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2 repudiating the existence of all mentalist constructs, Bloomfield also repudiated the classical view that the structure of language reflects the structure of thought.Bloomfield contended that whereas the phonological properties of morphemes are analyzable into parts (namely phonemes), sememes are unanalyzable: "There is nothing in the structure of morphemes like wolf, fox, and dog to tell us the relation between their meanings; this is a problem for the zoologist." Toward the end of the heyday of American structural linguistics however, this view was repudiated and the claim that there are submorphemic units of meaning was incorporated into early theories of GENERATIVE GRAMMAR. Bloomfield was aware that for a behaviorist theory of meaning such as his own to be successful, it would have to account for the semantic properties of nonreferential linguistic forms such as the English words not and and, and was also aware of the difficulty of this task. His attempt at defining the word not is particularly revealing. After initially defining it as "the linguistic inhibitor (emphasis his) in our speech-community," he went on to write: "The utterance, in a phrase, of the word not produces a phrase such that simultaneous parallel response to both this phrase and the parallel phrase without not cannot be made."For example, he called the semantic properties of morphemes 'sememes', those of grammatical forms 'episememes', etc.

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repudiating the existence of all mentalist constructs, Bloomfield also repudiated the classical view that
the structure of language reflects the structure of thought. For Bloomfield, the structure of language was the
central object of linguistic study, and hence of cognitive science, had that term been popular in his day.
Bloomfield maintained that all linguistic structure could be determined by the application of analytic
procedures starting with the smallest units which combine sound (or ‘vocal features’) and meaning (or
‘stimulus-reaction features’), called morphemes.
Having shown how to identify morphemes, Bloomfield went on to show how to identify both smaller units
(i.e., phonemes, defined as minimum units of ‘distinctive’ vocal features) and larger ones (words, phrases, and
sentences).
Bloomfield developed rich theories of both MORPHOLOGY and SYNTAX, much of which was carried
over more or less intact into generative grammar. In morphology, Bloomfield paid careful attention to
phonological alternations of various sorts, which led to the development of the modern theory of
morphophonemics. In syntax, Bloomfield generated so much enthusiasm for syntactic analysis that his students
felt that they were doing syntax for the first time in the history of linguistics.
Bloomfield did not develop his theory of SEMANTICS to the same extent as he did his theories of
PHONOLOGY, MORPHOLOGY, and SYNTAX, contenting himself primarily with naming the semantic
contributions of various types of linguistic units. For example, he called the semantic properties of morphemes
‘sememes’, those of grammatical forms ‘episememes’, etc. Bloomfield contended that whereas the phonological
properties of morphemes are analyzable into parts (namely phonemes), sememes are unanalyzable: “There is
nothing in the structure of morphemes like wolf, fox, and dog to tell us the relation between their meanings; this
is a problem for the zoölogist.”
Toward the end of the heyday of American structural linguistics however, this view was repudiated and
the claim that there are submorphemic units of meaning was incorporated into early theories of GENERATIVE
GRAMMAR. Bloomfield was aware that for a behaviorist theory of meaning such as his own to be successful,
it would have to account for the semantic properties of nonreferential linguistic forms such as the English words
not and and, and was also aware of the difficulty of this task. His attempt at defining the word not is particularly
revealing. After initially defining it as “the linguistic inhibitor
(emphasis his) in our speech-community,” he went on to write: “The utterance, in a phrase, of the word
not produces a phrase such that simultaneous parallel response to both this phrase and the parallel phrase
without not cannot be made.” In short, what Bloomfield is attempting to do here is to reduce the logical law of
contradiction to a statement about possible stimulus-response pairs.