Key aspects of Bloomfield's syntactic approach:
* Emphasis on distribution: Bloomfield's syntax was heavily concerned with identifying the positions words could occupy in a sentence and how this position contributed to the overall structure. He focused on discovering the *distributional properties* of words and phrases – where they could occur relative to other words.
* Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA): While not solely Bloomfield's invention, ICA became a cornerstone of his syntactic framework. ICA involves breaking down sentences into successively smaller constituents (phrases and words) until reaching the individual morphemes. This hierarchical approach aimed to reveal the structural organization of sentences.
* Form over Meaning: Bloomfield strictly separated syntax from semantics. The meaning of a sentence was considered irrelevant to the syntactic analysis. The focus was solely on the observable relationships between linguistic forms.
* Lack of Deep Structure: Unlike later generative approaches, Bloomfield's syntax lacked the concept of an underlying, abstract representation of sentence structure. The analysis was entirely based on the surface form of utterances.
In essence, Bloomfield's syntax aimed to provide a rigorous and objective description of sentence structure based on the observable patterns of word combinations, devoid of subjective interpretations or reliance on meaning. His work laid the groundwork for later developments in structural linguistics, although many of his assumptions were later challenged by more cognitively-oriented theories.