ABSTRACT
Behaviourism, the psychological theory behind behaviourist linguistics, was founded by J.B. Watson (1924). Its main tenet is that everything which some refer to as mental activity, including language use, can be explained in terms of habits, or patterns of stimulus and response, built up through conditioning. As these patterns of behaviour, an organism’s output, and the conditioning through which they become formed, the input to the organism, are observable phenomena, behaviourism accorded well with the strong current of empiricism which swept the scientific communities in the USA and Britain early in the twentieth century.
