Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield (* April 2, 1887 Chicago, Illinois, † April 18, 1949 New Haven ) was an American linguist and the relevant representative of the American structuralism in linguistics. His major work, Language is considered the most significant linguistic book of the 20th century.
Life
Leonard Bloomfield was born in Chicago, the son of Sigmund and Carola Buber Bloomfield. His uncle was Maurice Bloomfield (1855-1928), professor of Sanskrit and comparative linguistics at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Bloomfield enrolled in 1903 in the Harvard College in Boston, where he graduated in 1906 with a Bachelor. He continued his studies in Wisconsin, where he studied with Eduard Prokosch and decided on a career as a linguist.
1908 Leonard Bloomfield was appointed " Assistant in German and Graduate Studies " at the University of Chicago. A year later he earned his doctorate under Francis A. Wood with "A Semasiologic differentiation in Germanic secondary ablaut ". In the same year he married Alice Sayers.
In the years 1909/1910 he worked as an " Instructor in German " at the University of Cincinnati. Until 1913 he worked in the German Department of the University of Illinois.
As for the employees there a study stay in Germany was an essential condition for the promotion, Bloomfield went to the winter semester 1913/14, to Leipzig where he continued his studies of the historical- comparative linguistics at the neogrammarians August Leskien and Karl Brugmann. In the summer semester 1914, he studied in Göttingen, where he finished in Jacob Wackernagel indogermanisitische courses, Indology at Hermann Oldenberg events attended and was devoted to Iranian studies at Friedrich Carl Andreas.
From 1913 to 1921 Bloomfield " Assistant Professor of Comparative Philology and German " at the University of Illinois. During this time he began his first studies of the Algonquian languages. In the summer months of 1920 and 1921 Bloomfield did field research at the Menominee in Wisconsin. His writings served as a basis for the posthumously published grammar "The Menominee Language", which is still regarded as the standard work of this language.
From 1921 to Bloomfield worked as a colleague of the behaviorists Albert P. Weiss ( 1879-1931 ) as a "Professor of German and Linguistics " at Ohio State University. Bloomfield was in 1924 with George M. Bolling and Edgar H. Sturtevant to the founding committee of the " Linguistic Society of America."
In 1927 he went to Chicago, where he worked until 1940 Department of Germanic Philology at the University of Chicago. In 1933 his most famous work "Save ".
In 1935, he was appointed President of the Linguistic Society of America ( LSA). As the successor of Edward Sapir was Leonard Bloomfield 1940 " Sterling Professor of Linguistics " at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Teaching
Bloomfield's major work Language ( 1933) is a systematic overall presentation of linguistics, in which he summarized the terminology and methodology of American structuralism and codified. He joined " the tradition of comparative linguistics with the structuralism ... and the sound ethnolinguistisch descriptivism " (Franz Boas ). The self-imposed methodological rigor, which was exacerbated by his connection to the behaviorism of Albert Paul Weiss, Bloomfield led to great restraint in dealing with the linguistic meaning, while not excluded from the field of linguistics -related topics, but pushed to the periphery been. The older European language in the history of science representations often encountered assertion that the American structuralism was " hostile opinion ," is a prejudice.
Of great influence on the later linguistics was Bloomfield's Menominee Morphophonemics essay from 1939, developed an early form of a generative grammar in Bloomfield.