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Studies in the History of the Language Sciences
The companion series to the journal Historiographia Linguistica has been established to meet the revival of interest in the field and to provide an organized reservoir of information concerning the heritage of linguistic ideas of more than two millennia.
61 - 80 of 129 results
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The History of Linguistics in Spain
Editor(s): Antonio Quilis Morales and Hans-Josef NiederehePublication Date January 1986More LessThis selection of papers is concerned with the history of linguistics in Spain, dealing with the evolution of linguistic ideas from the Middle Ages and the European context of the linguistic debates in Spain to the 20th century, concluding with Malkiel's appraisal of Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869–1968). The volume includes papers on Antonio Nebrija and Sanctius, probably the best-known grammarians of the Iberian peninsula, but – as the other papers suggest – there is much more to be known about the Spanish linguistic traditions.The papers in this volume were previously published in Historiographia Linguistica XI:1/2 (1984).
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History of Linguistics in Spain/Historia de la Lingüística en España
Editor(s): E.F.K. Koerner and Hans-Josef NiederehePublication Date September 2001More LessThe contributions in this volume, a sequel to the volume published in 1986 (SiHoLS 34), treat many aspects of the history of the language sciences in Spain and in Hibero-America, from the Renaissance and ‘Siglo de Oro’ to the 20th century. Most papers were published in the journal Historiographia Linguistica; they were complemented with a few invited papers.
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The History of Linguistics in the Classical Period
Editor(s): Daniel J. TaylorPublication Date January 1987More LessThe study of Greek and Roman language science has figured prominently in the remarkable renascence of interest in the history of linguistics of the last twenty years. We know more now than we did several decades ago about what the Greeks and Romans were thinking, writing, and doing in matters grammatical, and the scholars who contribute to this volume are among the ones who are responsible for that happy circumstance. The contents of this book bear ample testimony to the enhanced and enlarged understanding and appreciation of ancient grammar that we now enjoy. Each article in this volume has something new to say about the history of linguistics in the classical period, and each author insists that we need to return to ancient texts time and time again and that we need to read them even more carefully. The rethinking so conspicuous in much of the recent scholarship in this field is pointing in the direction of a new historiographical model of Greek and Latin linguistic science. The text of this volume has also been published in Historiographia Linguistica XIII:2/3
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The History of Linguistics in the Low Countries
Editor(s): Jan Noordegraaf, Kees Versteegh and E.F.K. KoernerPublication Date November 1992More LessThe importance of the Low Countries as a centre for the study of foreign languages is well-known. The mutual relationship between the Dutch grammatical tradition and the Western European context has, however, been largely neglected. In this collection of papers on the history of linguistics in the Low Countries the editors have made an effort to present the Dutch tradition in connection with that of the neighbouring countries. Three articles by Claes, Dibbets and Klifman deal with the earliest stages of the development of a grammar for the Dutch vernacular. Several important European figures worked in the Low Countries; their contribution to linguistics is discussed in articles on Vossius (Rademaker), Spinoza (Klijnsmit), and one of the most original phoneticians of European linguistics, Montanus (Hulsker). Vivian Salmon's article is a survey on the relations between English and Dutch linguistics in the field of foreign language teaching. In the 19th century Dutch linguistics had a special relationship with German general and historical linguistics; four articles deal with this period (Jongeneelen, van Driel, le Loux-Schuringa, Noordegraaf). Finally, there are three articles by Kaldewij, Hagen and van Els/Knops on the development of three branches of linguistics in the 20th century: structuralism, dialectology and applied linguistics. This volume should be of interest for all specialists in the history of linguistics in Europe, who are interested in the interdependence of the various traditions.
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The History of Linguistics in the Near East
Editor(s): Kees Versteegh, E.F.K. Koerner and Hans-Josef NiederehePublication Date January 1982More LessThis collection of papers deals with aspects of the history of Arabic and Hebrew linguistics. These papers appeared simultaneously in Historiographia Linguistica 8:2/3 (1981).
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A History of the Study of the Indigenous Languages of North America
Author(s): Marcin KilarskiPublication Date December 2021More LessThe languages indigenous to North America are characterized by a remarkable genetic and typological diversity. Based on the premise that linguistic examples play a key role in the origin and transmission of ideas within linguistics and across disciplines, this book examines the history of approaches to these languages through the lens of some of their most prominent properties. These properties include consonant inventories and the near absence of labials in Iroquoian languages, gender in Algonquian languages, verbs for washing in the Iroquoian language Cherokee and terms for snow and related phenomena in Eskimo-Aleut languages. By tracing the interpretations of the four examples by European and American scholars, the author illustrates their role in both lay and professional contexts as a window onto unfamiliar languages and cultures, thus allowing a more holistic view of the history of language study in North America.
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Images of Language
Author(s): William Jervis JonesPublication Date April 1999More LessThis volume consists of six essays on interrelated themes, focusing on key aspects of language reflection during the period 1500-1800, with particular emphasis on the seventeenth century. German speakers are seen attempting to discover and define the nature of adjacent languages, whilst also shaping and demarcating the identity and image of their native tongue.
