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…
Blog Archives
History 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 Chinese. Quang Anh Le, Time-marking particles and the…
The 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).
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’ (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…
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) reacted sociologically to the advent of generative grammar. I call…
The journal WORD and the structural heritage of usage-based linguistics: Three functional tenets and an overarching principle
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 linguistic science in all…
The foreign entanglements of Mandarin Chinese in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Mårten 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 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 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 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 “a 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 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 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
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 