ABSTRACT
Since the publication of Leonard Bloomfield's Language in 1933, according to Hockett's foreword, 'most American linguistic investigation, and a good deal of that done elsewhere, has borne the mark of Bloomfield's synthesis'. Bloomfield's indignation has not only social and political motives, but professional ones as well. He is annoyed that 'the knowledge' 'gained' by 'linguistics' 'has no place in our educational programme', which 'confines itself to handing on the traditional notions'. Bloomfield's ideal model is clear: 'the methods of linguistics, in spite of their modest scope, resemble those of a natural science, the domain in which science has been the most successful'. In effect, Bloomfield's scientific ambitions mix pessimism with optimism. Like Firth, Bloomfield says 'the throat and mouth' are not, in a physiological sense, "organs of speech", for they serve biologically earlier uses like 'breathing and eating', but derives his terms for phonemes from the shape of the oral cavity and the movements of the tongue and lips.
