Historiographia Linguistica - Volume 35, Issue 3, 2008

The article focuses on the treatment of the noun (nomen) in the grammar published in 1584 by the first Slovenian grammarian, Adam Bohorič (c.1520–1598), under the title Arcticae horulae succisivae de Latinocarniolana literatura (“Spare winter hours on Latin-Carniolan grammar”). The chapter on the noun is examined in the larger context of European grammar-writing, revealing the Bohorič grammar to be a fully-fledged humanist text. In addition, the article explains certain aspects of the work which have sometimes been criticised as weaknesses, provides graphic representations of its structure, and describes Bohorič’s debt to Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), the similarities between his work and the German grammar by Johannes Clajus (1535–1592), and the parallels with other grammarians. Moreover, some new findings are presented concerning the glossaries accompanying the paradigms.

In this article the infiltration of the ‘general’ model into the educational systen in Spain is being studied. The author undertakes to demonstrate the diffusion of a scholastic general grammar in this country is not only connected — as in France — to the evolution of theory-internal matters, in other words, in relationship with purely linguistic conceptions, but also determined — and this in a decisive manner that would surprise historians of linguistics — by events external to linguistics, such as changes in the scholastic framework or the legislation pertaining to education generally. It is also shown that if the starting and the ending points of this infiltration of the general grammar in these two countries occurred almost during the same period, there is nevertheless little that these developments have in common, given differing external events in France and Spain, not even in the manner in which this kind of transfer actually took place.

The major claim of this article is that there is an independent and clearly defined chapter in the development of linguistics, beginning in the 1880s, which represents the birth of modern applied linguistics, and which has been overlooked in linguistic historiography because of the comparative marginalisation of applied linguistics in the literature. This is the Anglo-Scandinavian School, a phrase its members used to describe themselves. Pioneers within phonetics, these linguists applied their phonetic knowledge to a range of ‘real world’ language issues, notably language-teaching reform, orthographic reform, language planning, and the study of the spoken language. As well as presenting the ideas of the Anglo-Scandinavian School and how they were developed, this article interrogates the notion of a school in intellectual history and proposes that it may in fact be more fruitful to view intellectual history in terms of discourse communities.

During World War II there arose in the United States an urgent need for intensive foreign language instruction that emphasized the spoken language. Beginning in April, 1943, the U. S. Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) established approximately 500 intensive speaking courses in over 30 languages in fifty-five United States universities. After a single year, the program was suddenly abandoned, owing to combat personnel needs. The present study proposes to describe the sources, implementation, content, materials development, and methods of the ASTP in foreign languages. The study analyzes the ASTP Spanish language materials, explores the attempts at assessing the speaking proficiency of trainees of the program, and evaluates the program’s contributions to subsequent pedagogical approaches and assessment in the United States.