Call for Papers: VI Simpósio Mundial de Estudos da Língua Portuguesa, 24-28 October 2017

Posted on 18 August 2016 by rebecafr — Leave a comment

The VI Simpósio Mundial de Estudos da Língua Portuguesa (VI SIMELP) will take place in Escola Superior de Educação do Instituto Politécnico de Santarém (Portugal) from the 24th to 28th of October 2017. The theme of the conference is “Teoria linguística e abordagens didáticas na história da gramática portuguesa”. Please see the call for papers in Portuguese for more information.

Proposals (for 15 minute talks in Portuguese and Galician) should be sent by the 15th of November to Rogelio Ponce de León (rromeo@letras.up.pt) and to Sónia Duarte (sonia.duarte@esdjgfa.org).

Teoria linguística e abordagens didáticas na história da gramática portuguesa

Posted in Announcements

The utility of constructed languages

Posted on 22 June 2016 by awcarus23 — 3 Comments

A.W. Carus
Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU, Munich

The question how language, a sequence of events in spacetime, can have meaning — which seems not to be in spacetime — has puzzled philosophers since antiquity, though it only came to dominate philosophy explicitly over a century or so of wide-ranging developments that culminated, provisionally, in the work of the later Wittgenstein. Philosophers continue to discuss these questions, and to read Wittgenstein, but they also seem largely unaware that their central questions about the nature and possibility of meaning, which they approach in the abstract, as conceptual questions, have also become a thriving subject of empirical research. This post briefly explores some consequences of this new research for philosophical questions about meaning.

One relevant context for such questions has always been the puzzle of how to coordinate two aspects of language, its subjective or cultural aspect (“meaning” in the sense of what a sentence, or any other object or action, “means to me”) and its computational aspect (“meaning” in the sense of generative linguistics or in the sense of a computer program, in which a syntactic structure built up from atomic components is endowed – or not – with an analogously compositional semantics). The subjective aspect is inherently more salient with respect to natural languages, while the computational aspect is more in the foreground where constructed languages are concerned, especially axiomatically constructed (or otherwise clearly defined) languages of mathematics or computation. What they gain in precision, though, such languages sacrifice in rhetorical power and suggestiveness; there would appear to be a trade-off between the cultural and the computational aspects of language. However, while this Janus-faced property of language has been apparent to all major theorists of language from Locke to Frege and Saussure, their interest in language has usually focussed mainly on only one of the two aspects at the expense of the other, and theories of the coordination between these two aspects have remained quite superficial. The few attempts at bringing these aspects into some sort of relation to each other have usually tried to reduce one of them to the other. The later Wittgenstein (followed in this respect by ordinary language philosophers) tried to bring logic and constructed languages more generally within the scope of social practices and the natural languages mediating them, while Chomsky tried to bring ordinary language within the scope of the combinatorial.

The empirical research of recent decades on these subjects has mostly avoided this kind of reductionism. It does usually focus on only one of these aspects or kinds of language — naturally enough, because you have to start somewhere, and where you start generally influences which kinds or aspects of language you consider. But there is on the whole, in most of this research, a recognition that both aspects (and both kinds of language) exist, but there is little explicit discussion of the relation between them. Read more ›

Tagged with: constructed languages
Posted in Article, Constructed languages, Linguistics, Philosophy, Pragmatics

Anforderungen an eine serielle Untersuchung des Pariser Wettbewerbs von 1797/99 zum Einfluss der Zeichen auf das Denken

Posted on 29 May 2016 by kerstinohlim — Leave a comment

Kerstin Ohligschlaeger-Lim
Universität Potsdam

Im folgenden soll die Untersuchung des Pariser Wettbewerbs zum Einfluss der Zeichen auf das Denken (1797/99) vorgestellt werden. Dieser Wettbewerb gliedert sich in epistemologische und semiotische Diskurse des ausgehenden 18. Jahrhunderts in Frankreich ein, in denen die Übertragbarkeit der wissenschaftlichen Terminologie nach dem Vorbild der Naturwissenschaften auf die nicht-exakten Wissenschaften diskutiert wurde.

