Historiographia Linguistica - Current Issue

Abstract

Although coordination is a basic and universal syntactic construction, the conjunction is a grammatical category or part of speech that has often been neglected in the history of linguistics. The cause can be traced to the lack of correspondence between the morphosyntactic features and the functional meanings of this category, which should rather be placed on a grammatical continuum between coordination and subordination. The difficulty of an unambiguous definition is already evident in the reflections of ancient grammarians. The case of missionary grammarians at the beginning of the modern era represents a turning point, given the difficulty of adapting the classifications of the European tradition to indigenous languages characterized by a completely different morphosyntactic system. The aim of this paper is to analyze the first grammars of Aymara and Quechua written by missionary grammarians working at the school of Juli, which has been described as a true ‘linguistic laboratory’ of the Society of Jesus. Given that the notions of subordination and dependent sentence are commonly attributed to the Port-Royal grammarians (1660), and thus an explicit distinction between subordinating and coordinating conjunctions had not yet been formalized at the time, I attempt to reconstruct this distinction by analyzing the types of clauses that are explicitly defined as dependent and associated with specific conjunctions. The textual analysis suggests that, as early as the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European grammarians were already aware of the distinction between coordination and subordination, thus challenging prevailing assumptions in the historiography of linguistic thought.

Abstract

Dutch lexicography spread widely in Japan during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prompting Japanese scholars to develop methodologies for its reception. The two often-cited Dutch-French dictionaries by François Halma and Pieter Marin became the main link between the Sino-Japanese and European lexicographic traditions. This contribution analyses Japanese manuscripts to examine how Dutch lexicography was received and repurposed for the needs of the Japanese scholars. Marin and Halma compiled their works intending to aid Dutch learners of French looking up unfamiliar words, aware that this also implied an unprecedented cataloguing of the Dutch lexicon. When these dictionaries reached Japan, the local scholars had different necessities, having to make the most of these rare books. The Japanese used them not only to look up words, but also as models to base the first Dutch-Japanese dictionaries and, most uniquely, as sources for the study of Dutch grammar. European lexicography was different enough from what the Japanese were used to, that they felt compelled to explain in detail how to consult a Dutch dictionary, often without referencing comparable local sources, evidencing the perceived differences between the two lexicographic traditions.

Summary

Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) is one of the best-known German linguists of the early nineteenth-century. His influential volume, Deutsche Grammatik (1826, part two), deals with German word-formation. That work comments on the development of derivational affixes from former words, and thus contributes to affixoid studies. Much current work on affixoids utilizes Stevens’ (2005) criteria to determine whether an affixoid is on hand, and this paper thus uses Stevens’ work as a backdrop to situate Grimm’s related theoretical claims. A number of Grimm’s claims support current linguistic theory on affixoids, and several claims appear to offer fruitful insights for further investigation.

Summary

Antoine Meillet’s theory of sociolinguistic change finds one of its most accomplished expressions in his article “Le développement des langues.” Included in the posthumous volume Linguistique historique et linguistique générale (1936), it is often read out of its original context (cf. Swiggers 2015). In fact, Meillet wrote this essay for philosopher Jacques Chevalier’s 1929 special issue on the concepts “continuous” and “discontinuous” in science (Chevalier 1929a). Titled Continu et Discontinu, Chevalier’s volume brought together papers of researchers from various fields spanning epistemology, evolution, philosophy, history of science, physics, mathematics, chemistry, law, and Indo-European linguistics. The present article discusses Chevalier’s philosophical program and examines how each of the volume’s papers interacts with it. I argue that re-reading Meillet’s essay within the context of Chevalier’s epistemological project not only reveals its function in Chevalier’s editorial strategy, but also shows how this strategy compelled Meillet to articulate his theory more systematically while allowing us to reassess the role of the conceptual pair “continuous” and “discontinuous” in his work.

Summary

Generative linguistics has a longer prehistory than most linguists realize. The rewriting systems that Chomsky brought into linguistics as generative grammars were explicitly defined more than a century ago, as part of a project to formalize inference rules in logic, and were later applied to studying mathematical properties of certain kinds of infinite sets. Their developer was the mathematician and logician Emil Leon Post, whose work was inspired by Clarence Irving Lewis and Cassius Jackson Keyser. Post also proved the first two theorems about what linguists now call generative capacity. The idea of deploying Post’s systems within linguistics was first suggested in 1950 by the logician Paul Rosenbloom. I review the relevant pre-1950 work, and explore the reasons for its having remained so little known among linguists.

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