In this episode, we take a step back to explore the earliest beginnings of functional linguistics as represented by the work of Philipp Wegener.

In this episode, we talk to Chloé Laplantine about the life and work of French structuralist Émile Benveniste.

In this episode, we enter the age of classical structuralism by exploring the phonological research of Roman Jakobson and his colleague Nikolai Trubetzkoy undertaken within the Prague Linguistic Circle.

In this interview, we talk to Michael Ashby about the emergence and development of phonetics in the 19th and early 20th century.

In this interview, we talk to John Joseph about Ferdinand de Saussure.

In this episode, we look at Ferdinand de Saussure’s contributions to linguistics, which are widely considered to be foundational to the later movement of structuralism.

In this interview, we talk to Floris Solleveld about the character of linguistic research in the 19th century.

In this episode, we examine some of the major critiques directed against the Neogrammarians and see what they tell us about the state of linguistics around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. We focus in particular on…

In this episode, we introduce the Neogrammarians, the dominant school of linguistics in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

In this episode, we look first at the critiques of Schleicher’s “physical” and Steinthal’s “psychological” theory of language put forward by the American linguist William Dwight Whitney. We then turn to Whitney’s own conception of language as a “human institution”…