The first essay outlines and illustrates what European linguists believed, in an age before the advent of comparative philology, about the historical-genetic position of German within the circle of Classical and modern European languages.
Three further essays explore the surprisingly rich diversity of approach and method in earlier foreign-word purism, the puristic use of lexis and metaphor (with special reference to gender-specific imagery), and prominent reaction to the intrusive foreign word in German military usage.
The last two essays span a wide range of attitudes and reaction to the French language among German speakers, and early German perceptions of that marginal (and in the popular view excessively contaminated) language, English. The work makes frequent reference to contemporary views of other languages, including Hebrew, Greek Latin, Italian and Spanish.
Documented with much new material from about 300 original sources, these essays bring to light the ideas aired by many hitherto neglected personalities, whilst also deepening our understanding of better-known figures and their work.
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The Importance of Techmer's 'Internationale Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft' in the Development of General Linguistics
Author(s): E.F.K. KoernerPublication Date January 1973More LessTechmer’s Internationale Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (1884–1890) served, at a time of neogrammarian domination in the linguistic scene of the late 19th century, as an international forum for the discussion of general linguistics topics, the Humboldtian philosophy of language, and the promotion of non-Indo-European linguistic research.
This essay starts with information on the founder and sole editor of the journal, Friedrich Techmer, then analyzes the most significant contributions to the journal, surveying in the same part the range of publications as well as the international character of both the Advisory Board and the contributors, and in the concluding chapter shows how IZAS is of relevance even for the linguistic pursuits of today.
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In Memoriam Friedrich Diez: Akten des Kolloquiums zum Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Romanistik/Actes du Colloque sur l'Histoire des Etudes Romanes/ Proc
Editor(s): Hans-Josef Niederehe and Harald HaarmannPublication Date January 1976More LessThe first 'Kolloquium zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Romanistik' (Trier 1975) was held to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the death of Friedrich Diez, the founder of Romance philology. The colloquium offered Romanists and historians of linguistics the opportunity for intense discussion, which is continued in the papers in this volume.
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John Wilkins and 17th-Century British Linguistics
Editor(s): Joseph L. SubbiondoPublication Date May 1992More LessIn this reader, 19 articles have been collected that bring out the central position of John Wilkins and his Essay Toward a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) in the history of ideas in 17th-century Britain.
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Language and Earth
Editor(s): Bernd Naumann, Frans Plank and Gottfried HofbauerPublication Date April 1992More LessIn former times, the study of language was rarely pursued in isolation, and many of the other intellectual concerns that used to be intertwined with language study have long been on the record of historians of linguistics. The present volume is the first to probe into an association of linguistics that has so far been neglected: that with the study of the earth. The relations between linguistics and geology were intimate and manifold as both sciences were emerging in the 18th and 19th century. Highlighted in the contributions to this volume are biographical and institutional contacts, the joint interest in origins and very early developments and in the proper methods of acquiring knowledge about these, common structural and evolutionary concepts, and analogous problems in the classification of domains as fuzzy as languages and rocks.
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Language and Experience in 17th-Century British Philosophy
Author(s): Lia FormigariPublication Date January 1988More LessThe focus of this volume is the crisis of the traditional view of the relationship between words and things and the emergence of linguistic arbitrarism in 17th-century British philosophy. Different groups of sources are explored: philological and antiquarian writings, pedagogical treatises, debates on the respective merits of the liberal and mechanical arts, essays on cryptography and the art of gestures, polemical pamphlets on university reform, universal language scheme, and philosophical analyses of the conduct of the understanding. In the late 17th-century the philosophy of mind discards both the correspondence of predicamental series to reality and the archetypal metaphysics underpinning it. This is a turning point in semantic theory: language is conceived as the social construction of historical-conventional objects through signs and the study of strategies we use to bridge the gap between the privacy of experience and the publicness of speech emerges as one of the main topics in the philosophy of language.
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Language and its Functions
Author(s): Pieter A. VerburgPublication Date August 1998More LessWhen Pieter Verburg (1905-1989) published Taal en Functionaliteit in 1952, the work was received with admiration by linguistic scholars, though the number of those who could read the Dutch text for themselves remained limited. The title alludes to the theories of linguistic function set out in 1936 by Karl Bühler, but Verburg regards the three functions of discourse — focussing respectively on the speaker, the person addressed and the matter discussed — as no more than sub-functions of the human function of speech. His central concern is to explore the relationships between thought and language, and language and reality; and the work sets out to provide a historical analysis of views on these relationships in the period 1100 to 1800.
The great strength of the work lies in the way in which the views of language are related to contemporaneous moves in philosophy and science, contrasting essentially the mediaeval acceptance of authority, the beginnings of induction in the Renaissance, the dependence of early rationalism on calculation based on axiomatic truths, and the further development of independent observation. All these trends are reflected in the way men thought about language, as well as in the way they used it.
Much has been written on the history of linguistics since this book was written, but it still offers a unique view of the development of thinking about language.
