced
by the positivism of the behaviourist philosophy. Bloomfield is regarded as one of the chief
advocates of linguistic positivism, and his interpretation of linguistics predominated American
linguistics in the 1930s and 1940s (Robbins 1997, p. 237). The positivistic/behaviouristic view
on linguistic science put emphasis on the observable. Reliable facts could only be found through
objective observation of data, and only phenomena which could be empirically experienced by
any observer were considered valid data for further analysis. Robbins states that the favoured
model of description of the time was that of distribution; for some linguists the notion of
linguistic description coincided with the statement of distributional relations (Robbins 1997, p.
239). He also attributes the fact that there was little emphasis on the study of semantics in the
early twentieth century to Bloomfield’s dismissal of the possibilities of an empirically based
study of this field. Since the analysis of meaning requires non-linguistic knowledge as well,
semantic analysis was termed less ideal for empiricist methods. While the study of semantics
previously had aimed at creating an exhaustive description of what is referred to by a linguistic
entity, Firth represents a challenge to this way of thinking. His “contextual theory of language”
introduced a move in semantics, toward a statement of meaning as a function of how words are
used (Robbins 1997, p. 247). Together with Harris, Firth represents the distributional approach
to finding semantic meaning. Within this approach, meaning is treated as semantic functions
related to contexts of situation. This way of analysing meaning is data-driven in the same sense
as empiricist approaches in other fields of linguistics and is strongly connected to the positivistic
philosophy of science predominant in this time. However, using bottom-up methods as a means
to formulate theories of linguistics is a direction that was more or less abandoned after
Chomsky’s criticism of the structuralist approaches. Chomsky challenged the philosophical and
scientific foundation of the Bloomfieldian canon through his proposal of the transformationalgenerative
grammar. He dismissed the behaviouristic approach to language as the unacceptable
product of the strong empiricism of the Bloomfieldian behaviourist school. The shift from
empiricism to rationalism marks an important turning point in linguistic theory (Robbins 1997,
p. 260). Botley and McEnery state that Chomsky, and the generation of linguists following his
theories, represent a knowledge-driven approach with the goal of formulating linguistic theories
(Botley and McEnery 2000, p. 24).
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