Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

A-Z 125are placed close together. (b) A second law is that whatever is more important is placedafter whatever is less important. (c) A third law is that the specifying element (=specifier)precedes the specified element. And (d) the shorter constituent tends to precede thelonger ( weight principle). In addition, there is a tendency for constituents withstronger stress to alternate with constituents with weaker stress. ( also word order)ReferencesBehaghel, O.P. 1932. Deutsche Syntax. Heidelberg. Vol. 4.Collinge, N.E. 1985. The laws of Indo-European. Amsterdam and Philadelphia. 242.behaviorismDirection of psychological research founded by J.B.Watson (1878–1959) and modeledafter natural science that takes aim at the methods of self-observation (introspection) aswell as the description of the consciousness (such as feelings, thoughts, impulsivebehavior). Behaviorism investigates objectively observable behaviors as a reaction tochanges in environmental circumstances. The stimulus-response model (developedthrough experiments on animals) as well as the fundamental categories of ‘conditionedreflexes’ and conditioning provide the point of departure for behaviorist research.According to these theories, behavior is analyzed as a reaction to particularenvironmentally conditioned external or internal stimuli and is thereby predictable basedon the exact characterization of the corresponding instance of stimulus. Behaviorism hasbecome particularly significant in educational psychology. Its principle of the learningprocess as a conditioning process, which was further developed in educationalpsychology, was also applied to the process of language acquisition. In contrast to thementalist ( mentalism) understanding of language acquisition as a maturation processthat runs according to an innate plan derived from an inborn internal mechanism(‘device’), behaviorism assumes that one can only presuppose the command of certainprocedures or strategies for the acquisition of cognitive and, thus, also linguisticknowledge as an innate psychological ability, but that the learning process itself is carriedout through continual experience. As Skinner presents in detail in his (to a great degreespeculative) book Verbal Behavior (1957), language is explained as a learned behavior,as the sum of individual language habits developed and acquired through conditioning,reinforcement and generalization, as a circumstantial network of associative connectionsof linguistic expressions. The conception of behaviorism is most clearly expressed inBloomfield’s antimentalist concept of language, especially in his taxonomic method ofdescription which is itself geared towards those methods used in the natural sciences (cf.antimentalism, distributionalism). For a critique of this approach from a linguisticpoint of view, see Chomsky (1959).