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Otto Jespersen, Leonard Bloomfield, and American Structural Linguistics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Julia S. Falk
Julia S. Falk*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
*
Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Ml 48824-1027
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Abstract

Otto Jespersen and his work were well known and widely recognized in American linguistics during early decades of the 20th century, particularly by Leonard Bloomfield. This study investigates Bloomfield’s references to Jespersen’s works on the structure and history of English, the nature of language change, and foreign language teaching, and finds that Bloomfield’s few criticisms of Jespersen’s writings were concentrated in the brief period 1922-1927 and were focused almost entirely on issues of science and method as Bloomfield had come to define them at the time. The study further documents and offers explanations for widespread underrepresentation of Jespersen’s work by American structuralists in the 1940s and 1950s and by historians of American structural linguistics. It concludes with a brief account of the renewed interest in Jespersen during recent decades.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , September 1992, pp. 465 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Charles Hockett, John Joseph, and Terry Langendoen for the helpful comments, insightful criticisms, detailed suggestions, and important references they generously provided at several stages in the development of this paper.

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