[7] It is considered one of the scientific grounds of Noam Chomsky's generative grammar and had considerable influence on language teaching.
However, both appear in the United States while the theses of Ferdinand de Saussure are only just beginning to be known in Europe: distributionism must be considered as an original theory in relation to Saussurianism.
Leonard Bloomfield argues that language, like behaviour, could be analysed as a predictable mechanism, explicable by the external conditions of its appearance.
Bloomfield calls his thesis mechanism, and he opposes it to mentalism: for him, in fact, speech cannot be explained as an effect of thoughts (intentions, beliefs, feelings).
Thus, one must be able to account for linguistic behaviour and the hierarchical structure of the messages conveyed without any assumptions about the speakers' intentions and mental states.
The only regularity is of a morphosyntactic nature: it is the structural invariants of the morphosyntax that allow us to reconstruct the language system from an analysis of its observable elements, the words of a given corpus.