Exclamatives: a grammatical category?

Posted on 7 May 2014 by elselffers — Leave a comment

Els Elffers
University of Amsterdam

1. Introduction

In most Western European grammars, sentences such as Hurrah!, How very curious!, or Vienna is so dull! are categorized as exclamatory sentences or exclamatives. Next to declaratives, interrogatives and imperatives, exclamatives are usually regarded as a separate sentence type.

However, as a grammatical category, exclamatives are more problematic than other sentence types. More often than other sentence types, exclamatives are omitted from grammars, or they are dealt with very succinctly, and/or in a rather ambiguous way.

During the last decades, there has been a cry for more research into exclamatives. This is mainly due to a growth of interest in themes such as “language and emotion” and “the expressive function of language” (cf. e.g. Foolen 1997). Below, I will briefly discuss the history of thought about exclamatives. Special attention will be paid to some early insights into the problematic character of the category. I will argue that, despite some theoretical improvements, the category has remained problematic up until the present day. Solutions are within reach only if two long-standing ideas are given up: (i) the idea that exclamatives constitute an independent category, (ii) the idea that research of exclamatives exclusively belongs to the “language and emotion” area. Read more ›

Tagged with: Den Hertog, exclamatives, Gabelentz, Géza Révész, Georg von der Gabelentz, Hermann Paul, Révész
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, History, Linguistics, Syntax, Uncategorized

Dr José Rizal and the making of a modern linguistic Messiah

Posted on 23 April 2014 by P. Kelly — 5 Comments

Piers Kelly
Australian National University

Describing the preeminent Filipino national hero Dr. Jose Rizal as a linguist is a little like referring to Thomas Jefferson as a horticulturalist. The statement may be true, but the many other talents that Rizal developed in his short life have tended to overshadow his extraordinary flair for language. After all, it was not for his linguistic achievements that his statue stands in every town plaza of the Philippines, nor was it the motive for his execution at the hands of Spanish authorities in 1896. Rizal is renowned as a legendary defender of civil and democratic rights, and parenthetically as a political scientist, historian, novelist, poet, sculptor, journalist, linguist and eye surgeon. It is for this last accomplishment that he is always conventionally known as Doctor Jose Rizal (a distinction he shares with another great civil rights leader, Dr Martin Luther King).

Dr José Rizal. Source: Pinoy Etchetera

Born in 1861 to wealthy Tagalog-speaking parents in Calamba, a town situated 50 kilometres south of Manila, Rizal was to be educated in Spanish—a language that less than ten percent of native Filipinos would have access to in his lifetime.[1] In fact, it was only as late as 1863 that a royal decree mandated the establishment of a universal primary school system with Spanish as the sole medium of instruction.[2] In the linguistically diverse Philippines it was the policy of Spanish missionaries to communicate in the language of the region in which they were stationed. Educational reforms issuing from the motherland were ignored, resisted or poorly implemented since universal literacy and linguistic competence in Spanish threatened the mediating role of the friar orders.[3] For this reason, among others, the Spanish language was never to diffuse widely across the Filipino population in the same way that it did in Latin America.[4]

SHLP4 Call for Papers

Posted on 16 April 2014 by moored03 — 1 Comment

Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific SHLP4

The fourth biennial conference of the Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific will take place in Alice Springs, Australia, 22-23 September 2014.

Papers on any aspect of the history of linguistics are welcome, especially those relating to the history of linguistics in Australia and the Pacific. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to David Moore (moored03@bigpond.com) by 31 July.

Tagged with: Alice Springs, announcements, Australia, conference, history of linguistics, SHLP, Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific
Posted in Announcements, Conferences and workshops

La historiografía mexicana en el contexto de los estudios lingüísticos actuales

Posted on 9 April 2014 by rebecafr — Leave a comment

Ana Balderas García
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

El quehacer lingüístico en México se remonta al encuentro entre culturas que se dio en el siglo XVI. La imperiosa necesidad de convertir a los nativos al cristianismo, llevando el desconocimiento de las lenguas de éstos a cuestas, dio como resultado que los religiosos comenzaran a internarse en el análisis sistemático del náhuatl, tarasco, totonaca, zapoteco, etc. Así, las gramáticas y vocabularios hacen su aparición abriendo paso al conocimiento de nuevos sistemas comunicativos y, por ende, a paradigmas culturales inimaginables.

