The creation of ‘parts of speech’ for Chinese: ‘translingual practice’ across Graeco-Roman and Sinitic traditions

Posted on 12 June 2013 by Edward McDonald — 2 Comments

Edward McDonald
University of Sydney

The English term ‘parts of speech’ is actually a mistranslation of long standing of the Latin partēs oratiōnis, itself a translation of the Greek merē logou, in which the term oratiō / logos takes not its common meaning of ‘speech’ but rather the technical sense of ‘sentence’ (Halliday 1977/2003: 98). So the notion of ‘parts of speech’, which may seem to suggest that these ‘parts’ are natural classes somehow inherent to the language, should in fact be read ‘parts of the sentence’, in other words, constructs of language analysis. This confusion seems fitting as an epigraph to tracing the process of ‘translingual practice’ (Liu 1995) whereby this category came to be introduced from the Graeco-Roman tradition of linguistic scholarship to its Sinitic counterpart by a multilingual Chinese scholar just over a century ago. This notion allows us to understand the complexity of an achievement which cannot be reduced to ‘explaining change in terms of either foreign impact or indigenous evolution’ (Liu 1995: xix, emphasis added), but rather allows us to recognise the scholar, deeply versed in both Chinese and European scholarly traditions, strategically deploying concepts from both traditions in the service of his scholarly and political project.

The ‘responsible party’ in this case, Chinese diplomat and scholar Ma Jianzhong 馬建忠 (1845-1900), was educated not only in Chinese but in Latin and French at a French Catholic school in Shanghai. In 1876 he went to France to study international law, becoming the first Chinese to achieve a baccalauréat, followed by a diploma in law in 1879. After a professional career as a diplomat, Ma transferred his energies to the scholarly arena, devoting the last decade of his life to writing the first grammar of Chinese produced by a native scholar, 馬氏文通 Mashi Wentong [Mr Ma’s Compleat Grammar] (1898/1956).*

Tagged with: History of Chinese grammar, Ma Shi, Mashi Wentong
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, China, History, Linguistics, Syntax

Analyses du fonctionnement sémantico-référentiel du nom propre dans l’Inde ancienne

Posted on 5 June 2013 by emilieaussant — 4 Comments

Émilie Aussant
Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques (CNRS) – Université Paris Diderot

Introduction

La question du « sens » des noms propres a suscité, aussi bien en Occident qu’en Inde, de nombreuses réflexions. Si les débats ont longtemps concerné, en Occident, la logique et la philosophie – la linguistique n’y participant que de manière marginale – ce sont essentiellement les grammairiens (vaiyākaraṇa) et les dialecticiens (naiyāyika) qui, dans l’Inde ancienne, se sont emparés du problème. Les premiers ont majoritairement défendu l’idée selon laquelle les noms propres dénotent parce qu’ils connotent, alors que, parmi les seconds, c’est l’idée d’une dénotation directe, sans connotation, qui a été le plus souvent soutenue.

La présente contribution, qui se fonde sur une recherche publiée en 2009 sous le titre Le nom propre en Inde. Considérations sur le mécanisme référentiel (Aussant 2009), vise à donner un aperçu de ces deux types d’analyses. Bien que leur contexte d’émergence soit différent, elles s’élaborent toutes deux autour du concept de « cause d’application » (pravṛtti-nimitta), auquel la première section de cet article est consacrée. J’expliquerai, dans la deuxième section, en quoi consiste la première analyse (les noms propres dénotent parce qu’ils connotent) à travers la thèse de la propriété générique comme cause d’application des noms propres, la plus ancienne qui soit parvenue jusqu’à nous et la plus fréquemment évoquée. La troisième et dernière section de cette contribution sera consacrée au deuxième type d’analyse (les noms propres dénotent directement), analyse défendue par plusieurs dialecticiens et dont les fondements sont posés dès le VI^es.

Tagged with: history of grammar, history of semantics, India, Sanskrit, semantics
Posted in Article, History, India, Linguistics, Semantics

Theoretical linguistics and artificial languages

Posted on 29 May 2013 by Alan Reed Libert — 5 Comments

Alan Reed Libert
University of Newcastle, New South Wales

Mainstream theoretical linguists have generally ignored artificial languages, apparently considering them unworthy of attention. This is true not only of “fictional languages” such as Klingon, but also of “serious” languages such as Esperanto. Much of the linguistic work which has been done on artificial languages has been carried out by Esperantists and is not concerned with structural aspects of these languages (see e.g. Schubert, ed. 1989). Serious languages have usually been designed to facilitate international communication and so are generally intended to be optimally designed for easy learning and use. Chomskyan linguists assume that there is a human language faculty, which sets limits on a possible human language. If this is the case, one might think that there would be limits even on languages which have been consciously created — unless one were trying to be perverse, which one presumably would not do in creating a language for international communication — or at least there would be limits on a usable artificial language.

