Bloomfield, Leonard

Bloomfield, Leonard (1887-1949), American linguist, born in Chicago, graduated from Harvard in 1906, and received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1909. He was very influential in the founding of the Linguistic Society of America in 1924. Bloomfield is best known for his commitment to linguistics as an autonomous science, and his insistence on scientific discovery procedures for the establishment of linguistic units. Early in his career he was influenced by behaviourism, and grounded his work, especially his approach to meaning, in its principles. In 1933 his major work, Language, was published; it synthesized the theory and practice of linguistic analysis, and his approach and thinking dominated the development of linguistics, particularly in America, for upwards of the next 20 years. His approach was later called “structuralist” because it used various techniques in the identification and classification of elements of sentence structure.