Podcast episode 3: Language classification
In this episode, we look at language classification in the first half of the nineteenth century and at some key ideas in the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt....
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What is Syriac and what is Aramaic according to Syriac grammarians (8th-16th...
Margherita Farina Histoire des Théories Linguistiques (Paris) What is Aramaic? In modern linguistic terms, we can say that Aramaic is a linguistic group, composed by dialectal varieties defined on a...
View ArticlePodcast episode 4: Interview with Jürgen Trabant on Wilhelm von Humboldt
In this episode, we talk to Jürgen Trabant about Wilhelm von Humboldt. https://hiphilangsci.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/hiphilangsci_004_int.mp3 Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts References for...
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Galant grammarians: Donneau de Visé’s Mercure galant
Doyle Calhoun Yale University (Department of French) What was the Mercure galant and why should it interest historians of linguistics? Founded in 1672 by Jean Donneau de Visé (1638–1710) — journalist...
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Johann Christoph Adelung, a forerunner of modern bilingual lexicography
Jacques François University of Caen-Normandy www.interlingua.fr 1. A forgotten German Enlightenment philosopher Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806) was one of the main promoters of the Volksaufklärung...
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Racialization, language science, and nineteenth century anthropometrics
Margaret Thomas Boston College Introduction In May 2019, the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America approved of a ‘Statement on Race’...
View ArticleThe Facts of Whorf’s Hopi Research
In this talk, Penny Lee presents some preliminary results from her research into the personal diaries of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941). This presentation was originally given at the 2020 meeting of...
View ArticleHistory of Linguistics in Australia
The following are a selection of three talks on the history of linguistics in Australia originally delivered at the meeting of the Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific, December 2020....
View ArticleHistory of Linguistics in East and South-East Asia
Below are two talks originally presented at the meeting of the Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific, December 2020, on the history of the grammatical description of Vietnamese and...
View ArticleJohn Goldsmith – Battle in the Mind Fields
John Goldsmith (University of Chicago) has made a series of 10 videos – one for each chapter – about the book Battle in the Mind Fields, which he wrote with Bernard Laks (University of Paris) and...
View ArticleIn the Shadow of the Standard – a workshop
Olivia Walsh University of Nottingham On Saturday 22 September 2018, I organized a workshop, ‘In the Shadow of the Standard’, at the University of Nottingham. The aim of the workshop was two-fold:...
View ArticleTowards a history of concept list compilation in historical linguistics
Johann-Mattis List Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena A large proportion of lexical data of the world’s languages is presented in the form of word lists in which a set of...
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Pierre-Philippe Potier’s Elementa Grammaticae Huronicae (1745)
Zanna Van Loon University of Leuven Introduction Instead of imposing European languages, Catholic friars conducting missions in the Americas in the early modern period opted to learn indigenous...
View ArticleHenry Sweet, a model for John Rupert Firth?
Angela Senis Université Bordeaux Montaigne This post introduces a few of the insights developed during the Henry Sweet Society colloquium in 2017. My full research on this topic is the subject of a...
View ArticleGrammaticalisation clines: a brief conceptual history
Martin Konvička Freie Universität Berlin 1 Grammaticalisation clines In this blog post, I will sketch the history of grammaticalisation clines. Hopper and Traugott (2003: 6) understand this concept as...
View ArticleJohn Hart and the Beginning of English Linguistics in Tudor England
Andrew Ji Ma Southern University of Science and Technology, China 1. Introduction John Hart (c. 1501–1574) is a remarkable figure in the history of British linguistic thought. Along with Thomas Smith...
View ArticleSpeech sounds in the field: Dynamical approaches to phonology after Maxwell...
Alexander Teixeira Kalkhoff Universität Freiburg 1 The notion of field in physics The mutual interaction, i.e. attraction and repulsion, of bodies across space without direct mechanical contact, such...
View ArticleWhy women botanists outnumbered women linguists in nineteenth century Australia
Jane Simpson Australian National University 1. Introduction In colonial Australia (1788–1901), only about a dozen women are recorded as documenting Australian languages, compared with nearly 300 women...