Arte en lengua zapoteca de fray Juan de Córdova
1578

Vocabulario de la lengua mexicana y castellana de fray Andrés de Olmos 1547

Arte de la lengua de Michuacán de fray Maturino Gilberti
1558

Empirical methods in language construction

Posted on 26 March 2014 by basakaray — Leave a comment

Başak Aray
Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne, EXeCO (PHICO)

Efforts to establish an international auxiliary language (IAL) have a long history. Projects to overcome ethnic languages flourished in the 17th century Britain. Creators of these “philosophical languages” (Descartes, Dalgarno, Wilkins, Leibniz) stressed the shift between the structure of spoken languages and the structure of nature, and consequently the view that the former leads to a distorted understanding of the latter. To replace imperfect natural languages – they are inefficient, at best, if not obviously misleading, so they claimed – they devoted their efforts to designing a transparent medium to represent the real structure of things adequately.

The history of the universal languages took a new turn towards the end of the 19th century. With Schleyer’s Volapük (1879) emerged a new goal for constructed languages: unlike their Enlightenment-era predecessors, the new constructed languages had a practical focus on international communication. Most of them integrated a posteriori elements in their grammar and vocabulary in order to maintain a continuity with natural languages, which ensured that they were more accessible to learners (Couturat and Léau 1903: 113). This period may be characterized as a pragmatic turn. Epistemic ambitions of reflecting the real structure of things were discredited, and “universal language” was replaced by “international auxiliary language”. On the methodological side, conceptual analysis left its place to empirical observation of existing languages.

The new paradigm bore humanistic and cosmopolitan tendencies combined with a technophilia that inspired the extension of engineering to the linguistic field. Esperanto, the most emblematic – and, so far, most successful – IAL was accompanied by rhetoric from its creator, Zamenhof (1906: 1154), encouraging pacifism and promoting international brotherhood. The Delegation for the Adoption of International Auxiliary Language presented IAL as a historical necessity. In their history of the universal language, the leaders of the Delegation, Couturat and Léau, mention the ongoing rapid globalization of the world as the background to the IAL (Couturat and Léau 1903: VII). They explain this development by the exponential growth of transport and telecommunication technologies. These raised global mobility and revived international commerce, making the need for an IAL to facilitate international communication more important than ever. Read more ›

Tagged with: constructed languages, IAL, international auxiliary language, international language, international languages, language planning, Otto Jespersen, Valter Tauli
Posted in 20th century, Article, Constructed languages, Europe, History, Linguistics

Language and smell: traces of synesthesia in premodern learning

Posted on 12 March 2014 by rafvanrooy — 5 Comments

Raf Van Rooy
PhD fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO)
University of Leuven

It is well known that, in present-day English, the verb ‘smell’ can obtain a negative connotation when used intransitively; the adjective derived from it, ‘smelly’, is even lexically restricted to the meaning ‘having a bad smell’. By contrast, speakers of English tend to allot more positive interpretations to the sense adjective ‘tasty’ (cf. Krifka 2010). That is to say: everybody with a healthy appetite would prefer ‘tasty’ to ‘smelly’ food. Another example, from a rather unexpected corner, is the association between stench and syntax errors in computer terminology. It appears that the terms CodeSmell (alternative terms: CodeStench and CodePerfume) and LanguageSmell refer to the use of erroneous codes in computer programming (see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CodeSmell). ‘If it smells, it’s bad’, appears to be the maxim of olfactory imagery in English. Things seem to have been quite different in some premodern Latin and Italian texts I encountered during my research on the history of the ‘dialect’ concept. In these writings, the image of ‘smell’, always expressed by means of the Proto-Indo-European root *od- (cf. ancient Greek ὀσμή), seems to be usually tied up with more positive features, such as antiquity, purity, and naturalness, especially with reference to linguistic contexts. Since no studies on this topic are known to me, I would like to briefly explore some of these passages in the present contribution, so as to shed a little more light on this peculiar aspect of premodern language attitudes.