Die Spezifik des Wettbewerbs von 1797/99 liegt nicht allein in der Fragestellung nach dem Einfluss der Zeichen auf das Denken, sondern vielmehr in ihrer sprachtheoretischen Begründung. Der enorme institutionelle Einfluss der Gruppe der Ideologen[1] und ihr Bestreben, ein auf dem Sensualismus beruhendes Wissenschaftsprogramm zu entwickeln, sowie die unmittelbar vorangegangene Erneuerung der wissenschaftlichen Terminologie in der Chemie durch Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794), die auf Etienne Bonnot de Condillacs (1714-1780) Annahme von Sprache als analytischer Methode beruht, stellen die inhaltliche Grundlage für die Ausschreibung des Wettbewerbs dar. Ausgeschrieben wurde der Wettbewerb von der zweiten Klasse des 1795 in Nachfolge der alten Akademien gegründeten Institut de France. Read more ›

Posted in 18th century, Article, Europe, Philosophy

Diversity, linguistics and domination: how linguistic theory can feed a kind of politics most linguists would oppose

Posted on 11 May 2016 by nickriemer — 18 Comments

Nick Riemer
University of Sydney & HTL, Université Paris-Diderot

Antonio Gramsci, a co-founder of the Italian Communist Party and one of the twentieth century’s most prominent intellectuals. Gramsci studied linguistics and wrote about linguistic topics throughout his life. ‘Study, because we’ll need all your intelligence’.

What connections might linguists’ professional activities have to politics? Most recently, the question has been posed by the collective self-dismissal of the Lingua board and the journal’s metamorphosis into the open-access Glossa – a welcome attempt to break the monopoly of profiteering multinationals over the dissemination of research. Initiatives like Glossa or Language Science Press are much-needed, and all too rare, instances of scholarly activism against the widespread ‘enclosure’ of knowledge characteristic of our age (Riemer forthcoming). As such, they are compatible with the ‘vague form of liberal progressiveness’ that Hutton (2001: 295) has identified as the ethos of contemporary linguistics. But how might other aspects of linguistics as an institution fit, or not, into this frame? What can we say about how linguistics might relate to characteristic progressive priorities like support for diversity, opposition to discrimination and domination, commitment to democracy, and to the overall political contexts in which efforts to advance those priorities are situated?

There’s been little shortage of critical discussion of linguistics’ ideological and political valencies, though it has often come from sources other than linguists themselves.[1] Linguists have, in fact, on the whole been strikingly reluctant to direct against their own discipline the kinds of critique that swept over the rest of the humanities in the final third of the last century. Linguistics’ scientistic pretensions act as a strong brake on any attempt even to think in critical terms about the epistemic status of the discipline’s results, let alone to explore the field’s wider political effects or determinants.[2]

Reflection on both, however, is important, in the interests of disciplinary self-awareness at least. Not just that, though: linguists who identify with the ‘vague form of liberal progressiveness’ mentioned by Hutton, or whose political sympathies lie further to the left, have an interest in thinking not just about how social and political factors influence linguistics, but also about how what they do as linguists might feed back into the societies to which they belong. Like other academic corporations, linguists probably mostly have a strong sense of their own distinctness. But we are nevertheless a part of the body politic, and our professional activities influence it in various ways.
Read more ›

Tagged with: critical theory, Gramsci, philosophy of linguistics
Posted in Article, Linguistics

The secret history of grammaticalization

Posted on 28 April 2016 by James McElvenny — 4 Comments

James McElvenny
Universität Potsdam

Research into grammaticalization has an established pedigree, first certified by Lehmann (2015[1982]: 1-9) and confirmed, with various additions, by Heine et al (1991: 5-23) and Hopper & Traugott (2003[1993]: 19-38).[1] The standard genealogy records the birth of the term “grammaticalization” in more or less its present-day sense with Antoine Meillet (1866–1936), but recognises an intellectual lineage extending back at least to the Enlightenment. Among the immediate predecessors of Meillet, Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) is accorded a significant place for proposing an account of the emergence of grammatical forms that prefigures Meillet’s in several key respects. The standard narrative is without doubt correct, but at the same time excessively sketchy, omitting important details. The place of Gabelentz, in particular, deserves greater attention.

