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).

Bloomfield, Leonard (1887–1949), an American linguist whose book Language (1933) was a major influence on the development of ‘Structural Linguistics’, putting forward the idea that the analysis appropriate to a particular language must be inferred from its own structure, not brought to bear on it from general linguistic principles. This approach, characterized as ‘ Bloomfieldian’, prevailed in some circles up to the 1950s; it was opposed by Chomsky, though the origins of his analyses of grammar lie in Bloomfield's system.