Program March-May 2014

Posted on 6 February 2014 by The Editor — Leave a comment

[Updated 22 May 2014]

12 March	Language and smell: traces of synesthesia in premodern learning Raf Van Rooy PhD fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) University of Leuven
26 March	Empirical methods in language construction Başak Aray Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne, EXeCO (PHICO)
9 April	La historiografía mexicana en el contexto de los estudios lingüísticos actuales Ana Balderas García Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
23 April	Dr José Rizal and the making of a modern linguistic Messiah Piers Kelly Australian National University
7 May	Exclamations: a grammatical category? Els Elffers University of Amsterdam
22 May	The Latin-Portuguese grammarian Manuel Álvares (1526-1583) Rolf Kemmler Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD)

Posted in Programs

New dating of the Iloko manuscript lexicography

Posted on 11 December 2013 by rebecafr — 2 Comments

Rebeca Fernández Rodríguez
Centro de Estudos em Letras (CEL)
Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD)

Missionary lexicography in the Philippines is extensive and exhaustive. Dozens of grammars and vocabularies have been written since the Spanish arrival in the Philippines in 1565. In many cases they have remained in manuscript form. However, in the last decade, some scholars have focused their research on specific languages and documents. Quilis edited Blancas de San José’s Arte y Reglas de la lengua Tagala (1661) in 1991; García-Medall edited Alonso de Méntrida’s Diccionario de la lengua bisaya, hiligueina y haraya de la Isla de Panay in 2004; Zwartjes edited Melchor Oyanguren’s Tagalysmo elucidado (1742) in 2010; and I am working on an edition of manuscript Calepino Ilocano.

Even though there is an increasing number of papers and books on Philippine linguistic documentation, there is no study on how dictionaries were compiled and finally printed. Missionaries worked on previous dictionaries, improving them by making amendments, adding new terms and examples. Authorship was not regarded as it is today. Grammars and dictionaries were kept in libraries or passed from hand to hand and were constantly improved.

So we might ask what work Spanish missionaries in the Philippines did on their field notes to prepare printed dictionaries. We can begin to answer this question by looking at three different Ilocano manuscripts kept in the Library of the Estudio Teológico Agustiniano de Valladolid (Spain) and comparing them to the first printed Ilocano dictionary of 1849. Read more ›

Tagged with: Ilocano, lexicography, Philippine
Posted in 17th century, 18th century, Article, Europe, Field linguistics, Lexicography, Linguistics, Philippines

Bloomfield : Du mentalisme au behaviorisme

Posted on 4 December 2013 by jeanmfort — 1 Comment

Jean-Michel Fortis
Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques, Université Paris-Diderot

On peut s’interroger sur l’évolution qui voit Bloomfield passer de la psychologie à dominante wundtienne, qui imprègne son Introduction de 1914, au behaviorisme, et d’une linguistique “mentaliste” à une linguistique psycho-abstinente et centrée sur l’analyse des formes. Une version simple de cette évolution est celle que décrit Langendoen (1998): de conceptualiste, Bloomfield devient behavioriste et structuraliste.

Je voudrais donner ici une image plus complexe de cette transition, en insistant sur le découplage entre la conversion au behaviorisme et l’évolution des idées linguistiques de Bloomfield. Cette évolution est à mon avis graduelle, et entretient des rapports complexes avec la psychologie de l’époque (celle de Wundt, essentiellement, mais aussi de Hermann Paul). Trois examples, qui sont autant de rapports à la psychologie, peuvent l’illustrer.

