Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield 1887-1949, American linguist, b. Chicago. Bloomfield was professor at Ohio State Univ. (1921-27), at the Univ. of Chicago (1927-40), and at Yale (from 1940). His specialty for years was Germanic languages, especially in their comparative aspects. He became interested, however, in languages from a scientific, descriptive viewpoint. His masterpiece Language (1933) is a standard text. It had a profound influence on linguistics, for it was a clear statement of principles that became axiomatic, notably that language study must always be centered in the spoken language, as against documents; that the definitions used in grammar should be based on the forms of the language, not on the meanings of the forms; and that a given language at a given time is a complete system of sounds and forms that exist independently of the past—so that the history of a form does not explain its actual meaning. His other works include Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis (1917), Linguistic Aspects of Science (1939), Spoken Dutch (1945), and Spoken Russian (1945).

Bibliography: See R. A. Hall, Leonard Bloomfield: Essays on His Life and Work (1987).



Author not available, BLOOMFIELD, LEONARD., The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition 2008