Bloomfield the Man

The wide-spread conception of Bloomfield as a cold, unfeeling person, devoted only to a naïve scientism, is discussed and refuted. The very intensity of his feelings led him to repress them and to give vent to them only indirectly, often which quiet but bitter wit and sarcasm. He consequently distanced himself from many of the normal concerns of every-day life and of university politics. This had unfortunate results in the failure of the University of Chicago’s administration to recognize his merits; his move to Yale in 1940; his wife’s resultant mental break-down on separation from her Chicago environment; and his ensuing stroke in 1946. His contribution to linguistics during the war-years (1941–45) was thus outweighed by the loss of further influence he might have had on the development of American “structuralism” after 1946.