Historical Roots Of Linguistic Theories

Most of the papers collected in this volume concentrate on the history of linguistic ideas in France and Italy in the modern period (from the Renaissance to the present day). Some of them are specifically focused on the links between the two traditions of reflection on language. The contributions have a common methodological outlook: the authors do not believe that the history of linguistic ideas is a separate activity from research on language or that it is marginal with respect to the latter. On the contrary, they are convinced that in contemporary research into language we can still discern the influence — positive or negative as this may be — of factors deriving from the (sometimes distant) past. A historical analysis of these factors — whether it rejects them as superseded, or redefines them in order to elicit the fruitful suggestions they may still contain — has a contribution to make to the progress of theory.

Most of the papers collected in this volume concentrate on the history of linguistic ideas in France and Italy in the modern period (from the Renaissance to the present day). Some of them are specifically focused on the links between the two traditions of reflection on language.The contributions have a common methodological outlook: the authors do not believe that the history of linguistic ideas is a separate activity from research on language or that it is marginal with respect to the latter. On the contrary, they are convinced that in contemporary research into language we can still discern the influence — positive or negative as this may be — of factors deriving from the (sometimes distant) past. A historical analysis of these factors — whether it rejects them as superseded, or redefines them in order to elicit the fruitful suggestions they may still contain — has a contribution to make to the progress of theory.

The History of Linguistics, to be published in five volumes, aims to provide the reader with an authoritative and comprehensive account of the attitudes to language prevailing in different civilizations and in different periods by examining the very varied development of linguistic thought in the specific social, cultural and religious contexts involved. Issues discussed include the place of language in education, variation and prestige, and approaches to lexical and grammatical description. The authors of the individual chapters are specialists who have analysed the primary sources and produced original syntheses by exploring the linguistic interests and assumptions of particular cultures in their own terms, without seeking to reinterpret them as contributions towards the development of contemporary western conceptions of linguistic science. In Volume IV: Nineteenth Century Linguistics, Anna Morpurgo Davies shows how linguistics came into its own as an independent discipline separated from philosophical and literary studies and enjoyed a unique intellectual and institutional success tied to the research ethos of the new universities, until it became a model for other humanistic subjects which aimed at 'scientific status'. The linguistics of the nineteenth century abandons earlier theoretical discussions in favour of a more empirical and historical approach using new methods to compare languages and to investigate their history. The great achievement of this period is the demonstration that languages such as Sanskrit , Latin and English are related and derive from a parent language which is not attested but can be reconstructed. This book discusses in detail the theories developed and the individual findings obtained. In contrast with earlier historiographical trends it denies that the new approach originated entirely from German Romanticism, and highlights a form of continuity with the eighteenth century, while stressing that a deliberate break took place round the 1830s. By the end of the century the results of comparative and historical linguistics had been generally accepted, but it soon became clear that a historical approach could not by itself solve all questions that it raised. At this point the new interest in description and theory which characterizes the twentieth century began to gain prominence.

Muriel Norde shows that linguistic change via the well-attested process of grammaticalization is reversible and that degrammaticalization can occur on all levels: semantic, morphological, syntactic, and phonological. Her careful analysis of the process makes a significant contribution to methods of linguistic reconstruction and language change.

Most of us know of the Indo-European roots of European languages, but how did this precursor language take hold and what did Europe look like before it did so? This book explores the continent before the spread of the Indo-Europeans, examines its indigenous population and the contacts it had with Indo-European and Uralic immigrants, and, ultimately, asks how these origins led to the development of that crucial singularity for Europe’s languages. Drawing on archaeology, religious studies, and palaeography, the contributors offer a detailed and comprehensive picture of Europe’s linguistic and, in turn, cultural prehistory.

What is lost in translation may be a war, a world, a way of life. A unique look into the nineteenth-century clash of empires from both sides of the earthshaking encounter, this book reveals the connections between international law, modern warfare, and comparative grammar--and their influence on the shaping of the modern world in Eastern and Western terms. The Clash of Empires brings to light the cultural legacy of sovereign thinking that emerged in the course of the violent meetings between the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Lydia Liu demonstrates how the collision of imperial will and competing interests, rather than the civilizational attributes of existing nations and cultures, led to the invention of China, the East, the West, and the modern notion of the world in recent history. Drawing on her archival research and comparative analyses of English--and Chinese--language texts, as well as their respective translations, she explores how the rhetoric of barbarity and civilization, friend and enemy, and discourses on sovereign rights, injury, and dignity were a central part of British imperial warfare. Exposing the military and philological--and almost always translingual--nature of the clash of empires, this book provides a startlingly new interpretation of modern imperial history.

This book argues convincingly against the widespread opinion that very few syntactic studies were carried out before the 1950s. Relying on the detailed analysis of a large amount of original sources, it shows that syntactic matters were in fact carefully investigated throughout both the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Moreover, it illustrates how the enormous development of syntactic research in the last fifty years has already condemned even several recent ideas and analyses to oblivion, and deeply influenced current research programs. The wealth of research undertaken over the last two centuries is presented here in a systematic way, taking as its starting point the relationship of syntax with psychology throughout this period. The critical ideas expressed in the text are based on a detailed illustration of the different syntactic models and analyses rather than on the polemics between the different schools.

The 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.

Changing socio-political landscapes, the dynamics of ‘glocalisation’, among other factors, are spawning new policy attitudes towards multilingualism, and again putting language planning (LP) on the map – in a manner reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s. With respect to terminology, this book suggests that to be relevant and sustainable, current LP would have to define its mission as the deregulation of access to specialised knowledge, and correspondingly be founded on substantially different methods and theoretical bases: epistemology and ontology of specialised domains; research on language for special purposes (LSP) and collocations; corpus linguistics; knowledge extraction and knowledge representation; language engineering technologies. On the one hand, the book recommends itself to decision-makers and language planning project managers. On the other, it should be of interest to students of LSP and terminology, language planning, concept and object theories, knowledge modelling, artificial intelligence, text and corpus management, translation process analysis, text and African linguistics.