Workshop: History and Philosophy of Linguistics Research Morning, Sydney, 29 March
Friday 29 March
Rogers Room, Woolley Building, University of Sydney
Further information at the Sydney Centre for Language Research website Read more ›
Cfp: SHESL-HTL Conference 2020 – Simplicity and complexity of languages in the history of linguistic theories (Paris, January 23-25, 2020)
Call for papers
SHESL-HTL CONFERENCE 2020
Paris, January 23-25, 2020
Simplicity and complexity of languages in the history of linguistic theories
The goal of this conference is to explore the ways in which, through the history of linguistic theories, languages have been evaluated in terms of their complexity.
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 the same kinds of changes”. A prototypical cline, following Hopper and Traugott (2003: 7), looks as follows:
(1) content item > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix
Read more ›
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 for academic publication and where the topic is much further developed.
This is also the occasion to thank again the Henry Sweet Society for awarding me the Verburg-Salmon 2017 grant, which made this contribution possible.
Henry Sweet is widely mentioned and quoted throughout John Rupert Firth’s work. Palmer claims Firth even liked to be compared to Sweet and that there were similarities, with both acting as “a voice crying in the wilderness” on academic grounds (Palmer 1968:1). However, the relation between both men is hardly a simple one and, although they never met, their connection most certainly contributed to the scientific orientation of the London School. Read more ›
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, Europe, History, Linguistics
Program February–June 2019
| 20 February | Henry Sweet, a model for John Rupert Firth? Angela Senis Université Bordeaux Montaigne |
| 6 March | Grammaticalization clines: a brief conceptual history Martin Konvička Freie Universität Berlin |
| 25 March | John Hart (c. 1501–1574) and the beginning of English linguistics in Tudor England Ji Ma University of Sheffield |
| 17 April | Speech sounds in the field: dynamical approaches to phonology after Maxwell and Einstein Alexander Teixeira Kalkhoff Universität Freiburg |
| 1 May | Why women botanists outnumbered women linguists in nineteenth century Australia Jane Simpson Australian National University, Canberra |
| 29 May | The foreign entanglements of Mandarin Chinese in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Mårten Söderblom Saarela Academia Sinica, Taipei |
| 14 June | The formalisation of grammatical meanings in Copenhagen structural linguistics. Some remarks. Lorenzo Cigana Institut for Nordiske Studier og Sprogvidenskab (NorS), University of Copenhagen |
CfP: International Conference Ideology and Linguistic Ideas 2019, Tblisi
12 September 2019 – 14 September 2019
After the two successful conferences in 2015 and 2017, we are pleased to invite scholars interested in the history of linguistic ideas developed alongside with different ideologies in different times once more to Georgia. Read more ›
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 