Bloomfield thought that semantics, or the study of meaning, was the weak point in the scientific investigation of language and would necessarily remain so until the other sciences whose task it was to describe the universe and humanity’s place in it had advanced beyond their present state. In his textbook Language (1933), he had himself adopted a behaviouristic theory of meaning, defining the meaning of a linguistic form as “the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer.” Furthermore, he subscribed, in principle at least, to a physicalist thesis, according to which all science should be modelled upon the so-called exact sciences and all scientific knowledge should be reducible, ultimately, to statements made about the properties of the physical world. The reason for his pessimism concerning the prospects for the study of meaning was his feeling that it would be a long time before a complete scientific description of the situations in which utterances were produced and the responses they called forth in their hearers would be available. At the time that Bloomfield was writing, physicalism was more widely held than it is today, and it was perhaps reasonable for him to believe that linguistics should eschew mentalism and concentrate upon the directly observable. As a result, for some 30 years after the publication of Bloomfield’s textbook, the study of meaning was almost wholly neglected by his followers; most American linguists who received their training during this period had no knowledge of, still less any interest in, the work being done elsewhere in semantics.

Two groups of scholars may be seen to have constituted an exception to this generalization: anthropologically minded linguists and linguists concerned with Bible translation. Much of the description of the indigenous languages of America has been carried out since the days of Boas and his most notable pupil Sapir by scholars who were equally proficient both in anthropology and in descriptive linguistics; such scholars have frequently added to their grammatical analyses of languages some discussion of the meaning of the grammatical categories and of the correlations between the structure of the vocabularies and the cultures in which the languages operated. It has already been pointed out that Boas and Sapir and, following them, Whorf were attracted by Humboldt’s view of the interdependence of language and culture and of language and thought. This view was quite widely held by American anthropological linguists (although many of them would not go as far as Whorf in asserting the dependence of thought and conceptualization upon language).

Also of considerable importance in the description of the indigenous languages of America has been the work of linguists trained by the American Bible Society and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a group of Protestant missionary linguists. Because their principal aim is to produce translations of the Bible, they have necessarily been concerned with meaning as well as with grammar and phonology. This has tempered the otherwise fairly orthodox Bloomfieldian approach characteristic of the group.

The two most important developments in semantics in the mid-20th century were, first, the application of the structural approach to the study of meaning and, second, a better appreciation of the relationship between grammar and semantics. The second of these developments will be treated in the following section, on Transformational-generative grammar. The first, structural semantics, goes back to the period preceding World War II and is exemplified in a large number of publications, mainly by German scholars—Jost Trier, Leo Weisgerber, and their collaborators.

The structural approach to semantics is best explained by contrasting it with the more traditional “atomistic” approach, according to which the meaning of each word in the language is described, in principle, independently of the meaning of all other words. The structuralist takes the view that the meaning of a word is a function of the relationships it contracts with other words in a particular lexical field, or subsystem, and that it cannot be adequately described except in terms of these relationships. For example, the colour terms in particular languages constitute a lexical field, and the meaning of each term depends upon the place it occupies in the field. Although the denotation of each of the words “green,” “blue,” and “yellow” in English is somewhat imprecise at the boundaries, the position that each of them occupies relative to the other terms in the system is fixed: “green” is between “blue” and “yellow,” so that the phrases “greenish yellow” or “yellowish green” and “bluish green” or “greenish blue” are used to refer to the boundary areas. Knowing the meaning of the word “green” implies knowing what cannot as well as what can be properly described as green (and knowing of the borderline cases that they are borderline cases). Languages differ considerably as to the number of basic colour terms that they recognize, and they draw boundaries within the psychophysical continuum of colour at different places. Blue, green, yellow, and so on do not exist as distinct colours in nature, waiting to be labelled differently, as it were, by different languages; they come into existence, for the speakers of particular languages, by virtue of the fact that those languages impose structure upon the continuum of colour and assign to three of the areas thus recognized the words “blue,” “green,” “yellow.”

The language of any society is an integral part of the culture of that society, and the meanings recognized within the vocabulary of the language are learned by the child as part of the process of acquiring the culture of the society in which he is brought up. Many of the structural differences found in the vocabularies of different languages are to be accounted for in terms of cultural differences. This is especially clear in the vocabulary of kinship (to which a considerable amount of attention has been given by anthropologists and linguists), but it holds true of many other semantic fields also. A consequence of the structural differences that exist between the vocabularies of different languages is that, in many instances, it is in principle impossible to translate a sentence “literally” from one language to another.

It is important, nevertheless, not to overemphasize the semantic incommensurability of languages. Presumably, there are many physiological and psychological constraints that, in part at least, determine one’s perception and categorization of the world. It may be assumed that, when one is learning the denotation of the more basic words in the vocabulary of one’s native language, attention is drawn first to what might be called the naturally salient features of the environment and that one is, to this degree at least, predisposed to identify and group objects in one way rather than another. It may also be that human beings are genetically endowed with rather more specific and linguistically relevant principles of categorization. It is possible that, although languages differ in the number of basic colour categories that they distinguish, there is a limited number of hierarchically ordered basic colour categories from which each language makes its selection and that what counts as a typical instance, or focus, of these universal colour categories is fixed and does not vary from one language to another. If this hypothesis is correct, then it is false to say, as many structural semanticists have said, that languages divide the continuum of colour in a quite arbitrary manner. But the general thesis of structuralism is unaffected, for it still remains true that each language has its own unique semantic structure even though the total structure is, in each case, built upon a substructure of universal distinctions.

Harris’s grammar

Harris distinguished within the total set of grammatical sentences in a particular language (for example, English) two complementary subsets: kernel sentences (the set of kernel sentences being described as the kernel of the grammar) and nonkernel sentences. The difference between these two subsets lies in nonkernel sentences being derived from kernel sentences by means of transformational rules. For example, “The workers rejected the ultimatum” is a kernel sentence that may be transformed into the nonkernel sentences “The ultimatum was rejected by the workers” or “Did the workers reject the ultimatum?” Each of these may be described as a transform of the kernel sentence from which it is derived. The transformational relationship between corresponding active and passive sentences (e.g., “The workers rejected the ultimatum” and “The ultimatum was rejected by the workers”) is conventionally symbolized by the rule N₁ V N₂ → N₂ be V + en by N₁, in which N stands for any noun or noun phrase, V for any transitive verb, en for the past participle morpheme, and the arrow (→) instructs one to rewrite the construction to its left as the construction to the right. (There has been some simplification of the rule as it was formulated by Harris.) This rule may be taken as typical of the whole class of transformational rules in Harris’s system: it rearranges constituents (what was the first nominal, or noun, N₁, in the kernel sentence is moved to the end of the transform, and what was the second nominal, N₂, in the kernel sentence is moved to initial position in the transform), and it adds various elements in specified positions (be, en, and by). Other operations carried out by transformational rules include the deletion of constituents; e.g., the entire phrase “by the workers” is removed from the sentence “The ultimatum was rejected by the workers” by a rule symbolized as N₂ be V+en by N₁ → N₂ be V+en. This transforms the construction on the left side of the arrow (which resulted from the passive transformation) by dropping the by-phrase, thus producing “The ultimatum was rejected.”