In this episode, we talk to Chloé Laplantine about the life and work of French structuralist Émile Benveniste.
Read more ›CfP: Abralin International Congress, 22–30 Sept 2021
The main theme of InterAb 12 will be “Linguistics Challenges in Open Science”. This edition will be completely online. Proposals in all areas of linguistics are welcome. Papers covering the main theme will be considered for keynote.
All InterAb12 activities will be broadcast on Abralin’s YouTube channel with free and open access to everyone.
Submission deadline: 15 July (talks), 31 July (posters)
Further information: https://interab12.abralin.org/en/about/
Posted in Announcements, Conferences and workshops
Recent publications in the history and philosophy of the language sciences – June 2021
Velmezova, Ekaterina, ed. 2020. La Discussion Linguistique de 1950: 70 Ans Après [Epistemologica et Historiographica Linguistica Lausannensia 2]. Faculté des lettres, UNIL & Индрик. Lausanne & Moscou. 194 p. ISBN : 978-5-91674-626-6
Publisher’s website
The authors of the volume – researchers from Switzerland, Russia, Georgia, France, Estonia and Finland – share their thoughts on an event that occurred seventy years ago: the famous linguistic discussion that took place in the Soviet Union in 1950 and which radically changed the Soviet humanities. Articles published in Russian, French and English discuss the general context of the Soviet era that made the discussion possible, the Soviet languages and “national linguistic traditions” that were in one way or another influenced by or referred to in the discussion and the reception of the discussion in the West.
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Posted in Publications
Public talk online: The “Political” and the Language-Dialect Dichotomy, or Fact-Checking Noam Chomsky
Monday 21 June 2021, 11:00am CEST
The “Political” and the Language-Dialect Dichotomy, or Fact-Checking Noam Chomsky
Alexander Maxwell (Victoria University of Wellington)
In this talk, Alexander Maxwell suggests that linguists pondering the language-dialect dichotomy fall into two schools: apolitical agnostics who view the dichotomy as something political and therefore not linguistic, and objective assertionists, who declare the dichotomy ought to be analyzed on linguistic grounds to the exclusion of political factors. Since Noam Chomsky seems to straddle both schools, the paper then examines his comments on the dichotomy at length, fact-checking assertions concerning the linguistic diversity of Romance and Chinese and the putative scholarly consensus about Dutch and German. The extraordinary role of “the political” as a bugbear in linguistic thought also informs how scholars invoke the Weinreich witticism, and why it generates so much cognitive dissonance.
Please register using this form to receive the Zoom link to the talk: https://forms.gle/Dfc9w93rk8UuFzs77
This talk is organized by Raf Van Rooy (University of Oslo & KU Leuven Center for the Historiography of Linguistics), and partly frames the course “The history of western linguistics: A survey in myths”, taught at the University of Graz this spring.
Posted in Announcements, Conferences and workshops
Podcast episode 15: Roman Jakobson, Prague Circle structuralism and phonology
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.
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Posted in Podcast
Recent publications in the history and philosophy of the language sciences – May 2021
Maupas, Charles. 2021. Grammaire et syntaxe françoise. Édition de Nathalie Fournier. Paris : Classiques Garnier. (Descriptions et théories de la langue française, 4, in Grammaires françaises des xviie et xviiie siècles, 2). 637 p. ISBN : 978-2-406-10455-1
Publisher’s website
La Grammaire & syntaxe françoise de Charles Maupas (1607 et 1618) se signale par sa puissance théorique, son caractère méthodique et sa fine observation de l’usage du français. Cette édition critique entend montrer en quoi elle est un jalon décisif dans la jeune tradition grammaticale du français.
Chiflet, R. P. Laurent. 2021 [1659]. Essay d’une parfaite grammaire de la langue françoise. Édition de Cendrine Pagani-Naudet. Paris : Classiques Garnier (Grammaires françaises des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 3, in Descriptions et théories de la langue française 5). 525 p. ISBN : 978-2-406-10458-2
Publisher’s website
Posted in Publications, Uncategorized
Interview 1 : The Owl of Minerva takes flight only when dusk begins to gather”: Inverview with Sylvain Auroux
Interview conducted in Lyon, on March 10th, 2021 by Chloé Laplantine.
Film directed by Emilie Aussant, Chloé Laplantine and Rafaello Pisu.
Translation by Andrew Eastman.
Music from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes galantes (interpreted by Les Arts Florissants, at the Philarmonie de Paris).
The text of the interview has been edited in a bilingual version French / English, available here.
Read more ›
Posted in Interviews
John Goldsmith – Battle in the Mind Fields
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 French version (Aux origines des sciences humaines: Linguistique, philosophie, logique, psychologie 1840–1940) is coming out from Gallimard in fall 2021.
You can find the first of John’s videos embedded below and all ten up on his YouTube channel.
Les Dossiers d’HEL déménagent !
Les Dossiers d’HEL, the electronic supplement of the journal Histoire Épistémologie Langage, have moved.
You can find them at their new address :
http://shesl.org/index.php/les-dossiers-dhel/
Here are the issues already published :
Dossiers d’HEL n°1
Wilhelm Von Humboldt : éditer et lire Humboldt
Dossiers d’HEL n°2
Karl Bühler : Science du langage et mémoire européenne
Posted in Announcements, Publications
Recent publications in the history and philosophy of the language sciences – April 2021
Marco Tamburelli & Mauro Tosco, ed. 2021. Contested Languages. The hidden multilingualism of Europe. Amsterdam : John Benjamins. Studies in World Language Problems, 8. 271 p. ISBN : 9789027208040
Publishers’ website
This is the first volume entirely dedicated to contested languages. While generally listed in international language atlases, contested languages usually fall through the cracks of research: excluded from the literature on minority languages and treated as mere ensembles of geographically defined varieties by traditional dialectology. This volume investigates the nature of contested languages, the role language ideologies play in the perception of these languages, the contribution of academic discourse to the formation and perpetuation of language contestedness, and the damage contestedness causes to linguistic communities and ultimately to linguistic diversity. Various situations and degrees of language contestedness are presented and analysed, along with theoretical considerations, exploring potential roads to recognition and issues in language planning that arise from language contestedness. Addressing the “language vs dialect” question head on, the volume opens up new perspectives that are relevant to all students and researchers interested in the maintenance of linguistic diversity.
Posted in Publications, Uncategorized
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 