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The formalisation of grammatical meanings in Copenhagen structural...
Lorenzo Cigana University of Copenhagen (NorS) The aim of this outline contribution, which will receive a proper treatment elsewhere, is to describe a single piece within the broader mosaic of European...
View ArticleThe journal WORD and the structural heritage of usage-based linguistics:...
Enrico Torre Università degli Studi di Genova The first issue of WORD was launched in 1945, announced on its front cover as “the journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, devoted to the study of...
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Language in and out of society: Converging critiques of the Labovian paradigm
Johannes Woschitz University of Edinburgh The following text is based on and is, where appropriate, an elaboration of Woschitz (2019), a paper I have recently published and which is the centrepiece of...
View ArticlePodcast episode 1: Pre-history of comparative-historical linguistics
The first series of the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast looks at the history of modern linguistics. We begin in this episode by examining the pre-history of...
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Has the LSA Been a Generativist-Dominated Organisation?
Frederick J. Newmeyer University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and University of Washington There are two stories about how the field of linguistics (at least in the United States)...
View ArticlePodcast episode 2: Comparative-historical linguistics – Bopp and Grimm
In this episode, we look at the emergence of comparative-historical grammar, focusing on the work of Franz Bopp and Jacob Grimm....
View ArticleDer Siegener Diskursmonitor – ein Onlineportal zur strategischen Kommunikation
Friedemann Vogel, Fabian Deus & Clemens Knobloch Universität Siegen 1. Gegenstand und Ziel des Diskursmonitors Der “Diskursmonitor” (www.diskursmonitor.de) ist ein disziplinenübergreifendes,...
View ArticleBeing critical: Elements of Critical Theory in the work of critical discourse...
Diego Romeo University of Edinburgh The constellation of linguistic research broadly labelled as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can hardly be understood as the homogeneous product of a monolithic...
View ArticleColorless green ideas and the others
Martin Konvička (Freie Universität Berlin)* 1 Colorless green ideas In the opening pages of his Syntactic Structures (1957: 15)[1], Noam Chomsky demonstrates the independence of grammar (or syntax)...
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Intentionality in phenomenology and speech act theory
Els Elffers 1. Introduction Phenomenology covers a large area, and the same is true of speech act theory. Here I will focus on one point of contact between them, namely intentionality. Intentionality...
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The 1940 BFBS Conference on African Languages
Floris SolleveldUniversity of Bristol On 28 May 1940, a group of 33 people met at the British and Foreign Bible Society headquarters (‘Bible House’) in London for a conference on African languages....
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Language and the Missionary World Map
Floris SolleveldUniversity of Bristol Two unpublished histories of the British and Foreign Bible Society were written in the 1820s to 1830s (BFBS Archives, Cambridge University Library,...
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Ludwig Noiré and the Debate on Language Origins in the 19th Century
Jacopo D’Alonzo Sorbonne Nouvelle & Sapienza Università di Roma Renato Guttuso, Contadini al lavoro. Source Introduction Linguistic naturalism was one of the main positions taken in linguistic...
View ArticleMissionary linguistics and the German contribution to Central Australian...
David Moore University of Western Australia Introduction This article explores the outstanding contribution of German Lutheran missionaries to linguistics, language documentation and translation in...
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Mapping Language: linguistic cartography as a topic for the history of science
Jan David Zimmermann (Braun) University of Vienna Map of Deutscher Volks- und Kulturboden, by Albrecht Penck (design) and Arnold Hillen Ziegfeld (cartographer; Penck 1925: 73). Introduction Beginning...
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La langue de Boas. Quelques remarques à propos de l’écriture de Franz Boas.
Chloé Laplantine UMR 7597 – Laboratoire Histoire des Théories Linguistiques, Université Paris Diderot F. Boas posant en train de représenter un chasseur de phoque inuit (Minden, Allemagne, 1885) As we...
