Leonard Bloomfield's Descriptive and Comparative Studies of Algonquian

SUMMARYBloomfield's Algonquian studies comprise a large body of descriptive and comparative work on Fox, Cree, Menominee, and Ojibwa. The materials he used were derived from his own fieldwork, for the most part, and especially in the case of Fox from the published work of others. His major achievement was to bring explicitness and orderliness to the description of Algonquian inflectional and derivational morphology. An examination of the development of his solution to certain phonological problems in Menominee and of his practices in editing his Menominee texts shows his struggle to reconcile the conflicting goals, formulated in his general statements (in his 1933 Language and elsewhere), of describing a language by determining the norm of the speech community and documenting a language in exhaustive objective detail. In his diachronic studies Bloomfield reconstructed the phonology of Proto-Algonquian and worked out the historical phonology of the languages he was concerned with; his work on morphology was largely confined to the comparison and reconstruction of directly corresponding features. A normative approach to variation is evident in these diachronic studies as well.RÉSUMÉLes etudes algonquiennes de Bloomfield comprennent un grand nom-bre de travaux descriptifs et comparatifs sur le renard, le cri, le menomini et l'ojibwa. II basa son travail sur des materiaux recueillis eri grande partie sur place, et aussi, surtout quand il s'agissait du renard, sur des ouvrages publics par d'autres. De toutes ses contributions, la plus importante fut celle d'avoir mis de l'ordre et de la nettete dans la description de la morphologie flexionnelle et derivationnelle des langues algonquiennes. L'auteur examine de pres le developpement de la solution bloomfieldienne de certains pro-blemes phonologiques du menomini et de la pratique de Bloomfield en edi-tant ses textes menomini. Bloomfield dut lutter pour concilier deux buts opposes, qui furent formules dans ses declarations de principes (dans son livre Language [1933] et ailleurs): celui de decrire une langue en determinant la norme de la communaute linguistique, et celui de documenter la langue d'une faÇon detaillee et exhaustive. Dans ses etudes diachroniques, Bloomfield reconstruisit la structure phonologique du proto-algonquien et etablit la phonologie historique des langues dont il s'occupait. En etudiant la morphologie, il se limita en general a la comparaison et a la reconstruction de traits qui se correspondaient directement. Dans ses etudes diachroniques aussi, on aperÇoit un approche normatif de la variation.