The strangest, and perhaps the most interesting, artificial languages are the a priori languages, that is, those (supposedly) designed from scratch without reference to existing languages. These will seem exotic for various reasons, one being the total unfamiliarity of most of the vocabulary to speakers of any natural language. This is in contrast to another main type of artificial languages, a posteriori languages, which are based on one or more natural languages. Still other languages are called mixed languages, as they contain substantial material of both the a priori and a posteriori types (this way of classifying artificial languages has long been used, e.g. by Couturat and Leau 1903). Esperanto, the best known and most successful artificial language, is of the a posteriori type, and much of Esperanto will be familiar to someone who knows several major European languages (for a recent grammar of Esperanto in English, see Gledhill 2000). Volapük, a mixed language, was the most successful artificial language before Esperanto (see e.g. Post 1890 for more information on it).

By looking at artificial languages, in particular at the a priori ones, we may be able to explore the limits of language universals: perhaps universals will constrain even language creation. In fact, there may not be any truly a priori artificial languages, since we cannot create — or at least cannot fluently use — a language which lacks properties that natural languages must have.

The notion of stereotype in language study

Posted on 22 May 2013 by Elena L. Vilinbakhova — 5 Comments

Elena L. Vilinbakhova
St. Petersburg State University

1. Introduction

Originally, the word stereotype derives from two Ancient Greek roots: στερεός ‘solid’ and τύπος ‘impression’. It was first used by the French printer Firmin Didot in 1796 as a typographical term. Later, it became a part of everyday language (in the beginning, it was used mostly in the form of an adjective stéréotypé ‘stereotyped’) to describe repetitive situations that lacked originality or spontaneity.

In 1922, it was introduced into the social, cultural and psychological studies by the American writer Walter Lippmann in his book “Public Opinion”. He saw stereotypes as pictures in our heads which simplify reality: “[stereotypes] may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted” (Ibid.).

Nowadays, the notion of stereotype is widely used in different areas, and even in linguistics, there are two major traditions of understanding it. The first approach defines stereotype as a fixed form, fixed expression, or even fixed text. According to the second approach, stereotype is seen as a fixed content, a fixed mental image of a person, an object or an event. Both definitions of stereotype share the same characteristic of stability, but it is either the stability of form or the stability of content (сf. the terms formal vs. semantic stereotype (Bartmiński 2005), Sprachstereotype ‘stereotype of speech’ vs. Denkstereotype ‘stereotype of thought’ (Gülich 1978), stéréotype de langue ‘stereotype of language’ vs. stéréotype de pensée ‘stereotype of thought’ (Schapira 1999), etc. My focus here will be on semantic, rather then formal, stereotypes.

Tagged with: Hilary Putnam, linguistics, prototype, semantics, stereotype
Posted in Article, Linguistics, Semantics

Otto Jespersen and progress in international language

Posted on 15 May 2013 by James McElvenny — 10 Comments

James McElvenny
University of Sydney

When it comes to expressing the ideas of our own day, the deficiencies of classical Latin appear with ruthless clarity: telephones and motor-cars and wireless have no room in Ciceronian Latin, and it will be of little use to coin Neolatin words for these and other inventions, for the whole structure of the language with its intricate forms and complex syntax, which tempts the writer to twisted sentences, has become so utterly antiquated that we of the twentieth century wince at the idea of having to clothe our thoughts in that garb.
(Jespersen 1928:19)

Otto Jespersen (immediate source: University of Warwick)

These are the words with which Danish linguist Otto Jespersen (1860–1943) rejected contemporary proposals to revive Latin as a language of international communication. Overcoming the curse of Babel was a problem that greatly exercised Jespersen, as it did numerous other scholars, scientists and enthusiastic amateurs in this period. Jespersen’s eventual solution, NOVIAL (Nov [= new] International Auxiliary Language; Jespersen 1928:52), was a design for a new, constructed language, optimised for ease of learning and efficiency in expression, the embodiment of his well-known views on ‘Progress in language’.¹

Greetings from the Orient: H.W. Ludolf as a central figure in 17th-cent. language study

Posted on 8 May 2013 by beo — 1 Comment

Han Lamers (Leiden) & Toon Van Hal (Leuven)
Leiden University and University of Leuven

This post takes the reader to Ottoman Smyrna (Izmir in present-day Turkey) and Constantinople (now Istanbul) about 1700 A.D. Almost 250 years before, the Eastern-Roman, or Byzantine, empire had fallen into the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Sources about the socio-cultural and linguistic situation of the Greeks during this period of Tourkokratia or ‘Turkish rule’ (1453–1821) are fairly scarce. Hence, historians are much indebted to western archives and travel reports of westerners who visited the Greek world during this period.

