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'Semilingualism' is one of the most questionable theories produced in the language sciences. Yet, little is known about its origins. We present a critical account of the history of semilingualism, tracing its roots in the work of Nils Erik Hansegård, (1918–2002), inaugural chair of Sámi at Umeå University (1975–1979), who developed a theory of semilingualism (halvspråkighet) in the 1960s. We show how Hansegård theorized semilingualism using ideas from Nazi German linguistics, producing an unforgiving theory of linguistic pathology directed at minoritized bilinguals in Sweden's far north. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term grammaticalization originally denoted a particular outcome of language change (lexis > morphology), then got expanded to practically all studies involving language change, the processes that create such changes, and a theory modeling these. These expansions have been challenged in the literature as conceptually flawed. A usage-based analysis of the evolution of the concept culminates in the use of the term grammaticalization as a "flag" of a particular approach to linguistics. However, the theoretical premises of grammaticalization studies are entirely compatible with the premises of Diachronic Construction Grammar (DCxG). All studies within the "expanded" concept of grammaticalization can be explicitly modeled within DCxG, which provides formalism of sufficient detail to map the gradual nature of language change in cases of grammaticalization and beyond. Consequently, the most vigorous attacks on grammaticalization lose power when grammaticalization is seen as part of a larger, more complete theory of language and language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the earliest voice recordings of Arabic made for linguistic purposes date from World War I and were made by German authorities who recorded prisoners of war in the Halbmondlager camp outside of Berlin. This study analyzes two voice records in particular, which are labelled 'Tripolitanisch-Arabisch (Tunesien)' and stem from what is now southern Tunisia. This study seeks to historicise the scientific context of these voice records as well as interpret the linguistic data preserved by them in the light of Arabic dialectology. It also raises questions about the reliability of both voice recordings and printed linguistic data from the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the contribution of the Norwegian historian, politician, and ethnologist Ludvig Kristensen Daa (1809–1877) to the study of the Indigenous languages of North America. We focus on his accounts of sound systems, where he argued that North American languages are characterized by greater linguistic diversity, small consonant inventories and gaps in inventories, unusual sounds, and indistinct pronunciation of consonants. Daa attributed these features to the use of the languages in small and isolated communities, thus anticipating more recent discussions in which the degree of linguistic complexity is attributed to social and demographic factors. While some of his claims reflect methodological shortcomings of pre-20th-century phonetic study, the factors which according to Daa shape languages spoken in isolation are analogous to the parameters now examined by typologists, thus providing a sense of continuity across centuries in the links sought between structural diversity among languages and external factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attends to "questionnaires" in linguistic fieldwork defined by the inclusion of sensory stimuli. It shows that such non-verbal protocols have been used to help elucidate and compare semantic content, which has generally been subordinated to formal analysis in the history of linguistics. To explain and exemplify this relationship, I target the color questionnaire developed by Hugo Magnus, which included ten standardized color chips and a long list of interview questions on language use. Magnus's questionnaire (Fragebogen) decoupled perception and denotation in its day, though similar protocols have recently been employed to restore the connection between meaning and form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work in stylistics of Charles Bally (1865–1947) attempts to analyse that subset of a language system in which meaning is not purely conceptual or intellectual, but has an affective, emotional dimension. It is not concerned with literary language, but with everyday language used in the service of 'life', a word which is central for Bally. This paper adds to the definitive study of Bally's stylistics (Taylor 1981) by bringing in material which came to light after its publication, including Médina's (1985) study of Bally's reliance on the work of Henri Bergson, who reconfigured the affective-conceptual dyad and whose writings are the source, Médina shows, of Bally's use of 'life'. This paper also adduces more recently published documents on Bally's intellectual and professional relationship with Ferdinand de Saussure, which figures prominently in Taylor's (1981) account, and which can now be reassessed in a new light. • Re-examines Talbot Taylor's 1981 study of Charles Bally's stylistics in the light of subsequent discoveries concerning Bally's work. • Situates Bally's stylistics in its relationship to Saussure's linguistics, and looks at how both articulate with psychological theories of the time. • Considers the implications of Bally's remarks on Henri Bergson for an understanding of the key concept of 'life' in Bally's Le langage et la vie (1913) and other work. • Looks at how Taylor's study of Bally links to Taylor's later work on understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to show the role played by the relations of comparison and associativity, as they are introduced in Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, in the theories of Luis J. Prieto. This is done, first, on the basis of a historiographical approach, and second, on the basis of an exegetical approach to Prieto's works. Thus, the paper first presents and analyses three programmes, corresponding to three courses Prieto gave at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba during the early 1950s. The analysis of these programmes will show the centrality of Saussure's Cours in Prieto's linguistic theorizing. After this, an attempt will be made to show the continuity between the theoretical tenets presupposed by the courses' programmes and the main proposal advanced in Prieto's article "Classe et concept. Sur la pertinence et sur les rapports saussuriens 'de comparaison' et 'd'échange'". By constructing this continuity we attempt to show: (1) the constant influence the Cours exerted upon Prieto's thinking throughout his whole career, and (2) that such influence is manifested in the fact that Prieto did not generalize linguistic principles as such, but rather posited that linguistic principles were instances of more general semiotic ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the geolectal dimension of the aoristic uses of the present perfect (he cantado) in European Spanish. To that end, a bank of samples of oral speech