The "Great Crisis" in the History of Linguistics and How It Was Overcome

The Medieval Life of Language: Grammar and Pragmatics from Bacon to Kempe explores the complex history of medieval pragmatic theory and ideas and metapragmatic awareness across social discourses. Pragmatic thinking about language and communication are revealed in grammar, semiotics, philosophy, and literature. Part historical reconstruction, part social history, part language theory, Amsler supplements the usual materials for the history of medieval linguistics and discusses the pragmatic implications of grammatical treatises on the interjection, Bacon's sign theory, logic texts, Chaucer's poetry, inquisitors' accounts of heretic speech, and life writing by William Thorpe and Margery Kempe. Medieval and contemporary pragmatic theory are contrasted in terms of their philosophical and linguistic orientations. Aspects of medieval pragmatic theory and practice, especially polysemy, equivocation, affective speech, and recontextualization, show how pragmatic discourse informed social controversies and attitudes toward sincere, vague, and heretical speech. Relying on Bakhtinian dialogism, critical discourse analysis, and conversation analysis, Amsler situates a key period in the history of linguistics within broader social and discursive fields of practice.

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Universal History of Linguistics

Journal of the American Oriental Society ◽

10.2307/603073 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 113 (2) ◽

pp. 329

Author(s):

Roy Andrew Miller ◽

Esa Itkonen

Keyword(s):

Universal History ◽

History Of Linguistics ◽

History Of

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André Martinet (1908–1999)

Language Problems & Language Planning ◽

10.1075/lplp.36.3.05kla ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 36 (3) ◽

pp. 273-293

Author(s):

Johannes Klare

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Foreign Language ◽

World Wide ◽

Columbia University ◽

The World ◽

History Of Linguistics ◽

History Of ◽

Important Position ◽

Research Director

André Martinet holds an important position in the history of linguistics in the twentieth century. For more than six decades he decisively influenced the development of linguistics in France and in the world. He is one of the spokespersons for French linguistic structuralism, the structuralisme fonctionnel. The article focuses on a description and critical appreciation of the interlinguistic part of Martinet’s work. The issue of auxiliary languages and hence interlinguistics had interested Martinet greatly from his youth and provoked him to examine the matter actively. From 1946 onwards he worked in New York as a professor at Columbia University and a research director of the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). From 1934 he was in contact with the Danish linguist and interlinguist Otto Jespersen (1860–1943). Martinet, who went back to Paris in 1955 to work as a professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sorbonne), increasingly developed into an expert in planned languages; for his whole life, he was committed to the world-wide use of a foreign language that can be learned equally easily by members of all ethnic groups; Esperanto, functioning since 1887, seemed a good option to him.

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A Few Remarks on Adam Smith’s Dissertation (1761)

Historiographia Linguistica ◽

10.1075/hl.4.1.04noo ◽

1977 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 59-67 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Jan Noordegraaf

Keyword(s):

Adam Smith ◽

French Translation ◽

Moral Sentiments ◽

The Third ◽

History Of Linguistics ◽

History Of ◽

Theory Of Moral Sentiments

Summary In 1761 Adam Smith (1723–90) published his Dissertation on the Origin of Languages. Erroneously scholars have thought that this essay appeared as a supplement to the second edition of Smith’s book The Theory of Moral Sentiments of the same year; in fact it was only added to the third edition of that work (1767). Against Coseriu’s opinion that Adam Smith must be considered as a pioneer of the typology of language, one can put forward that Smith’s ideas on the typology of language are very similar to those of the French Abbé Gabriel Girard (1677–1748), whose influence is admitted by Smith himself. On another point, it turns out that before 1809, the year in which J. Manget published a French translation of Smith’s Dissertation, already three other translations into French of the same work had appeared. First-hand inspection of texts appears desirable in the writing of the history of linguistics.

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The new big picture for linguistics: Complex systems

Yearbook of the Poznan Linguistic Meeting ◽

10.2478/yplm-2018-0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 1-20

Author(s):

William A. Kretzschmar

Keyword(s):

Complex Systems ◽

Distributional Pattern ◽

Logical System ◽

Human Speech ◽

New Methods ◽

Central Factor ◽

History Of Linguistics ◽

Big Picture ◽

History Of ◽

Logical Nature

Abstract In the history of linguistics there have been crucial moments when those of us interested in language have essentially changed the way we study our subject. We stand now at such a moment. In this presentation I will review the history of linguistics in order to highlight some past important changes in the field, and then turn to where we stand now. Some things that we thought we knew have turned out not to be true, like the systematic, logical nature of languages. Other things that we had not suspected, like a universal underlying emergent pattern for all the features of a language, are now evident. This emergent pattern is fractal, that is, we can observe the same distributional pattern in frequency profiles for linguistic variants at every level of scale in our analysis. We also have hints that time, as the persistence of a preference for particular variants of features, is a much more important part of our language than we had previously believed. We need to explore the new realities of language as we now understand them, chief among them the idea that patterned variation, not logical system, is the central factor in human speech. In order to account for what we now understand, we need to get used to new methods of study and presentation, and place new emphasis on different communities and groups of speakers. Because the underlying pattern of language is fractal, we need to examine the habits of every group of speakers at every location for themselves, as opposed to our previous emphasis on overall grammars. We need to make our studies much more local, as opposed to global. We do still want to make grammars and to understand language in global terms, but such generalizations need to follow from what we can now see as the pattern of language as it is actually used.

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«GERMAN GRAMMAR» BY JACOB GRIMM AND SCHOOL GERMAN GRAMMAR BOOKS IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY

Verhnevolzhski Philological Bulletin ◽

10.20323/2499-9679-2020-4-23-121-127 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 23 (4) ◽

pp. 121-127

Author(s):

Oleg V. Lukin ◽

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Secondary Schools ◽

Native Language ◽

German Language ◽

Linguistic Research ◽

Scientific Approach ◽

The Matrix ◽

History Of Linguistics ◽

History Of ◽

Xix Century

The article is devoted to the place of J. Grimm's «German grammar» among school German grammar books of the XIX century Germany. The work that appeared at the beginning of the century opened a new page in the history of linguistics – the development of comparative historical language study and the formation of linguistics as a science. The paper provides information on some of the most important German grammar textbooks in Germany of the XIX century, used in secondary schools. They were grammar books by J. Ch. Gottsched, J. Ch. Adelung, J. Ch. A. Heyse, J. G. Radlof, S. G. A. Herling, F. J. Schmitthenner, M. W. Götzinger, etc. The author of the article compares J. Grimm's «German grammar» with the above-mentioned grammar works of that time and puts forward a hypothesis that in the XIX century Germany there appeared an opposition between scientific approach to grammar and that of school grammar books, which, according to the author, reflects dramatically different goals set by both sides. Unlike school textbooks which task is to consistently initiate students into the system of their native language, often on the basis of the matrix created by Alexandrian grammarians, scientific grammar is based on the results of linguistic research and seeks to answer questions about language phenomena. J. Grimm rejected any normative grammar based on logics, that resulting in the aversion on the part of the pedagogical community. Nevertheless, the publication of «German grammar» resulted in appearance of German language textbooks the writers of which tried to build their work on the basis of Grimm’s work, thereby contributing to the popularization of the ideas of the great linguist both among the pedagogical community and the students (A. F. H. Vilmar and K. A. J. Hoffmann).

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