![]() It was in syntax that this programme was particularly attractive, and met with the fewest doubts and criticisms. Not merely did the study of language start from form rather than from meaning but the investigation of form was separated strictly from that of meaning, and necessarily preceded it. For the same period also saw the firm adoption of distributional criteria. From the late 1940s syntax had basically two tasks, one to establish the hierarchical structure of sentences and the other to sort the units of this hierarchy into classes with equivalent distributions. In syntax it was, above all, the principle of immediate constituents. In morphology it was the morpheme, so that an account of morphology, insofar as it remained distinct from syntax, was reduced to the identification of morphemes and their alternants. Once again a part of Bloomfield's theory was taken from its context and made the foundation of the whole. But we have yet to consider contemporary developments in syntax. We have seen in chapter 2 how Bloomfield's concept of the morpheme was transformed by his immediate successors (above, ยง2.3).
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