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) reacted sociologically to the advent of generative grammar. I call…
Blog Archives
The journal WORD and the structural heritage of usage-based linguistics: Three functional tenets and an overarching principle
Enrico Torre UniversitĂ degli Studi di Genova The first issue of WORD was launched in 1945, announced on its front cover as âthe journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, devoted to the study of linguistic science in all…
The foreign entanglements of Mandarin Chinese in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
MĂ„rten Söderblom Saarela Academia Sinica in Taipei This blog post will discuss some transnational aspects of the history of Mandarin Chinese, what in the twentieth century became codified as the national language of China. I will first briefly discuss what…
Speech sounds in the field: Dynamical approaches to phonology after Maxwell and Einstein
Alexander Teixeira Kalkhoff UniversitĂ€t 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 as the movement of planets, gravity, magnetism, electricity, or light, posed a…
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, America, Article, Europe, Field linguistics, History, Linguistics
Grammaticalisation clines: a brief conceptual history
Martin KonviÄka Freie UniversitĂ€t 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 âa metaphor for the empirical observation that cross-linguistically forms tend to undergo…
Tagged with: clines, grammaticalization, typology
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, historical linguistics, Linguistics, Typology
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, historical linguistics, Linguistics, Typology
Henry Sweet, a model for John Rupert Firth?
Angela Senis UniversitĂ© 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 paper that is soon to be proposed…
Tagged with: Firth, Sweet
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, Europe, History, Linguistics
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, Europe, History, Linguistics
Towards 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 concepts was translated into the…
Tagged with: concept list, historical linguistics, Morris Swadesh, Swadesh list
Posted in 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, Article, historical linguistics, Lexicography, Linguistics
Posted in 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, Article, historical linguistics, Lexicography, Linguistics
“Except in the case of Andrade”: Manuel J. Andrade’s Quileute (1933) on the questions of “drift” and “function”
Perry Wong University of Chicago While currently nearly unknown, Manuel J. Andrade (1885-1941)[1] is one of the central figures in the history of linguistics in the United States. He was a student of Boas at Columbia and an early methodological…
Tagged with: American languages, American structuralism, Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, Sapir
Posted in 20th century, America, Article, Field linguistics, History, Linguistics, Pragmatics, Structuralism
Posted in 20th century, America, Article, Field linguistics, History, Linguistics, Pragmatics, Structuralism
Discussing Disciplinary Development: The role of the First International Congress of Linguists (1928) in the formation of the discipline of general linguistics
Emma Mojet University of Amsterdam Why congresses? The organisation of an international congress of a discipline marks a noteworthy stage in the development of a discipline. Taking a broader perspective, the many first disciplinary congresses held around 1900 also mark…
âKarte und Gebiet’. Die Spatialisierung von Sprache in der Dialektologie des Deutschen von 1918 bis 1955.
Jan David Braun UniversitĂ€t Wien & Ăsterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Bericht aus einer Akademie)[1] Vorbemerkung Der vorliegende Text ist ein Bericht aus den bisherigen Arbeiten und eine ErklĂ€rung einiger theoretischer AnsĂ€tze zu meiner wissenschaftshistorischen Dissertation, die folgenden Arbeitstitel trĂ€gt: “Die…
Tagged with: cartography, dialect geography, Dialectology
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, Europe, History, Linguistics
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, Europe, History, Linguistics
