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Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887-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 for the first half of the 20th century.

His work helped to establish linguistics as an independent scientific discipline. Avoiding cognitive processes and other non-observable processes, Bloomfield applied behavioristic principles to the field rejecting the view that the structure of language reflects the structure of thought. While his approach established linguistics as a scientific discipline, his isolation of linguistic phenomena from their non-linguistic mental and social environment, was a serious limitation, as human beings are social beings and language is an essential tool of communication.

Leonard Bloomfield was born on April 1, 1887, 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 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 Alice Sayers on March 18, 1909.

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 aspects of language.

Meanwhile, in 1913-1914 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.

Bloomfield’s earliest work was in historical Germanic studies, beginning with his dissertation, and continuing with a number of papers on Indo-European and Germanic phonology and morphology. His post-doctoral studies in Germany further strengthened his expertise in the Neogrammarian tradition, which still dominated Indo-European historical studies. Bloomfield throughout his career, but particularly during his early career, emphasized the Neogrammarian principle of regular sound change as a foundational concept in historical linguistics.

Bloomfield’s work in Indo-European beyond his dissertation was limited to an article on palatal consonants in Sanskrit and one article on the Sanskrit grammatical tradition associated with Pāṇini, in addition to a number of book reviews. Bloomfield made extensive use of Indo-European materials to explain historical and comparative principles in both of his textbooks, an Introduction to the Study of Language (1914), and his seminal Language (1933). In his textbooks he selected Indo-European examples that supported the key Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change, and emphasized a sequence of steps essential to success in comparative work:

Appropriate data in the form of texts which must be studied intensively and analysed;

Application of the comparative method;

Reconstruction of proto-forms.

He further emphasized the importance of dialect studies where appropriate, and noted the significance of sociological factors such as prestige, and the impact of meaning. In addition to regular linguistic change, Bloomfield also allowed for borrowing and analogy.

It is argued that Bloomfield’s Indo-European work had two broad implications: «He stated clearly the theoretical bases for Indo-European linguistics» and «he established the study of Indo-European languages firmly within general linguistics».

As part of his training with leading Indo-Europeanists in Germany in 1913 and 1914 Bloomfield studied the Sanskrit grammatical tradition originating with Pāṇini, who lived in northwestern India during the sixth century BC. Pāṇini’s grammar is characterized by its extreme thoroughness and explicitness in accounting for Sanskrit linguistic forms. Bloomfield noted that «Pāṇini gives the formation of every inflected, compounded, or derived word, with an exact statement of the sound-variations (including accent) and of the meaning». In a letter to Algonquianist Truman Michelson, Bloomfield noted «My models are Pāṇini and the kind of work done in Indo-European by my teacher, Professor Wackernagel of Basle».

Pāṇini’s systematic approach to analysis includes components for:

Forming grammatical rules,

An inventory of sounds,

A list of verbal roots organized into sublists,

A list of classes of morphs.

Bloomfield’s approach to key linguistic ideas in his textbook Language reflect the influence of Pāṇini in his treatment of basic concepts such as linguistic form, free form, and others. Similarly, Pāṇini is the source for Bloomfield’s use of the terms exocentric and endocentric used to describe compound words. Concepts from Pāṇini are found in Eastern Ojibwa, published posthumously in 1958, in particular his use of the concept of a morphological zero, a morpheme that has no overt realization. Pāṇini’s influence is also present in Bloomfield’s approach to determining parts of speech (Bloomfield uses the term «form-classes») in both Eastern Ojibwa and in the later Menomini language, published posthumously in 1962.

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 a long-lasting cooperation. They both applied the logical positivist approach to science, and agreed that linguistics needed a 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 the 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), through which he achieved wide fame. The book produced such a strong influence that the period from 1933, when it was published, until the 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.

Charles F. Hockett (ed.), A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. — ISBN 0-226-06071-3;

Hall, Robert A. Jr. Leonard Bloomfield: Essays on his life and work. Amsterdam: Benjamins 1987. — ISBN 90-272-4530-4;

Hockett, Charles F. Leonard Bloomfield: after fifty years // Historiographia linguistica 1999, 26/3, 295-311;

Fought, John G. Leonard Bloomfield’s linguistic legacy: later uses of some technical features // Historiographia linguistica 1999, 26/3, 313-332.

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