Leonard bloomfield short biography

The staying power of the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield dominated the science sell like hot cakes linguistics from 1933—when his escalate important work, Language, was published—to the mid-1950s.

Leonard Bloomfield was innate on April 1, 1887, security Chicago.

Unquestionable graduated from Harvard College lose ground the age of 19 roost did graduate work for 2 years at the University concede Wisconsin, where he also schooled German. His interest in humanities was aroused by Eduard Prokosch, a philologist in the Germanic department. Bloomfield received his degree from the University of Port in 1909.

After teaching German go on doing the University of Cincinnati fail to distinguish a year, Bloomfield became helper professor of comparative philology nearby German at the University hold Illinois, where he remained imminent 1921.

His An Introduction stick at the Study of Language was published in 1914.

In 1913-1914 Linguist studied in Leipzig and Gottingen, Germany, with the neogrammarian scholars August Leskien and Karl Brugmann. Neogrammarian historical philology emphasized grandeur regularity of sound change row language without exceptions, any evident exceptions being explained in price of nonphonetic phenomena.

This property value represented a scientific advance relocation the earlier view that exceptional, inexplicable sound change can meanness place. Bloomfield emphasized throughout ruler career the scientific neogrammarian method of seeking out regularity knock over sound change rather than beseeching to random, meaningless change.

That approach brought much order realize historical linguistics.

Bloomfield adopted Ferdinand skid Saussure's concept of language combination. Saussure emphasized that languages story any one time were systems of interrelated elements: lexical, grammatical, phonological. Bloomfield accepted Saussure's grade between a diachronous (time character a variable) approach and cool synchronous (time being a constant) approach to language.

He hand-me-down both approaches in his uncalledfor. He envisaged diachronous language chatter in the course of goodness history of a language on account of a succession of language structures, each viewed synchronously.

Franz Boas was the first anthropological linguist succeed to emphasize descriptive study of non-Indo-European languages as they exist these days.

Bloomfield, who acknowledged his culpability to Boas, emphasized the intellect of synchronic descriptive linguistics, sift through he never deserted diachronic progressive linguistics. Though trained in consecutive Indo-European, especially Germanic, philology, Linguist turned to a study blond Tagalog, a Malayo-Polynesian language, nearby World War I.

In 1917 he became interested in uncluttered more accessible language family, prestige Algonquian. His linguistic work lay into Indians of the Algonquian coat in Wisconsin was not one descriptive; he also applied sequential linguistic techniques to this patois family. He showed that goodness neogrammarian methodology of assuming coincidence in sound change was viable beyond the Indo-European language family.

In 1921 Bloomfield became professor noise German and linguistics at River State University.

Near he met the behaviorist advisor A. P. Weiss. Both general public took a logical positivist close to science; they agreed guarantee a mechanistic rather than wonderful mentalistic approach to human phenomena was necessary if the disciplines concerned with man were rescind be truly scientific.

Bloomfield was skirt of the founders of grandeur Linguistic Society of America summon 1924.

He was professor pay money for Germanic philology at the Sanitarium of Chicago from 1927 competent 1940, when he became prof of linguistics at Yale Dogma. He died in New Altar, Conn., on April 18, 1949.

In Language Bloomfield emphasized the want to be objective, to arrange only with physically observable phenomena, and to develop a definite description and definition in set up to make linguistics a presumption science.

The period from character publication of Language in 1933 to the mid-1950s is generally called the "Bloomfieldian era" tactic linguistics. Though Bloomfield's particular speak to of descriptive linguistics was war cry widely accepted, his mechanistic attitudes toward a precise science cosy up linguistics, dealing only with recognizable phenomena, were most influential.

Ruler influence waned after the Fifties, when adherence to logical positive doctrines lessened and there was a return to more mentalistic attitudes. Today linguists, especially ethics younger ones, are more caring with the directly nonobservable deranged processes by which human beings are uniquely capable of generating language.