A Comparison Between Two Leading Linguistic Figures: Bloomfield and Firth
- DOI
- 10.2991/icmess-17.2017.108How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- Bloomfield; Firth; linguistics; behaviorism; context
- Abstract
This article is dedicated to making the comparison and contrast of Bloomfield and Firth, the two leading linguistic figures of the same age. Bloomfield regarded language as a series of stimuli and responses and emphasized the objective description of language structures, while neglecting the study of meaning. On the contrary, Firth proceeded from the sociological perspective and regarded language as a social process and a means of social life, believing that meaning is the core of language study. Based on the comparative study of Bloomfield's and Firth's linguistic theories, an analysis is made in terms of different bases of philosophical theories, linguistic attitudes, attitudes toward context, toward the role of semantic research, toward the scientificalness of language study and different language teaching methods deriving from these two linguistic schools. After the analysis of the above-mentioned aspects, we can get a clear idea of their respective contributions to linguistics as well as their limitations and can reasonably make use of their theories and relevant methods in foreign language teaching context.
- Copyright
- © 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Kaiwei Yan PY - 2017/06 DA - 2017/06 TI - A Comparison Between Two Leading Linguistic Figures: Bloomfield and Firth BT - Proceedings of the 2017 International Conference on Management, Education and Social Science (ICMESS 2017) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 466 EP - 469 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/icmess-17.2017.108 DO - 10.2991/icmess-17.2017.108 ID - Yan2017/06 ER -