Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist whose 1933 textbook Language defined the methodology of American structural linguistics for a generation, insisting that grammatical analysis proceed from directly observable distributional evidence rather than from meaning or from inherited grammatical categories borrowed from Latin. In 1924 he joined George Bolling and Edgar Sturtevant in organizing the Linguistic Society of America, drafting the society's founding call and later serving as its president, and the society's journal Language, which he helped launch, remains one of the field's leading venues.