Christian Karl Reisig as an upholder of philosophical linguistics in 19th century Germany

Posted on 13 April 2016 by jacqueslouisfrancois — 1 Comment

Jacques François
Université de Caen & CNRS

In his introduction (p.6-18) to the Vorlesungen über lateinische Sprachwissenschaft (Lectures on Latin Linguistics, 1839), Christian Karl Reisig offered a philosophically grounded account of the epistemology of language as a Prinzipienwissenschaft (“Science of Principles”, in Hermann Paul’s wording, 1880). There is a crucial difference however between these two endeavours, namely : Reisig – who gave his lectures in 1817, i.e. twelve years before their publication – was a successor both to Wilhelm von Humboldt (and indirectly to Johann Gottfried Herder) in terms of conflating language, people and nation (in his principles 2 and 5, see below) and to Immanuel Kant in terms of his application to language of the latter’s table of the categories of understanding (see principles 6-7). In constrast to Paul, the impact of comparative grammar is hardly perceptible (see principles 12-13), although Reisig was certainly aware of the works of Friedrich Schlegel (1808) and Franz Bopp (1816).[1]
Read more ›

Tagged with: Humboldt, Karl Reisig, semantics, semasiology
Posted in 19th century, Article, Europe, Germany, History, Linguistics, Pragmatics, Semantics

How Galilean is the ‘Galilean Method’?

Posted on 2 April 2016 by christinab4 — 17 Comments

Christina Behme
Mount St Vincent University

In many recent (and some not so recent) publications Noam Chomsky makes an appeal to Galilean science and claims the Galilean framework justifies his own approach to scientific inquiry (e.g., Chomsky, 2002, 2009, 2010, 2012). Allegedly, this approach has a distinguished scientific and philosophical tradition. “Chomsky’s science of language is a science in the Cartesian-Galilean tradition. It is a branch of the study of biology” (McGilvray 2005: 4). In this blog post I argue that this approach should be rejected because it rests on a superficial and incorrect interpretation of Galileo’s work, has been rejected already by Rene Descartes, and is contrary to established scientific practice.

Without a doubt, Noam Chomsky is the best known linguist and his success has been linked to his persuasive debating style and his emphasis on rigorous scientific methodology for linguistic research. Yet, over the years Chomsky’s attitude towards the scientific method has changed, and he acts now as if no data can challenge his own proposals. For example when asked what kind of empirical discovery would lead to the rejection of the strong minimalist thesis, Chomsky replied: “All the phenomena of language appear to refute it” (Chomsky, 2002, 124, emphasis added). Yet, he is not willing to abandon the minimalist thesis. Instead he suggests dismissing the data that seem to challenge it. Chomsky claims that such a large-scale dismissal of data that are inconvenient for his view is based on a “Galilean style… [which] is the recognition that…the array of phenomena is some distortion of the truth … [and] it often makes good sense to disregard phenomena and search for principles” (Chomsky, 2002, 99). Chomsky calls this attitude the “Galilean move towards discarding recalcitrant phenomena” (Chomsky, 2002, 102). He claims that massive data dismissal was advocated by Galileo: “[Galileo] dismissed a lot of data; he was willing to say: ‘Look, if the data refute the theory, the data are probably wrong.’ And the data that he threw out were not minor” (Chomsky, 2002, 98). He then proposes that is was accepted by other famous scientists (e.g., Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Monod) and that it “is pretty much the way science often seems to work …You just see that some ideas simply look right, and then you sort of put aside the data that refute them” (Chomsky, 2009, 36). Data-dismissal has been advocated numerous times in Chomsky’s publications, culminating in the argument from the Norman Conquest: “… if you want to study distinctive properties of language – what really makes it different from the digestive system … you’re going to abstract away from the Norman Conquest. But that means abstracting away from the whole mass of data that interests the linguist who wants to work on a particular language” (Chomsky, 2012, 84, emphasis added). Arguably the most bizarre invocation of the Galilean style occurs when Chomsky suggests: “…if we want a productive theory-constructive [effort], we’re going to have to relax our stringent criteria and accept things that we know don’t make any sense, and hope that some day somebody will make some sense out of them” (Chomsky, 2012, 169).

Chomsky is not the only defender of the Galilean style. It has been suggested that “[a] significant feature of the Generative Revolution in linguistics has been the development of a Galilean style in that field” (Freidin & Vergnaud, 2001, 647). Attaching the label Galilean to a style of inquiry suggests two things. First, it implies that Galileo worked using the same or a very similar style. Second, given the massive success of the Galilean scientific revolution, it suggests that work adopting a Galilean style is superior to (all) other work. While the second suggestion seems uncontroversial, the first needs support from the actual work of Galileo. Below I argue that the success of Galileo as a scientist was not based on a massive dismal of data that were inconvenient to his theories and that he would have rejected proposals that required him “to accept things that make no sense”.

