Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield 

Who is Leonard Bloomfield? 


Leonard Bloomfield was born on April 1, 1887, in Chicago, He graduated from Harvard College and He founded American structuralism. He is especially known for his book Language (1933), describing the state of the art of linguistics at its time. Bloomfield was the main founder of the Linguistic Society of America. 


Which proposes the American structuralism?


The term structuralism is used in many contexts in different disciplines in the 20th century. Structuralism proposes the idea that many phenomena do not occur in isolation, but instead occur in relation to each other, and that all related phenomena are part of a whole with a definite, but not necessarily defined, structure.


 The important points of Leonard Bloomfield are: 
• Bloomfield was the main founder of the Linguistic Society of America.
 • Bloomfield's thought was mainly characterized by its behavioristic principles for the study of meaning, its insistence on formal procedures for the analysis of language data, as well as a general concern to provide linguistics with rigorous scientific methodology. 
• Leonard Bloomfield is not only considered one of the best Linguists of his time, he is considered one of the best of all time. 


American Structuralism 


American structuralism based on structural linguistics developed by Saussure. Bloomfield is known for applying the principles of behaviorist psychology to linguistics, defining "the meaning of a linguistic form as the situation in which the speaker utters it, and the response it calls forth in the hearer." (Oller, 1979).
Sapir's work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American "structuralism." When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly influenced by Wundt's psychology of language. 
In 1933, however, he published a drastically revised and expanded version with the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behavioristic approach to the study of language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to mental or conceptual categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption of the behavioristic theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Because science was still a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most stimuli, no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of meaning for some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing the grammatical analysis of a language on semantic considerations. Bloomfield's followers pushed even further the attempt to develop methods of linguistic analysis that were not based on meaning. One of the most characteristic features of "post-Bloomfieldian" American structuralism, then, was its almost complete neglect of semantics. 




 Bibliography
 http://encyclopedia.kids.net.au/page/st/Structuralism 
http://www.soc.hyogo-u.ac.jp/tani/amstructuralsim.htm
http://dona-te.blogspot.mx/2007/11/structuralism-bloomfield.html http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Found/bloomfieldbio.
html http://www.bookrags.com/biography/leonard-bloomfield/