Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) was the most influential American linguist between William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) and Noam Chomsky (1928-). This work collects the major critical and interpretative writings on Bloomfield's work. It shows how his legacy of theory, description and comparison was transformed in diverse ways both by his contemporaries and by later generations of linguists.

The topics include biographical and general assessments of Bloomfield, reviews of his major works, appraisals of his views on phonology, morphology and syntax, his comparative work on Indo-European and Germanic, of his pioneering work on Austronesian and of his descriptive and comparative work on Algonquian, as well as his pedagogical works on English literacy and introductory German.