Silverstein argues that the Saussurean tradition of linguistic analysis, which includes the tradition of structural linguistics in the United States founded by Leonard Bloomfield and including the work of Noam Chomsky and contemporary generative grammar, has been limited to identifying "the contribution of elements of utterances to the referential or denotative value of the whole", that is, the contribution made by some word, expression, or other linguistic element to the function of forming "propositions—predications descriptive of states of affairs". This study of reference and predication yields an understanding of one aspect of the meaning of utterances, their "semantic meaning", and the subdiscipline of linguistics dedicated to studying this kind of linguistic meaning is semantics.