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Language and Society in Early Modern England
Author(s): Vivian SalmonPublication Date September 1996More LessThis volume brings together twelve previously published essays, divided into three sections: 1. Surveys of 16th- and 17th-Century Linguistic Scholarship, 2. The Study of Universal and Particular Traits of Language, and 3. Language Learning and Language Instruction. The volume is completed by an index of biographical names and an index of subjects and terms.
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Language, Action and Context
Author(s): Brigitte Nerlich and David D. ClarkePublication Date June 1996More LessThe roots of pragmatics reach back to Antiquity, especially to rhetoric as one of the three liberal arts. However, until the end of the 18th century proto-pragmatic insights tended to be consigned to the pragmatic, that is rhetoric, wastepaper basket and thus excluded from serious philosophical consideration.
It can be said that pragmatics was conceived between 1780 and 1830 in Britain, but also in Germany and in France in post-Lockian and post-Kantian philosophies of language. These early ‘conceptions’ of pragmatics are described in the first part of the book.
The second part of the book looks at pragmatic insights made between 1830 and 1880, when they were once more relegated to the philosophical and linguistic underground. The main stage was then occupied by a fact-hunting historical comparative linguistics on the one hand and a newly spiritualised philosophy on the other.
In the last part the period between 1880 and 1930 is presented, when pragmatic insights flourished and were sought after systematically. This was due in part to a new upsurge in empiricism, positivism and later behaviourism in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. Between 1780 and 1930 philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and linguists came to see that language could only be studied in the context of dialogue, in the context of human life and finally as being a kind of human action itself.
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Last Papers in Linguistic Historiography
Author(s): E.F.K. KoernerPublication Date August 2020More LessThis volume brings together — in 8 chapters — what has occupied the author during his many years as editor of Historiographia Linguistica. Namely, how the history of linguistics has developed into a major field of scholarly research, and that the discussion of questions of method and epistemology needs to be continued to avoid stereotypical practice. The author takes up a number of subjects that often had been regarded as settled, but which require a revisit. This is shown in several chapters, whether it appears subjects like ‘analogy’ or the relationships between well-known linguists like Saussure, Hermann Paul, and others.
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Leibniz, Humboldt, and the Origins of Comparativism
Editor(s): Tullio De Mauro and Lia FormigariPublication Date January 1990More LessBoth Leibniz and Humboldt are scholars in whose work we find a passionate interest in the history and development of languages combined with a strong theoretical commitment. Linking their names to linguistic comparativism draws attention to the contribution these scholars have made to the history of comparativism and also promotes discussion of the relationship of theory and practice in linguistic research in more general terms. In September 1986, a conference on Leibniz, Humboldt and the Origins of Comparativism' was held in Rome. The papers included in this volume are revised versions of the papers presented at the conference.
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Leonard Bloomfield
Editor(s): Robert A. Hall, Jr.Publication Date January 1987More LessThese essays were brought together to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949), one of the most outstanding and influential linguists of the twentieth century. The contributions have been grouped in three sections according to their relevance to his work, and deal, respectively, with his personality, his theoretical stance, and his fields of study.
The papers in this volume were previously published in Historiographia Linguistics 14:1/2 (1987), to which has been added an index of names containing biographical dates.
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A Life for Language
Author(s): Robert A. Hall, Jr.Publication Date January 1990More LessLeonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) was one of the greatest linguists of the twentieth century. He devoted his entire life to a thorough-going study of language, its structure and its use, summed up in masterly fashion in his book Language (1933). After his premature death at the age of 62, his work was at first acclaimed as an exemplary application of the scientific method to linguistics, but then fell into unjustified neglect. Now that the centenary of his birth has passed, the time has come for the story of Bloomfield's life and work to be recounted in a biography. Accordingly, basing his discussion on all available materials (including some information not accessible until recently), Professor Hall has presented Bloomfield's life history in its intellectual and cultural setting. This book is not only a biography, but also a personal memoir, in which Hall draws on his contacts with Bloomfield, who was his teacher at Chicago and a senior colleague at Yale. There emerges from this study a fuller picture than we have had heretofore, presenting both Bloomfield's recognized achievement in establishing the study of language as a scientific discipline, and the less-known aspects of his character and of his personal life, which in certain respects was very tragic and sad.
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Limiting the Arbitrary
Author(s): John E. JosephPublication Date October 2000More LessThe idea that some aspects of language are ‘natural’, while others are arbitrary, artificial or derived, runs all through modern linguistics, from Chomsky’s GB theory and Minimalist program and his concept of E- and I-language, to Greenberg’s search for linguistic universals, Pinker’s views on regular and irregular morphology and the brain, and the markedness-based constraints of Optimality Theory. This book traces the heritage of this linguistic naturalism back to its locus classicus, Plato’s dialogue Cratylus. The first half of the book is a detailed examination of the linguistic arguments in the Cratylus. The second half follows three of the dialogue’s naturalistic themes through subsequent linguistic history — natural grammar and conventional words, from Aristotle to Pinker; natural dialect and artificial language, from Varro to Chomsky; and invisible hierarchies, from Jakobson to Optimality Theory — in search of a way forward beyond these seductive yet spurious and limiting dichotomies.
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