E. F. K. Koerner

Concise history of the language sciences : from the Sumerians to the cognitivists

General. Antiquity to Middle Ages--The Near East. Antiquity--The Far East. Antiquity--India. Antiquity--Europe. Middle Ages--Europe. Renaissance--Europe. 17th and 18th Century Europe. The Main Strands of 19th Century Linguistics. 20th Century Linguistics. Special Applications--Phonetics and Translation. Index of Biographical Names. Index of Concepts and Terms.

Practicing Linguistic Historiography

This collection contains 24 articles on the history of linguistics written between 1978 and 1988, divided into three parts: 1. Methods and Models in Linguistic Historiography 2. Tradition and Transmission of Linguistic Notions 3. Schools and Scholars in the History of Linguistics Three articles are written in German, two in French and one in Italian. The remaining eighteen articles are in English.

Historiography of Linguistics

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the historiography of linguistics. Historiography of Linguistics in the sense of “principled manner of writing the history of the study of language,” and not in the sense of is of recent vintage. “History of Linguistics,” the field of study concerned with delineating the development of the science of language from its early beginnings to present- day commitments in the field, has, it appears, come into its own in recent years. The setting up of the very bases of a historiography of linguistics, a field of inquiry whose biases should be only in favor of re-establishing the most important facts of our linguistic past sine ira et studio and explaining, as much as possible, the reasons for the changes of direction and emphasis, and for possible discontinuity that can be observed, places high demands on individual scholarship, breadth of scope, and depth of learning, requiring an almost encyclopedic knowledge on the part of the investigator, given the almost interdisciplinary nature of this activity.

Writings in General Linguistics

This volume brings together the most important general linguistic writings by Mikolay Kruszewski (1851-1887), whom Roman Jakobson described as “one of the greatest theoreticians of language among the world linguists of the late nineteenth century”. Apart from reissuing a revised version of the late Robert Austerlitz’ translation of the theoretical introduction of Kruszewski’s Master’s thesis on morphophonemic alternation in Old Slavic, first published in German in 1881, the bulk of the present volume consists of the first translation ever, by Gregory M. Eramian, of Kruszewski’s doctoral thesis, Outline of Linguistic Science , supervised by J. Baudouin de Courtenay and submitted in Russian at the University of Kazan in 1883, which until now has been available only in German translation, published in Techmer’s “Zeitschrift” (Leipzig, 1884-1890; reprinted Amsterdam, 1973). Together with a detailed introduction, a full list of Kruszewski’s writings, a bibliography of secondary sources, including a reconstruction of the major works consulted by Kruszewski, and detailed indexes of biographical names, subjects & terms, and languages cited for examples, the present volume provides Western scholars with a solid textual and contextual basis for a proper reassessment of the ideas of arguably the most outstanding 19th-century linguistic thinker.

Whitney, William Dwight (1827–1894)

William Dwight Whitney was the most important figure in 19th-century American linguistics. He is best known as a general linguist and Sanskrit scholar. His early interests lay in the natural sciences, notably ornithology and geology, leading him to introduce notions derived from geology into linguistic theory and practice.

Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772–1829)

The work of Carl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel was important for the development of comparative-historical as well as typological linguistics in the 19th century. His study of Sanskrit and related languages influenced many other linguists and undoubtedly earned him a place among the ‘founding fathers’ of comparative Indo-European grammar.

Bopp, Franz (1791–1867)

The publication of Franz Bopps Uber das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in 1816 is generally regarded as marking the beginning of comparative Indo-European languages. Bopp developed a method of showing the basic structural identity of Indo-European languages, thereby providing the framework and direction for the research of several generations of historical linguists.

Paul, Hermann (1846–1921)

Hermann Paul is best known for his Principien der Sprachgeschichte, which is particularly important because it constituted the first attempt in the annals of linguistic science to formulate the principles that should guide scholars in their linguistic research. He synthesized the linguistic ideas of what was developing as linguistic practice during the concluding decades of the 19th century. His theories provided stimulating material for intensive discussions among both his contemporaries and linguists of succeeding generations.

Schleicher, August (1821–1868)

August Schleicher was the most distinguished Indo-Europeanist of his generation and an accomplished synthesizer of the accumulated linguistic knowledge of his time. He was innovative in many fields, including the study of Baltic and Slavic languages. He developed the method of reconstruction in comparative linguistics, on which subsequent generations have built.

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913)

It was the posthumous publication of Saussure—-rather than his life-time accomplishment as an Indo-European—based on his lectures on general linguistics held in Geneva from 1907 to 1911, the Cours de linguistique generale (Lausanne and Paris 1916) which produced ‘a veritable Copernican revolution’ (Holdcroft 1991), not only in linguistics, where the emphasis on the synchronic study of language relegated traditional historical-comparative work to a mere province, but also in subjects such as anthropology, psychology, literary theory, and philosophy in as much as they deal with language. The definition of language as a socially conditioned network of interrelated terms and as a system of arbitrary signs proved to be the main source of twentieth-century structuralism in its various manifestations, notably in the work of theoretical linguists like Hjelmslev, Jakobson, Firth, Bloomfield, and Chomsky, but also in the work of philosophers of language such as Gardiner and Buhler.