Background
Bloomfield, Leonard was born on April 1, 1887 in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Bloomfield, Leonard was born on April 1, 1887 in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Universities of Harvard, Wisconsin and Chicago.
In 1914 he published his Introduction to the Study of Language. At Illinois Bloomfield first studied an "unfamiliar" language (Tagalog, now one of the national languages of the Republic of the Philippines), using the technique of recording texts from the lips of an informant and analyzing the material thus obtained (Tagalog Texts, 1917). In 1921 he went to Ohio State University and in 1927 to the University of Chicago. From this period dates his work in American Indian languages, primarily the Central Algonquian group (Cree, Menomini, Fox, Ojibwa), and his second general treatment of linguistics (Language, 1933). In 1940 he went to Yale University. During World War II he was one of the leading spirits behind the application of linguistics to language teaching, both in determining its theoretical bases and in writing texts (Dutch, Russian). A severe stroke incapacitated him in 1946, and he died on Apr. 18, 1949.
Bloomfield's scholarly work lay mainly in three fields: Indo-European, American Indian languages, and general linguistics. He also made contributions to the study of Philippine languages and applied linguistics, particularly in the theory of language teaching (Outline Guide for the Practical Study of Foreign Languages, 1942) and the teaching of developmental reading. An excellent beginning reading text by Bloomfield for the first and second grades was used successfully in classrooms but remained unpublished.
Bloomfield's greatest contribution to linguistics as a science lay in the rigor of his method, which he applied to all aspects of the field. Before the appearance of Language, linguistics had usually been treated as an essentially humanistic discipline, often fruitful but not completely amenable to scientific method--to procedure by postulates, hypotheses, and verification. Bloomfield was the first to demonstrate the possibility and to exemplify the means of a unified scientific approach to all aspects of linguistic analysis: phonemic, morphological, syntactical, descriptive, and historical. In the first part of Language Bloomfield provides a manual for descriptive technique; in the second, a similar guide to the historical study of language. Later advances in linguistic analysis, particularly in descriptive work, have used Bloomfield as a point of departure, building on his synthesis of preceding accomplishments.
Certain features of Bloomfield's basic assumptions and procedures have stood and probably always will stand in the way of their widespread acceptance. His concise, clearly knit, unemotional, quasi-mathematical reasoning and presentation do not make his ideas easily accessible or interesting to the casual reading public. His desire to place linguistics on a wholly scientific basis led him to reject the hypothesis of a special entity called "mind," and to base the analysis of language on a "non-mentalistic" or "operational" approach. For the same reason he based linguistic analysis on an initial approach through formal structure rather than meaning, though by no means denying or neglecting the latter. These attitudes often shock and repel naive or unscientifically minded readers. Nevertheless, Bloomfield's original work and his codification and synthesis of our knowledge of language as a whole constitute the greatest single contribution made to linguistics in America in the 20th century.
Main publications:(1914) An Introduction to the Study of Language, New York: Holt.(1933) Language, New York: Holt.(1935) 'Linguistic aspects of science’. Philosophy of Science 2: 499-517.(1936) ‘Language or ideas?’, Language 12: 89-95. (1939) Linguistic Aspects of Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Secondary literature:Bloch, Bernard (1949) ‘Leonard Bloomfield', Language 25: 87-98.Dempwolff, Otto (1934-1938) ‘Vergleichende Laulehre des austronesischen Wortschatzes’, Zeitschrift fwr eingeborenen Sprachen, Supplements 15, 17,19.
Bloomfield did more than anyone else to transform linguistics from a desultory pursuit into a branch of science. Concerned at first with the study of Germanic and Indo-European languages, Bloomfield turned to wider-ranging considerations of language in his Introduction to the Study of Language (1914). In 1924 he helped to found the Language Society of America, and in 1925 began its influential journal, Language.
In making linguistics ‘autonomous and scientific’, Bloomfield shunned operationally undefinable mentalistic terms and pursued a ‘physicalist’ approach which excluded all data that were not directly observable or physically measurable.
This led him to formulate the principles of phonological and syntactic analysis largely without reference to semantic considerations, since he believed that a precise definition of most words in terms of a complete ‘scientific’description of the objects to which they refer could not yet be given.
In his monumental Language (1933) Bloomfield presented his famous ‘single-stratum’scheme of language design: ‘phonemes' directly observable in the speech signal are the minimum though
meaningless ‘units’ of a language: sequences of phonemes, called ‘morphemes', are the minimum meaningful units: morphemes form words. Words form phrases and clauses, and these form sentences. Bloomfield’s work defined an epoch m American linguistics.
His followers, particularly Zellig Harris, carried even further than he did the idea of a linguistics ‘without semantics’. However, since the 1960s prominent linguists have become increasingly critical of the ‘Bloomfieldian’ school and have abandoned many of its original assumptions. Sources: Bullock & Woodings.
Eduard Prokosch, W. Wundt, E. Sapir and Albert Paul Weiss.