[4] The influence of Bloomfieldian structural linguistics declined in the late 1950s and 1960s as the theory of generative grammar developed by Noam Chomsky came to predominate.
His father immigrated to the United States as a child in 1868; the original family name Blumenfeld was changed to Bloomfield after their arrival.
[10] A meeting with Indo-Europeanist Eduard Prokosch, a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, convinced Bloomfield to pursue a career in linguistics.
During the summer of 1925 Bloomfield worked as Assistant Ethnologist with the Geological Survey of Canada in the Canadian Department of Mines, undertaking linguistic field work on Plains Cree; this position was arranged by Edward Sapir, who was then Chief of the Division of Anthropology, Victoria Museum, Geological Survey of Canada, Canadian Department of Mines.
[29] In his textbooks he selected Indo-European examples that supported the key Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change, and emphasized a sequence of steps essential to success in comparative work: (a) appropriate data in the form of texts which must be studied intensively and analysed; (b) application of the comparative method; (c) reconstruction of proto-forms.
"[32] As part of his training with leading Indo-Europeanists in Germany in 1913 and 1914 Bloomfield studied the Sanskrit grammatical tradition originating with Pāṇini, who lived in northwestern India during the fifth or fourth century BC.
[33] Pāṇini's grammar is characterized by its extreme thoroughness and explicitness in accounting for Sanskrit linguistic forms, and by its complex context-sensitive, rule-based generative structure.
Bloomfield noted that "Pāṇini gives the formation of every inflected, compounded, or derived word, with an exact statement of the sound-variations (including accent) and of the meaning".
[34] In a letter to Algonquianist Truman Michelson, Bloomfield noted "My models are Pāṇini and the kind of work done in Indo-European by my teacher, Professor Wackernagel of Basle.
Bloomfield used the materials collected in his descriptive work to undertake comparative studies leading to the reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian, with an early study reconstructing the sound system of Proto-Algonquian,[46] and a subsequent more extensive paper refining his phonological analysis and adding extensive historical information on general features of Algonquian grammar.
[47] Bloomfield undertook field research on Cree, Menominee, and Ojibwe, and analysed the material in previously published Fox text collections.
His first Algonquian research, beginning around 1919, involved study of text collections in the Fox language that had been published by William Jones and Truman Michelson.
Bloomfield's work on Swampy Cree provided data to support the predictive power of the hypothesis of exceptionless phonological change.
[26] Bloomfield's initial research on Ojibwe was through study of texts collected by William Jones, in addition to nineteenth century grammars and dictionaries.