Leonard bloomfield’s linguistic legacy

Abstract

Summary Leonard Bloomfield’s system of linguistics was recast by his colleagues and students. His morphophonemic phonology influenced Chomsky’s early generative phonology. His version of Wundt’s psychologically based immediate constituent analysis was adopted by the distributionalists, and later also by the Chomskyans, each for different reasons. His descriptive semantics was left out of American linguistics except for some linguistic anthropologists who came back to it around 1955. Finally, despite the restraint of his descriptions and his principles, the sources of distributionalism can be found in Bloomfield’s denial of lexical synonymy and his use of zeros in morphology.