BLOOMFIELD, Leonard

BLOOMFIELD, Leonard [1887–1949].American philologist and linguist, born in Chicago, Illinois, and educated at Harvard, Wisconsin, and Chicago. He taught at several universities (1909–27) before becoming Professor of Germanic Philology at Chicago (1927–40) and Professor of Linguistics at Yale (1940–9). Initially, he was interested in Indo-European, and particularly Germanic, speech sounds and word-formation. Later, he undertook pioneering studies in the Malayo-Polynesian languages, and made a detailed study of the North American Indian languages. His publications include: An Introduction to the Study of Language (1914), Language (1933), and Outline Guide for the Practical Study of Foreign Languages (1942). Influenced by European structuralism, Bloomfield is generally regarded as the founder of American STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS. His definitions of the basic units of language were influential. He defined the PHONEME as ‘a minimum same of vocal feature’ (that is, as a physical piece of speech rather than as an abstract construct of the linguist) and believed (mistakenly, as it proved) that within a few decades it would be possible to establish the phonemes of a language in the laboratory. He defined the MORPHEME as the basic unit of grammatical arrangement, a ‘minimal form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form’ (Language, p. 161). The WORD was a ‘minimum free form’, the smallest unit that can occur in isolation, and might consist of one morpheme (boy, but) or more than one (boyish, carelessness).