Leonard Bloomfield

What is Bloomfield's theory of linguistics?

In the writing of Language, Bloomfield claimed that linguistic phenomena could properly and successfully be studied when isolated from their nonlinguistic environment. Adhering to behaviourist principles, he avoided all but empirical description.

His famous book LANGUAGE defining the meaning of a linguistic form as “the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer.”

"The most difficult step in the study of language is the first step."

I am Leonard Bloomfield, an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. I am considered to be the father of American distributionalism.