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Difference Between Ferdinand De Saussure And Bloomfield

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RANI DWI ASTUTI
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Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield
Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield are both give big contributions towards linguistics. They both produce theories which are now used in linguistics. They have similarity as they both studied language as a structure using science basic. They both focus on the structure of the language. However, they do have several differences as the developed their own theories based on their thought about language.
Saussure’s thought nowadays is defined the option of “synchronic linguistics”, the study of language as systems existing at a given point in time. Saussure developed his synchronic linguistics when he taught a course called “General linguistics and the history and …show more content…

Bloomfield views language more as a diachronic linguistics or historical linguistics focusing in behaviour. The main points of Bloomfield’s theories of language description can already be found in Boas, though they are often stated more explicitly and with more elaboration by Bloomfield. What was new in Bloomfield was a philosophically sophisticated emphasis on the status of linguistics as a science. Bloomfield was not merely passively influenced by logical but (after a flirtation in his twenties with very different views) became an active, proponent of positivist ideas as they applied to the study of human behaviour, including language. For Bloomfield, linguistics was a branch of psychology and specifically of the positivistic brand of the psychology known as “behaviourism”. Bloomfield’s theorizing about language was heavily behaviouristic. Behaviourism is a principle of scientific method: a rule which says that the only things that may be used to confirm or refute a scientific theory are interpersonally observable phenomena, rather than, say, people’s introspections or ‘intuitions’. In some ways it was in fact easier for linguist than for psychologist to accept behaviourist

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