Recent publications in the history and philosophy of linguistics – November 2019

Emile BENVENISTE. 2019. Last Lectures. Collège de France 1968 and 1969. Edited by Jean-Claude Couet and Irène Fenoglio. Translated by John Joseph. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 196 p. ISBN 9781474439916
Publisher’s website

The first English translation of the last lectures of the leading French linguist Emile Benveniste.
Benveniste’s lectures had a shaping influence on a generation of scholars that includes Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva and Todorov and here, for the first time, these are made available in English for a new generation of linguists and philosophers of language. This book includes the full course of fifteen lectures which Benveniste gave in the Collège de France on the rue des Écoles in Paris between December 1968 and December 1969. Benveniste’s work as offered here presents the first serious attempt at reconciling the sign theories of Saussure and Peirce and draws together, language, writing and society into a comprehensive theory of signifying. Benveniste’s philosophy of language considers key concepts such as utterance, enunciation, speaker, discourse, subjectivity and as such is central to the areas of discourse analysis, text linguistics, pragmatics, semantics, conversational analysis, stylistics and semiotics.

Laurent VALLANCE. 2019. Les grammairiens italiens face à leur langue (15e–16e s.). Berlin: De Gruyter. 752 p. ISBN 978-3-11-042758-5
Publisher’s website

Based on the broadest corpus ever analyzed (25 grammars published between 1440 and 1586), this study offers a comprehensive view of grammatical thought during the Italian Renaissance – the first of its kind since the works of Trabalza (1908) and Kukenheim (1932). Devoting a particular attention to the historical context, the method and structure of each work, it highlights three linguistic innovations: article, compound tenses, and conditional.