Floris SolleveldUniversity of Bristol Two unpublished histories of the British and Foreign Bible Society were written in the 1820s to 1830s (BFBS Archives, Cambridge University Library, GBR/0374/BFBS/BSA/E3/8/1 and E3/8/2). It is unclear to me why there were two, both by…
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. The evacuation at Dunkirk was under way; the…
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 is a key concept in phenomenology and it…
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) from semantics by referring to the meaningless, yet grammatically well-formed – and…
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 published in 2019. A…
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 Chinese. Quang Anh Le, Time-marking particles and the…
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. Jane Simpson, Grammars for analysis, grammars for…
In this talk, Penny Lee presents some preliminary results from her research into the personal diaries of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941).
Camiel HamansUniversity of Amsterdam/Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań 27 June 1668, the Amsterdam prosecutor demanded a remarkable punishment: the accused should be displayed on the scaffold, his right thumb should be cut off, his tongue should be pierced with a glowing…
Margaret Thomas Boston College Introduction In May 2019, the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America approved of a ‘Statement on Race’ (https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/lsa-statement-race), which puts on record the society’s opposition to racialization in the study of language, and in…
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 