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…
In this talk, Penny Lee presents some preliminary results from her research into the personal diaries of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941).
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 