BLOOMFIELD, LEONARD

BLOOMFIELD, LEONARD (1887–1949), American linguist. Bloomfield, chiefly through his book Language, became the most influential individual in guiding the development of American descriptive linguistics. He taught at various American universities and from 1940 to 1949 was professor of linguistics at Yale. His interests widened from Indo-European to other language groups and into problems of general linguistics. He published his first inclusive survey of the field An Introduction to the Study of Language (1914); later he published Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis (1917); and in the early 1920s began his long series of important contributions to the study of the Algonquian languages spoken by many North American Indian tribes. His interest in the practical application of linguistics to the teaching of languages remained strong throughout his life, and he wrote a number of textbooks and a general work, Outline Guide for the Practical Study of Foreign Languages (1942). He was one of the founders of the Linguistic Society of America, and served a term as its president. His most important work, Language (1933), though outdated in several respects, is still used as a standard textbook in many places. It has provided generations of linguists with a survey of the whole field, an analytical framework, and a basic approach to language as a subject for scientific inquiry. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: B. Bloch, in: Language, 25 (1949), 87–98. (Haim Blanc)