Leonard Bloomfield

Bloomfield, Leonard 

Born Apr. 1, 1887, in Chicago; died Apr. 18, 1949, in New Haven. American linguist; specialist in Romance and Germanic linguistics.

Bloomfield studied the languages of Southeast Asia and North America and was the first to apply the comparative historical method to languages with a polysynthetic structure. In general theory of language he took the mechanistic position and approached linguistic phenomena from the standpoint of American behavioristic psychology, which considers behavior, not consciousness, as the object of study. Many of Bloomfield’s views were developed by representatives of so-called descriptive linguistics.

WORKS

“A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language.” Language, 1926, vol. 2.
“Language or Ideas.” Language, 1936, no. 2.
Linguistic Aspects of Science, 8th ed. Chicago, 1962.
In Russian translation:
lazyk. Moscow, 1968.

REFERENCES

Arutiunova, N. D., and E. S. Kubriakova. “Problemy morfologii v trudakh amerikanskikh deskriptivistov.” In Voprosy teorii iazyka v sovremennoi zarubezhnoi lingvistike. Moscow, 1961.
Arutiunova, N. D., G. A. Klimov, and E. S. Kubriakova. “Amerikauskii strukturalizm.” In Osnovnye napravleniia strukturalizma. Moscow, 1964.
Sapir, E. Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality. Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1951.