JESPERSEN,OTTO, BLOOMFIELD,LEONARD, AND AMERICAN STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS

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.