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Leonard Bloomfield
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Leonard Bloomfield (1887 - 1949) was an American linguist. 1914 he wrote Introduction to the Study of Language which was in later editons just called Language. The book is intended for a general audience and addresses general issues about language often ignored.
Leonard Bloomfield was a prominent Yale University linguistics professor who learned the Cree language and then spent five weeks during the summer of l925 on the Sweet Grass Reserve near Battleford Agency, Saskatchewan. The work he did there was tremendously useful, as he recorded from dictation tales from the oral tradition.
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Leonard Bloomfield's major works include An Introduction to the Study of Language (1914) and Language (1933). Bloomfield's ideas differed from the Port Royal school, because he sought to explain various languages by their own terminology, rather than try to fit all languages into the Latin mold. Contrary to the way he has been portrayed, Bloomfield did not leave meaning completely out of his study of linguistics. He was aware of the importance of meaning to the field, but did not integrate it into his scientific studies. He ... used diachronic studies along with synchronic ones (again, something he has been portrayed as leaving out). His views on meaning (and on several other issues) changed throughout his life-his early work reflected the ideas of Wilhelm Wundt of a dualism between the actual world and a non-physical mind.
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Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) is, together with Edward SAPIR, one of the two most prominent American linguists of the first half of the twentieth century. His book Language (Bloomfield 1933) was the standard introduction to linguistics for thirty years. Together with his students, particularly Bernard Bloch, Zellig Harris, and Charles Hockett, Bloomfield established the school of thought that has come to be known as American structural linguistics, which dominated the field until the rise of GENERATIVE GRAMMAR in the 1960s.
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Leonard Bloomfield was born in Chicago, Illinois on April 1, 1887, and his family later moved to Wisconsin. He graduated with an A. B. from Harvard in 1906, and did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Chicago, where he wrote his dissertation on "A Semasiological Differentiation in Germanic Secondary Ablaut," finishing in 1909. Bloomfield spent a year teaching German at the University of Cincinnati before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois. He subsequently spent a year studying German in Leipzig and Gottingen. Upon returning to Illinois, he began to study Tagalog, trying to find ways of explaining it by what it was itself rather than with a comparison to Latin. He moved on to study American Indian languages, especially Algonkian, and was influential in promoting the study of these languages.
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Leonard Bloomfield was born on April 1, 1887, in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard College at the age of 19 and did graduate work for 2 years at the University of Wisconsin, where he ... taught German. His interest in linguistics was aroused by Eduard Prokosch, a philologist in the German department. Bloomfield received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1909.
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