Dans un premier cas, Bloomfield donne un soubassement psychologique à des phénomènes linguistiques, pour n’en garder que ce qui est compatible avec des critères distributionnels d’analyse. Ici, le mentalisme embraye la discussion, donne un fondement psychologique à l’explication, pour se trouver recyclé en approche distributionnelle. La discussion partira de ce que dit Bloomfield à propos de la distinction analytique / synthétique.

Un autre cas concerne la réinterprétation par Bloomfield de l’analyse wundtienne de la proposition. En l’occurrence, dès l’Introduction de 1914, Bloomfield reprend Wundt en l’édulcorant, c’est-à-dire en restant plus près des formes de surface que Wundt. L’origine de l’analyse en constituants peut donc être cherchée chez Wundt, mais chez un Wundt en partie dépsychologisé.

Enfin, dans un troisième type de cas, la psychologie mentaliste ne joue qu’un rôle insignifiant dans la description linguistique, et ce à l’époque même où Bloomfield défend une linguistique psychologique. Ce cas est illustré par les précoces Tagalog Texts (1917).

Bien sûr, il ne s’agit pas ici de présenter Bloomfield et son évolution, mais de donner quelques coups de sonde historiques dans certains domaines. Read more ›

Tagged with: behaviourism, history of structuralism, Leonard Bloomfield, linguistics, mentalism, psychology, Wilhelm Wundt
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, America, Article, History, Linguistics, Structuralism

El Sermonario de fray Bernardino de Sahagún y los fondos en lenguas indígenas de la Biblioteca Nacional de México

Posted on 27 November 2013 by rebecafr — 1 Comment

Pilar Máynez
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Sobre el repositorio que resguarda la versión tardía del Sermonario de los Sanctos del año en lengua mexicana

La Biblioteca Nacional de México fue oficialmente inaugurada el 2 de abril de 1884 en la antigua iglesia de San Agustín y el 16 de diciembre de 1967 pasó a formar parte del recientemente creado Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, perteneciente a la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Dicho repositorio que constituye, sin duda, el más importante de México por el número de volúmenes y por la relevancia de los mismos, contiene igualmente una de las colecciones más valiosas sobre incunables, libros raros y archivos especiales en su Fondo Reservado; éste alberga alrededor de cuatro mil volúmenes, correspondientes al periodo comprendido entre los siglos XV al XX,[i] dentro de los que se incluyen invaluables manuscritos en lenguas indígenas.

Aunque no se cuenta aún con la bibliografía completa de los textos escritos en el tan amplio mosaico de lenguas indomexicanas, los catálogos realizados por Ángel María Garibay y Roberto Moreno de los Arcos[ii] constituyen una importante aproximación al mencionado acervo. Moreno de los Arcos, por su parte, atendiendo a la información proporcionada por García Icazbalceta y su continuador Agustín Millares Carlo, asegura que, sólo en lo que respecta al siglo XVI, tenemos como existencia comprobada 179 obras, de las cuales 30 están escritas en náhuatl o mexicano y 50 en otras lenguas indígenas, mientras que de “85 consta su existencia, 15 en lengua náhuatl y 38 en otras lenguas” (1966:27).

Garibay y Moreno de los Arcos destacan, entre las obras que custodia el Fondo Reservado, varias de carácter doctrinal escritas en náhuatl que merecen ser estudiadas como testimonio lingüístico e intercultural. Se trata de textos, algunos de ellos aún inexplorados, que mucho pueden abonar en lo que desde hace varias décadas se ha denominado Lingüística Misionera. Figura, por ejemplo, con signatura 1628 bis, el manuscrito titulado Cantares Mexicanos y otros opúsculos que publicará próximamente la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, en su totalidad, en edición crítica y bilingüe. También el Fondo Reservado preserva otras obras como son las Domínicas en mexicano, de autor desconocido (Ms. 1478), y el manuscrito 1476 correspondiente a santorales con algunos refranes y fábulas escritos por diferentes manos. A continuación nos abocaremos a una de ellas. Read more ›

Tagged with: 15th-century, history, Mexico, Náhuatl, Spain
Posted in 15th century, 16th century, America, Article, Europe, History, Linguistics