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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.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.