Synchronic linguistic description proceeds on the counter-factual assumption of constant and stable forms paired with meanings within an unchanging speech-community, some forms are never observable in isolated utterance. This justifies the distinction of free and bound forms, when both are established as linguistic forms. Constructed linguistic forms have at least two, so A’ linguistic form which bears a partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to some other linguistic form is a complex form and the common parts are constituents or components, while A’ linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form is a simple form or morpheme.
Basic and Modified Meaning
The meaning of a morpheme is a sememe (the meaning of a morpheme), constant, definite, discrete from all other sememes: the linguist can only analyze the signals, not the signalled, so that is why linguistics must start from the phonetics, not the semantics, of a language. The total stocks of morphemes is a language’s lexicon.
Sentence Types
Order can imply (but is not exhausted by) position, which can be functional; a form alone is in absolute position, with another, in included position. Sentences relate through order, position, and, within a sentence, are distinguished by modulation, pratactic arrangement, and features of selection.
Languages show full and minor sentence types distinguished by taxemes of selection.
Words
Since the word is a free form, freedom of occurrence largely determines our attitude towards parts of a language. But even with our typographic conventions, we are inconsistent in distinguishing words and phrases, and in other languages, it is difficult to keep them apart.
Syntax
Grammar deals with constructions under morphology and syntax, syntax takes as its construction those in which noone of the immediate constituents is a bound form. The free forms (words and phrases) of a language appear in larger free forms (phrases), arranged by taxemes of modulation, phonetic modification, selection and order.
The study, use and spread of language. Bloomfield proposes that the empirical science of language should study a real rather than a fancied object.
Language conceived as a normative ideal does not constitute an empirical object; language as a universal phenomenon can only be established inductively; one can
observe actual speech----and its actual effects on hearers---without preconceptions, so the Behaviorist approach provides a model.
Speech communities are best observed behavioristically. Density of communication can be empirically observed, quantified, and correlated with geography, social stratification, occupation, success in cooperation, and consequences in describable speech differences.
There are behavioral correlates for determining traditional concerns about language:
- The literary standard
-The colloquial standard
-The provincial standard
-Sub-standard
-Local dialect
The phoneme. Sound-production can be described empirically. Phonetics is the branch of science that deals with it.
What phonetics provides is an objective record of gross acoustic features, only part of which are distinctive for particular languages, while phonology, or practical phonetics, determines which features are the distinctive ones.
Phonetic basis. This predominantly phonetic account ‘may be viewed as a kind of basis which may be modified in various ways’.
Modification, presumes some standard from which a departure is made, and the criteria for establishing the base can vary, legitimately or inconsistently.
For instance, it might be inconsistent to shift, in phonology, from subjective, or objective production to subjective reception or objective disturbance of the air, or from objective measurement to subjective standards.
