Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield (born April 1, 1887 – died April 18, 1949) was an American linguist, whose influence dominated the development of structural linguistics in America between the 1930s and the 1950s. He is especially known for his book Language (1933), which greatly influenced the subsequent course of linguistics in the United States, and helped establish linguistics as an independent scientific discipline.

Life

Leonard Bloomfield was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Juden Sigmund and Carola Buber Bloomfield. He graduated from Harvard College at the age of 19, and finished his graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin. His interest in linguistics grew after hearing the lectures by Eduard Prokosch (1876 - 1938), a philologist in the German department. Bloomfield received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1909. He married on March 18, 1909 to Alice Sayers.

Bloomfield became instructor of German language at the University of Cincinnati in 1909, but stayed there only for a year, accepting the position of German instructor at the University of Illinois. In 1913 he became assistant professor of comparative philology and German at the University of Illinois, and remained there until 1921. He published his first main book in 1914, under the title Introduction to the study of Language, dealing with the overall aspect of language.

Meanwhile, in 1913-14 Bloomfield spent more than a year in Germany, studying at the universities of Leipzig and Gottingen under neogrammarian scholars August Leskien (1840-1916} and Karl Brugmann (1849-1919). He also completed his studies of Indian and Iranian languages. During the First World War he turned to a study of Tagalog, a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken mostly in the Philippines. In 1917 he published his second major book Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis.

In 1917 he became interested in the Algonquian languages, and spent several years studying this family of languages. In 1921 Bloomfield became Professor of German and Linguistics at the Ohio State University, where he met behaviorist psychologist Albert P. Weiss, with whom he established long-lasting cooperation. They both applied logical positivist approach to science, and agreed that linguistics needs more mechanistic and less mentalistic approach to qualify as a scientific discipline.

In 1924 Bloomfield, together with George M. Bolling (1871-1963) and Edgar H. Sturtevant (1875-1952) founded the Linguistic Society of America. The purpose of the organization was the scientific study of human language, the results of which were published in society’s journal Language.

Bloomfield served as professor of Germanic philology at the University of Chicago from 1927 to 1940. In that period he published his masterwork, Language (1933), which made him wide famous. The book produced such influence that the period from 1933, when it was published, until mid 1950s is commonly called the "Bloomfieldian era" of linguistics. He was the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1935.

In 1940 Bloomfield became professor of linguistics at Yale University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1946. He died in New Haven, Connecticut, on April 18, 1949.

Work

Bloomfield's thought was mainly characterized by its behavioristic principles, its insistence on formal procedures for the analysis of language data, as well as a general concern to provide linguistics with rigorous scientific methodology.

In his early career he came under the influence of the German neogrammarian historical philology, which emphasized the regularity of sound change in language. Every change, according to neogrammarians, can be accounted for and explained, while exceptions to the rule could be explained in terms of non-phonetic phenomena. Therefore, all changes are subdued to certain rules. The neogrammarian theories brought much order into the historical linguistics, replacing previous theories that saw sound changes as result of random, meaningless processes.

In his work Bloomfield adopted the concept of language structure from Ferdinand de Saussure. Similar to de Saussure, Bloomfield held that languages at all time consisted of systems of interrelated elements: lexical, grammatical, and phonological. Bloomfield also took over de Saussure’s distinction between a diachronous approach (where time is a variable) and a synchronous approach (where time is a constant). Bloomfield took interest in both, language changes throughout the course of history (diachronous), as well as at a specific point in time (synchronous).

Bloomfield was well familiar with the work of Franz Boas on the descriptive analysis of the contemporary non-Indo-European languages, especially those of Native American Indians. Bloomfield himself began with the study of one group of Indian languages, that of Algonquin Indians. He performed the genetic examination of the Algonquian language family and reconstructed the Proto-Algonquian language, the ancient language spoken before it diverged into several contemporary languages. In addition, he was able to show that the neogrammarian theory of the regularity of sound change could be applied beyond the Indo-European language family. Bloomfield’s seminal paper on the Algonquin family remains a cornerstone of Algonquian historical linguistics today.

Language

Bloomfield published his Language in 1933, in which he argued that linguistics needs to be more objective if it is to become a real scientific discipline. He argued that the main target of linguistic inquiry are observable phenomena, rather than the abstract cognitive processes. He thus advocated for the establishment of the exact descriptive methods through which use linguistics could be elevated to the level of a positive discipline.

In order to separate linguistics from any mentalistic theory, Bloomfield rejected the classical view that the structure of language reflects the structure of thought. He believed that spoken language is the only object of study and applied different analytic procedures to study language. He showed how to analyze spoken language, dividing it into its smallest units – phonemes (“vocal features”) and morphemes (“stimulus-reaction features”), and how those units are combined into higher level structures.

