Universal History of Linguistics

This epilogue argues that historians ought to be able to produce a universal history, one that would ‘cover’ the past of humankind ‘as a whole’. However, aside from the always increasing difficulty of mastering the factual material that such an undertaking requires, there exists another difficulty: the coherence of universal history always presupposes an initial decision not to write about the human past in all its multiplicity, but to focus on one aspect of that past. Nevertheless, the lure of universal history will persist, even in the face of its practical and conceptual difficulty. Certainly, it is possible to imagine a future ideological convergence among humans that would enable them to accept, as authoritative, one history of humankind.

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The Medieval Life of Language

10.5117/9789463721929 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Mark Amsler

Keyword(s):

Critical Discourse Analysis ◽

Social History ◽

Theory And Practice ◽

Margery Kempe ◽

Pragmatic Theory ◽

Sign Theory ◽

Philosophy And Literature ◽

Social Discourses ◽

History Of Linguistics ◽

History Of

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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Timothy Greenwood: The Universal History of Step‘anos Tarōnec‘i: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. (Oxford Studies in Byzantium.) xiv, 358 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. £90. ISBN 978 0 19 879251 2.

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies ◽

10.1017/s0041977x1800068x ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 81 (2) ◽

pp. 339-340

Author(s):

Sergio La Porta

Keyword(s):

Universal History ◽

Oxford University ◽

History Of ◽

Oxford University Press

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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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