Bloomfield, Leonard (1887-1949)

US linguist who carried out extensive field research, notably on Tagalog (Filipino), spoken in the Philippines, and on the languages of North American Indians. His widely influential Languages 1933 is a rigorous analysis of the theory and methodology of linguistic research.

Bloomfield's aim was to make linguistics a scientific discipline. This led him to adopt a behaviourist approach to research, concerned solely with what can be observed and measured - with form (phonology, syntax, and morphology) rather than meaning (semantics). He stressed that research should concentrate on the spoken rather than the written language, and argued that at any given time the sounds and forms of a language could be seen as a complete system, the history of their gradual evolution (the focus of 19th-century philosophy) being irrelevant. Bloomfield's ideas dominated American linguistics until the appearance of Noam Chomsky's theories in the late 1950s.

He was professor of linguistics at Chicago University 1927-40 and at Yale from 1940.