Bloomfield also emphasized that linguists need to study spoken language rather than documents written in a language, because language changes over time and the meaning of something today might be different of what it meant in the past. The documents thus cannot be adequate representations of a spoken language.

Legacy

Beside Edward Sapir, Bloomfield is often regarded as the most prominent American linguists of the first half of the twentieth century. His scientific approach to the study of language emphasized observable phenomena and the spoken language rather than abstract mentalistic processes, which helped bring linguistics closer to an exact science.

Although his use of descriptive methods was not widely accepted, Bloomfield’s ideas were widely used. In the period after the publication of his Language, all up to mid-1950s, Bloomfield was the utmost authority in the study of language. Together with his students, among others Bernard Bloch, Zellig Harris, and Charles Hockett, he established the school of thought that has come to be known as American structural linguistics.

After 1950s, however, Bloomfield’s influence waned, as logical positivism ceased to be the main preoccupation of social sciences. Linguists again turned to more mentalistic attitudes and non-observable cognitive processes. With the immergence of the Generative Grammar in 1960s, structural linguistics completely vanished from the linguistic mainstream.

Publications

• Bloomfield, L. 1911. The Indo-European Palatals in Sanskrit. The American Journal of Philology, 32(1), 36-57.
• Bloomfield, L. 1914. Sentence and Word. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 45, 65-75.
• Bloomfield, L. 1917. Tagalog texts with grammatical analysis. University of Illinois studies in language and literature.
• Bloomfield, L. 1924. Notes on the Fox language. International Journal of American Linguistics, 3, 219-232.
• Bloomfield, L. 1926. A set of postulates for the science of language. Language, 2, 153-164
• Bloomfield, L. 1927. Literate and illiterate speech. American Speech, 2, 432-441.
• Bloomfield, L. 1927. On Some Rules of Pāṇini. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 47, 61-70.
• Bloomfield, L. 1935. Linguistic aspects of science. Philosophy of Science, 2(4), 499-517.
• Bloomfield, L. 1939. Menomini morphophonemics. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, 8, 105-115.
• Bloomfield, L. 1939. Linguistic aspects of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Bloomfield, L. 1942. Outline guide for the practical study of foreign languages. Linguistic Society of America.
• Bloomfield, L. 1961. Let's read, a linguistic approach. Wayne State University Press. ISBN 0814311156
• Bloomfield, L. 1983 (original published in 1914). Introduction to the Study of Language. John Benjamins Pub Co. ISBN 9027218927.
• Bloomfield, L. 1984 (original published in 1933). Language. University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226060675
• Bloomfield, L. 1990 (original published in 1928). Menomini Texts. AMS Press Inc. ISBN 0404581625.
• Bloomfield, L. 2002 (original published in 1930). Sacred stories of the Sweet Grass Cree. Fifth House Publishers. ISBN 1895618274.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• BookRags.com. Leonard Bloomfield. Retrieved on January 29, 2007, <http://www.bookrags.com/biography/leonard-bloomfield/>
• Hall, Robert A. 1987. Leonard Bloomfield: Essays on his life and work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 9027245304.
• Hall, Robert A. 1990. Life for Language: A Biographical Memoir of Leonard Bloomfield. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 1556193505
• Hockett, Charles F. (Ed.). 1987. A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology. University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226060713.
• Hockett, Charles F. 1999. Leonard Bloomfield: After fifty years. Historiographia linguistica, 26(3), 295-311.
• Fought, John G. 1999. Leonard Bloomfield. Routledge. ISBN 0415174465
• Fought, John G. 1999. Leonard Bloomfield’s linguistic legacy: Later uses of some technical features. Historiographie linguistica 26(3), 313-332.
• Langendoen, D.T. n.d. Bloomfield Leonard. Publication Services, Inc. Retrieved on January 29, 2007, <http://www.pubserv.com/mitecs/pdf/langendoen.pdf>
• Manaster, R. Alexis. 1993. Ever since Bloomfield. Proceedings of the international congress of linguists 15(1), 308-310.

External links

• Biography of Bloomfield Leonard – Several articles on Bloomfield’s work
• Bloomfield Leonard – Biography and his work on the Universitat Erfurt website
• Bloomfield Leonard - Biography on mnsu.edu
• Bloomfield’s work – Great overview of Bloomfield’s work, put in historical perspective
• Linguistic Society of America – Official website of the Linguistic Society of America
• Structural linguistics – On its history, contributions and relevance

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