It is, therefore, of some interest to read through a small bunch of letters written at the end of the 17^th century about the linguistic situation of Smyrna and Constantinople. The letters suggest that Smyrna is dominantly Greek and Turkish linguistically speaking. Constantinople, on the other hand, is a Babel of different voices:
Read more ›

Tagged with: 17th century, Anatolia, Germany, history, Ludolf
Posted in 17th century, Anatolia, Article, Germany, History

On the history of the question of whether natural language is “illogical”

Posted on 1 May 2013 by Barbara H Partee — 10 Comments

Barbara H Partee
University of Massachusetts Amherst

There have been centuries of study of logic and of language. Some philosophers and logicians have argued that natural language is logically deficient, or even that “natural language has no logic”. And before the birth of formal semantics in the late 1960’s, most linguists and philosophers were agreed that there was a considerable mismatch between the syntactic structure of natural language sentences and their “logical form”. The logician and philosopher Richard Montague argued that natural languages do have a very systematic semantic structure, but that it can be understood only if one uses a rich enough logic to mirror the rich syntactic structure of natural languages. This essay briefly sketches the history of arguments about the relation between natural language syntax and logical structure, concentrating on the period from Frege to Montague, roughly 1880 to 1970, illustrating the issues with sentences containing quantifiers.

Gabelentz — Grammatiker einer Sprache ohne Grammatik

Posted on 24 April 2013 by Kennosuke Ezawa — 6 Comments

Kennosuke Ezawa
Ost-West-Gesellschaft für Sprach- und Kulturforschung e. V., Berlin

In der Wissenschaft gilt ein Modell von dem Gegegenstand, der erklärt werden soll, nur solange, bis es nicht mehr taugt.

Bei der so genannten Chomskyschen Revolution in der Linguistik Mitte der 1950-er Jahre ging es darum, nach dem Versagen der strukturellen Beschreibung der Sprache im Bereich der Syntax den Gesichtspunkt umzukehren und vom intuitiven Wissen des Sprechers und Hörers auszugehen und die Erzeugung statt der Beschreibung von Sätzen als „generatives“ Modell der Grammatik einzuführen.

Georg von der Gabelentz, der 1881 seine „Chinesische Grammatik“ vorlegte, ging es darum, die chinesische Sprache als Gegenstand der Grammatik erst zu erschließen, nachdem die damaligen, an den indogermanischen Sprachen orientierten Sprachwissenschaftler versagt hatten, es zu tun, weil dieser Sprache morphologische Elemente (Deklinations- und Konjugationsformen u. a.), an denen sie sich sonst in der grammatischen Beschreibung einer Sprache orientierten, gänzlich fehlten. „Eine Sprache ohne Grammatik“ sollte eine Grammatik erhalten.

Tagged with: 19th century, Chinese, Gabelentz, Germany, grammar, history
Posted in 19th century, Article, Germany, History

Philosophy of linguistics: the phenomenological perspective

Posted on 17 April 2013 by Lei Zhu — 5 Comments

Lei Zhu
Shanghai International Studies University

Philosophy of linguistics is a special branch of the philosophy of science which focuses on linguistics, the scientific study of language. It was formally established in the last decades of the 20th century after the Chomskyan revolution, and has been under the influence of analytic philosophy since then. Its concern for the foundations of linguistics, however, is not unique to analytic philosophy, but is shared by phenomenology, although discussions on linguistics in the latter tradition are scattered in various works and almost never appear under the title ‘philosophy of linguistics’. The following is a very brief summary of what phenomenologists have contributed to the philosophical understanding of linguistics.

Tagged with: linguistics, phenomenology, philosophy
Posted in Article, Phenomenology, Philosophy

Program April–July

Posted on 17 April 2013 by The Editor — 6 Comments

Welcome to History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences! This is a new blog devoted to exploring and promoting the incredible diversity that exists in the study of language, both in the past and today. We publish a new post every Wednesday, with an invitation to all readers to join in the discussion through comments. Our program for the first fourteen weeks can be seen below. To find out more about us, see our ‘About’ text (in English, French and German).

We are now preparing our second program, for the period July–September. If you would like to write a post for us in this period, please get in touch. Our contact details and guidelines are included in the ‘About’ text.

Posted in Programs

The creation of ‘parts of speech’ for Chinese: ‘translingual practice’ across Graeco-Roman and Sinitic traditions

Analyses du fonctionnement sémantico-référentiel du nom propre dans l’Inde ancienne

Introduction

Theoretical linguistics and artificial languages

The notion of stereotype in language study

1. Introduction

Otto Jespersen and progress in international language

Greetings from the Orient: H.W. Ludolf as a central figure in 17th-cent. language study

On the history of the question of whether natural language is “illogical”

Gabelentz — Grammatiker einer Sprache ohne Grammatik

Philosophy of linguistics: the phenomenological perspective

Program April–July

Upcoming events

Posts

Follow