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The Prague Linguistic Circle and the Analogy between Musicology and Linguistics
Bart Karstens University of Amsterdam In recent historiography an upsurge in interest in the interaction between academic disciplines can be seen. This is in no small part due to the rise of the...
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Joseph Greenberg’s comparative notebooks
Judith Kaplan University of Pennsylvania In John Webster Spargo’s 1931 translation of Holger Pedersen’s contribution to the genre of Disziplingeschichte, readers are introduced to a legion of mostly...
View ArticlePraxeology and language: Social science as the study of human action
Daniel W. Hieber University of California, Santa Barbara danielhieber.com Introduction Since the formulation and elaboration of speech act theory by Grice (1957; 1969), Austin (1962) and Searle (1962)...
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Missionary-induced language change, on the trail of the conditional in...
Nick Thieberger University of Melbourne Can a missionary make a change to a language so that an existing construction is replaced by one based on English? This is what appears to have happened in...
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Speech act theory and Georg von der Gabelentz
Sven Staffeldt University of Würzburg 1. The modernity of the ancestors Georg von der Gabelentz(Ezawa & Vogel 2013, 28) There is a trend in linguistics – or maybe even in general – to reclaim the...
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From godly analogy to “distant like floating clouds”: the inevitability of...
Yukun Zeng University of Chicago Li Fang-Kuei and Edward Sapir (Sources: Li & Sapir) 1. The Problem of Scaling in Language Classification Language classification is a matter of scale and scaling....
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Benvenuto Terracini and the history of linguistics between the 19th and 20th...
Diego Stefanelli University of Pavia Benvenuto Terracini (1886–1968) Source: Atlante Linguistico Italiano Benvenuto Terracini (1886–1968) was a notable Italian linguist who lived through all the most...
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Primitive Languages: linguistic determinism and the description of Aranda...
David Moore University of Western Australia Strehlow Research Centre, Alice Springs. Photo by Alex Nelson. Introduction The view that Australian Aboriginal languages are primitive endured into the...
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Wilhelm Wundt and the Lautgesetze Controversy
Lia Formigari Sapienza Università di Roma Wilhelm Wundt (centre) with his research group, ca. 1880 (source: Wikimedia Commons) A long-dominant historiographical tradition, culminating in Hugo...
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‛Karte und Gebiet’. Die Spatialisierung von Sprache in der Dialektologie des...
Jan David Zimmermann (Braun) Universität Wien & Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften Wissenschaft, Alfred Kubin, 1901. Quelle (Bericht aus einer Akademie)[1] Vorbemerkung Der vorliegende...
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Discussing Disciplinary Development: The role of the First International...
Emma Mojet University of Amsterdam Newspaper cutting from Leidsch Dagblad, 1928, on the opening of the First International Congress of Linguists in The Hague. On the first row, from left to right, J....
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“Except in the case of Andrade”: Manuel J. Andrade’s Quileute (1933) on the...
Perry Wong University of Chicago “PLATE: Portrait of Manuel J. Andrade (1885-1941)……Frontispiece” is the caption. This image, included at the beginning of the posthumously published “Materials on the...
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Lawyers, Linguists and Truthiness
Douglas Kibbee University of Illinois Michigan Supreme Court in the Hall of Justice. Source: Wikimedia Commons Are lies information? This was the question before the Supreme Court of Michigan in a 2016...
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What Zarathustra said: The sixty-year controversy regarding...
Floris Solleveld University of Amsterdam Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Zend-Avesta, ouvrage de Zoroastre, vol. I (1771), title page (source) In 1771, a French scholarly adventurer by the name of...
View ArticleSome reflections on the uses and abuses of theory in linguistic thought
Jon Orman My purpose in this piece is to offer a few brief thoughts on a series of questions with which I have become increasingly interested in recent months. Linguistics, it seems to me, is awash...
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Typology – a new task of linguistics
James McElvenny University of Edinburgh In lieu of an introduction Below I offer an English translation of the last essay Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) personally submitted for publication,...
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