Studies in the History of the Language Sciences

This volume presents a selection of – slightly revised versions – of papers from the third International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS III), Princeton, 1984. The papers are organized under the following headings: I Generalia; II Classical Period; III Medieval Period; IV Renaissance; V 17th Century; VI 18th Century; VII 19th Century, and VIII 20th Century.

Contributors include W. Keith Percival, Aron Dotan, Michael G. Carter, Kees Versteegh, Brian Ó Cuív, Francis P. Dinneen, Manuel Breva-Claramonte, Douglas A. Kibbee, Joseph L. Subbiondo, Rüdiger Schreyer, Marc Wilmet, Robert H. Robins, Jean Rousseau, Ramón Sarmiento, Edward Stankiewicz, Irmengard Rauch, Talbot J. Taylor, Julie Andresen, and many others.

This volume presents an English translation of Petrus Hispanus Portugalensis’ (d. 1277) Tractatus — called afterwards Summulae Logicales — on the basis of the critical edition established by L. M. de Rijk (1972). The Summulae’s first part (I-V) introduces Aristotelian ideas familiar enough at the time to be called Old Logic; the second (VI-XII) studies properties of terms, then considered novelties of Modern Logic. The two most important properties of terms were Supposition (meaning-as-reference) and Signification (meaning-as-sense). Among the questions raised were how senses and referents are related. Classifications recorded by Hispanus became part of Western traditional education. His Summulae was widely required as a text for generations, and later texts borrowed, amended, rejected or extended parts of it. The Summulae is also worth evaluating in the light of debate about the ‘scientific’ status of Linguistics. Hispanus claimed Dialectic was a study prerequisite to all others, because it shows how to test their fundamental assumptions. Norms he proposed for this rigorous interpretation of language are public, refutable, and countable, all characteristics claimed for ‘science’.

From the 16th century onwards, Europeans encountered languages in the Americas, Africa, and Asia which were radically different from any of the languages of the Old World. Missionaries were in the forefront of this encounter: in order to speak to potential converts, they needed to learn local languages. A great wealth of missionary grammars survives from the 16th century onwards. Some of these are precious records of the languages they document, and all of them witness their authors’ attempts to develop the methods of grammatical description with which they were familiar, to accommodate dramatically new linguistic features.This book is the first monograph covering the whole Portuguese grammatical tradition outside Portugal. Its aim is to provide an integrated description, analysis and evaluation of the missionary grammars which were written in Portuguese. Between them, these grammars covered a huge range of languages: in Asia, Tamil, four Indo-Aryan languages and Japanese; in Brazil, Kipeá and Tupinambá; in Africa and the African diaspora, Kimbundu and Sena (from the modern Angola and Mozambique respectively).Each text is placed in its historical context, and its linguistic context is analyzed, with particular attention to orthography, the parts of speech system, morphology and syntax. Whenever possible, pedagogical features of the grammars are discussed, together with their treatment of language variation and pragmatics, and the evidence they provide for the missionaries’ attitude towards the languages they studied.

The volume brings together recent papers by the author, selected to form a broad picture of his teachings, all of them revised and updated, either addressing particular topics in the Histor(iograph)y of Linguistics (Part I) or offering historical accounts of linguistic subfields (Part II), in altogether 10 chapters: 1, Persistent Issues in Linguistic Historiography; 2, Metalanguage in Linguistic Historiography; 3, The Natural Science Impact on Theory Formation in 19th and 20th Century Linguistics; 4, Saussure and the Question of the Sources of his Linguistic Theory; 5, Chomsky’s Readings of the Cours de linguistique générale; 6, Toward a History of Modern Sociolinguistics; 7, Toward a History of Americanist Linguistics; 8, Toward a History of Linguistic Typology; 9, History and Historiography of Phonetics: A state-of-the-art account, and 10, The ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’: An historico-bibliographical essay. Index of authors; index of subjects & terms.

This book provides a critical edition, translation and commentary of the British Museum Incunabulum C.21.C.52 and the Cambridge Incunabulum 5.J.3.7. of the Quaestiones Alberti. Although the British Museum catalogue ascribes the incunabulum to Albertus Magnus, the authorship is debated.The format of the twenty-one questions of this text follows the standard pattern of the time: after stating the question, the author cites as argumenta opinions with which he does not agree, gives his own answer, and then refutes the argumenta.
For the author of these questions, three issues are paramount: the scientific status of grammar, the problem of universals, and the 'structure of the device' through which language was generated.

The phenomenon of absolutist, prescriptive correctness is persistent and pervasive in the linguistic through of educated and intelligent citizens of the United States. This volume is not only and attempt to gain some understanding of the source, nature, and operation of the prescriptive attitude, but also to examine it in the light of what Einar Haugen (1972) has called the ‘ecology of language’, that is, the relationship between language attitudes and other social and cultural behavior.

It is widely believed by historians of linguistics that the 19th-century was largely devoted to historical and comparative studies, with the main emphasis on the discovery of soundlaws. Syntax is typically portrayed as a mere sideline of these studies, while semantics is seldom even mentioned. If it comes into view at all, it is usually assumed to have been confined to diachronic lexical semantics and the construction of some (mostly ill-conceived) typologies of semantic change. This book aims to destroy some of these prejudices and to show that in Europe semantics was an important, although controversial, area at that time. Synchronic mechanisms of semantic change were discovered and increasing attention was paid to the context of the sentence, to the speech situation and the users of the language. From being a semantics of transformations', a child of the biological-geological paradigm of historical linguistics with its close links to etymology and lexicography, the field matured into a semantics of comprehension and communication, set within a general linguistics and closely related to the emerging fields of psychology and sociology.

This volume brings together papers originally presented at a seminar series on Speculative Grammar, Universal Grammar, and Philosophical Analysis, held at the University of Bologna in 1984. The seminars aimed at considering various aspects of the interplay between linguistic theories on the one hand, and theories of meaning and logic on the other. The point of view was mainly historical, but a theoretical approach was also considered relevant. Theories of grammar and related topics were taken as a focal point of interest; their interaction with philosophical reflections on languages was examined in presentations dealing with different authors and periods, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present day.

This volume reprints — with additions and corrections — seven papers originally published 1962–1973, on the indigenous grammars of Tibet and their linguistic tradition. Two ancient treatises commonly attributed to “Thon-mi Sambhoṭa” are studied extensively, as well as extracts from many other Tibetan texts, with translations, commentaries, and detailed bibliographical data, covering a wide range of linguistic doctrines, from the early 11th to the beginning of the 20th century. The final article incorporates a complete grammatical sketch of Classical Tibetan; this, together with the comprehensive indexes of Tibetan and Indic grammatical and technical terms, proper names, titles, etc., will facilitate the use of the volume as a basic reference-source for all future work on the Tibetan grammarians.

In the 19th century research on the Indo-European languages was to a large degree coterminus with the development of linguistics itself. The most notable accomplishments, as related in every history of linguistics, took place in the area of phonology. The present study examines one aspect of phonological investigation of the Indo-European languages: vocalism from the early 1800’s to around 1870, the threshold of the neogrammarian era. It attempts to go beyond a mere chronological presentation of research on vocalism in the 19th century to examine other questions, such as the origin of the concepts which linguists employed and the methodology they advanced. Moreover, it attempts to illustrate anew that the history of any science cannot be reduced to a simple linear arrangement of discoveries.