ABSTRACT
During the period in which Morris was writing, a significant sector of American linguistics was becoming increasingly focused on syntax, to the exclusion of semantics and pragmatics. Under the influence of behaviorism, both the latter were taken to involve aspects of the world outside language. This gave rise to formalisms and versions of irreducibility quite distinct from Saussure's. The inconsistent, zigzag quality of Bloomfield's writings on the topic attests to the difficulty of describing meaning within a formalism based on behaviorist premises. Chomsky's "Methodological Preliminaries" outlines the early program of generative grammar. It represents a sharp break with the kind of structural linguistics of Bloomfield, in which behaviorist psychology was granted the role of defining meaning, and the behavioral status of linguistic structure. Chomsky's linguistics starts from the ideal speaker-hearer, an analytic reduction of the heterogeneous facts of speech to the purely linguistic competence of one who perfectly masters her language.
