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Behaviourist linguistics The psychological theory known as behaviourism was founded by J.B. Watson (1924). Its main tenet is that all of what some people refer to as mental activity (including language use) can be explained in terms of habit formation, or patterns of stimulus and response, built up through conditioning. These patterns of behaviour are an organism’s output; the conditioning through which they have been formed are the input to the organism. Both the input and the output to the organism are observable phenomena, so behaviourism was well suited to the strong current of empiricism that swept the scientific communities in the USA and Britain early in the twentieth century. In linguistics, one of the finest examples of the

empiricist/behaviourist tradition is Leonard Bloomfield’s Language (1933/1935), although the most rigorous application of behaviourist theory to the study of language is probably Verbal Behavior (1957), by Burrhus Frederic Skinner, one of the most famous behaviourist psychologists of the twentieth century. This book was severely criticised by Chomsky (1959). In Language, Bloomfield insists that a scientific

theory of language must reject all data that are not directly observable or physically measurable. A scientific theory should be able to make predictions, but Bloomfield points out that (1935: 33):

We could foretell a person’s actions (for instance, whether a certain stimulus will lead him to speak, and, if so, the exact

exact structure of his body at that moment, or, what comes to the same thing, if we knew the exact make-up of his organism at some early stage – say at birth or before – and then had a record of every change in that organism, including every stimulus that had ever affected the organism.