Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield
Birthday	Friday, April 01, 1887
Birthplace	Chicago, Illinois
Died	Monday, April 18, 1949
Occupation	Linguist
Education	Harvard College, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Chicago, University of Leipzig, University of Göttingen

Bloomfield, Leonard

(1887–1949) linguist; born in Chicago, Ill. After teaching at several universities, he became professor of linguistics at Yale (1940–46), already one of the most influential linguists of the century. He was one of the first to advance linguistics as an empirical discipline, set out first in An Introduction to the Study of Language (1914). He developed a method of team-teaching languages and his work on Tagalog and Algonquian languages led to his independent discovery of the phonemic principle that organizes the sound system of a language. He promoted linguistics as a key approach to understanding human behavior and his most important work in this regard, Language (1933), is still widely used and studied.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

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.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.