Aree, volumi e spazi: la geometria linguistica di Hjelmslev

Posted on 10 March 2016 by Lorenzo Cigana — Leave a comment

Lorenzo Cigana
Université de Liège

Questo nostro intervento si concentra su alcuni aspetti del pensiero hjelmsleviano e della teoria glossematica in cui è più forte il respiro interdisciplinare che intreccia tra loro almeno i seguenti problemi: a) il ruolo gnoseologico della lingua, b) la modalità in cui la teoria linguistica rappresenta il suo oggetto, c) la questione di stabilire se tale modalità sia iconica, metaforica o costitutiva. Il filo rosso che intendiamo seguire, e che collega i problemi appena menzionati, è l’idea di spazio nella lingua e nella teoria glossematica del linguaggio. Si tratta di un aspetto già studiato approfonditamente da Picciarelli (1999), cui rimandiamo senz’altro. D’altra parte, il motivo per cui intendiamo tornare su tali questioni non è solo per dare continuità a una prospettiva di ricerca sovente trascurata, ma anche perché alcune considerazioni, forse di dettaglio ma proprio per questo importanti, restano in qualche modo pendenti: su di esse vale la pena tornare. Read more ›

Tagged with: Hjemslev
Posted in 20th century, Article, Denmark, Europe, History, Linguistics, Structuralism

Networking and obstacles to the development of the language sciences as reflected in the correspondence of Rodolfo Lenz and Hugo Schuchardt

Posted on 17 February 2016 by Johannes Mücke — 3 Comments

Silvio Moreira de Sousa & Johannes Mücke
Hugo Schuchardt Archive, University of Graz

Rodolfo Lenz (1863-1938). Source: Filosofía U. De Chile, via Wikimedia Commons

As the call for papers for the upcoming Coloquio Rodolfo Lenz 2016 is open until February 22^nd (the conference will be held on May 5^th 2016, at the Universidad de Chile), a second look at the correspondence between Rodolfo Lenz and Hugo Schuchardt would seem to be timely and fortuitous.[1] The goal of this article, however, relates to Bachmann (2004), where a survey of the works of Rodolfo Lenz provides a sketch of his theoretical positions on linguistics – Lenz had a strong background in linguistics as practised in Germany – and an explanation of his range of works on Amerindian languages, which were influenced by his life in Chile (Bachmann 2004: 380).

While the letters from Lenz to Schuchardt were easily accessible – the Hugo Schuchardt Nachlass is preserved at the Sondersammlung of the university library in Graz – the letters from Schuchardt required a fair bit of networking: the Archivo Lenz is maintained by the Universidad Metropolitana de las Ciencias de Educación in Santiago de Chile and we had no contacts whatsoever to Chile. Luckily, through our participation in the 13^th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, we met Darío Rojas, who kindly provided us with pictures of the letters.

With a good amount of biographical information on both linguists already available online (cf. Dannemann 2000-2001, Hurch 2007, 2007-, Maas 2010, Mücke & Sousa 2015a), we will not repeat too many details here. Rodolfo (or Rudolf) Lenz, who studied in Bonn and Berlin, was hired by the Chilean government to teach at the Instituto Pedagógico and insofar took part in the German emigration movement to Chile in the 19^th century. Read more ›

Tagged with: history of creolistics, Hugo Schuchardt, Rudolf Lenz
Posted in 19th century, Article, Field linguistics, Germany, History, Linguistics

Program February-June 2016

Posted on 3 February 2016 by The Editor — Leave a comment

17 February	Networking and obstacles to the development of the language sciences as reflected in the correspondence of Rodolfo Lenz and Hugo Schuchardt. Silvio Moreira de Sousa and Johannes Mücke Hugo Schuchardt Archive, University of Graz
10 March	Aree, volumi e spazi: la geometria linguistica di Hjelmslev. Lorenzo Cigana Université de Liège
16 March	break
2 April	How Galilean is the ‘Galilean Method’? Christina Behme Mount St Vincent University
13 April	Christian Karl Reisig as an upholder of philosophical linguistics in 19th century Germany Jacques François Université de Caen & CNRS
28 April	The secret history of grammaticalization. James McElvenny Universität Potsdam
11 May	Diversity, linguistics and domination: how linguistic theory can feed a kind of politics most linguists would oppose Nick Riemer University of Sydney & Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques, Université Paris-Diderot
29 May	Anforderungen an eine serielle Untersuchung des Pariser Wettbewerbs von 1797/99 zum Einfluss der Zeichen auf das Denken Kerstin Ohligschlaeger Universität Potsdam
22 June	The utility of constructed languages A.W. Carus MCMP, LMU, Munich

Posted in Programs