gathered from the Audible Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish will be analysed with the aim of mapping the area of influence of these uses and showing if their distribution in peninsular Spanish abides by any identifiable geographic pattern. Namely, it will be argued that the aoristic uses of the present perfect are a characteristic phenomenon of the Northern Central zone of the Iberian Peninsula and that their approximate area of influence broadly overlaps with the Castilian dialectal domain. These data will be connected to the particular traits of this linguistic area and to the diachronical processes of functional expansion of the Spanish perfect tense. This analysis will demonstrate that this spread is greater in those areas where this form has historically shown a more robust use compared to the rest. Thus, the geolectal nature of a syntactic phenomenon not considered until now within the framework of Geolinguistics will be unveiled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Venezuelan Baldomero Rivodó is the author of a grammatical textual series made up of the two editions of his Tratado de los compuestos castellanos (Caracas, 1878, and Paris, 1883) and a collection of Entretenimientos gramaticales: colección de tratados y opúsculos sobre diferentes puntos relativos al idioma castellano (Paris, 1890-1902). Faced with a grammatical tradition centered on word units, these works progressively propose a propitious framework for the grammatization, within the tradition of word formation, of multiword or phraseological expressions, particularly those of a nominal nature. Rivodó’s work embodies the syncretism between a Hispanic canonical grammatical tradition (represented by RAE, Salvá or Bello) and new ideas from France (the logicism and the syntactic perspective represented by Darmesteter), only possible in a space free of theoretical constraints as it was the American. Rivodó uses the classic concept of juxtaposition to overcome the traditional limits of the word in the field of lexical categories. In this work we analyze the audacious contribution of this author to the slow and continuous formation of a morphological theory over pluriverbal units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we analyze the theory of language through school grammar treatises published in Peru in 19th century, as a contribution to the study of linguistic ideas in Latin America. For this purpose, on the basis of the theories of the canon and the theory of textual series, and with an approach which combines the historiography of internal and external linguistics, we present the agents of this grammatical theory (grammarians and receivers of the works), the internal and external keys of interpretation of grammatical ideas in the nineteenth-century Peruvian context, as well as, finally, the conception of grammar and the underlying theoretical models in the twenty-four texts of the corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prologues are valuable pieces for the historiographic investigation about works that deal with linguistic aspects, that is, for Linguistic Historiography (HL). In this work we propose to examine this type of texts (paratexts) produced at one time: the 19th century; a space: Hispanic America; and a typology: works on grammar and orthography. All this from a precise and exhaustive analysis methodology, which will allow to establish what are the forms that such texts adopt, that is, their variants and representations, as well as the functions they perform in the contextual framework to which they are assigned, both intralinguistic: the works they surround, and extralinguistic: the sociocultural and political environment in which these works are produced. With this we intend to contribute to the historiography of linguistic ideas in relation to the Spanish language and its grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work we will analyze the grammatical conception in Colombia during the 19th century, for which we will base ourselves on a corpus of works destined to teaching in schools and, in the case of one of them, in the university, published in that country between the first and last decades of the century. To achieve this objective, we will concentrate, in a particular way, on the study of four themes: 1) the types of definition of grammar that the works present; 2) the division that they defend of the grammar in different parts; 3) the classes of words or parts of speech that they distinguish; and 4) the criteria for characterization of these classes of words. The results of our analysis will allow us to know the grammatical theory with which the works are connected, as well as the influence exerted by certain authors, who constitute the explicit and/or implicit canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at describing the magisterium and the scientific legacy of Walter Belardi (1923-2008), professor of historical linguistics at Napoli-Orientale first (since 1956) and then at Roma Sapienza (1964-1998). After recalling the scientific relationship between Belardi and his teacher Antonino Pagliaro (1898-1973), the article focuses on Belardi’s research trajectories, from Indo-European to Iranistics, from general linguistics to classical and romance studies. The article reviews the profiles of Belardi’s many pupils across essentially three generations of professors, all of whom focused on themes inherited from their master. These were explored primarily in light of the common philological-textual approach that is typical, more generally, of the so-called “Roman school of linguistics”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents new evidence on the authorship and readership of the earliest printed Ottoman language materials that details the extent to which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire actively engaged in learning Ottoman. Such findings open up a new field of inquiry evaluating the Ottoman impact on the German-speaking lands reaching beyond the so-called "Turkish menace." Presenting the variety of Ottoman language students, teachers, and materials in central Europe, as well as their connections with the oral world(s) of linguistic fieldwork in the Habsburg-Ottoman contact zone, this article argues that Ottoman language learning is an important but thus far neglected element in understanding the cultural and intellectual landscape of early modern central Europe. What may appear to be experiments with linguistic riddles on first glimpse was in fact grounded in deep enthusiasm and fascination for Ottoman language learning shared among a community of Protestant semi-scholarly aficionados. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Romanist Hugo Schuchardt is best known today for his contributions to the study of language contact, language mixing and creole languages. Less well known are the theoretical requirements of such research, which Schuchardt established early in his career. This article uses Schuchardt's 1870 proof lecture "On the classification of Romance dialects" to point out the central theoretical lines and arguments that have crystallisation points in the critique of the genetic tree model and the search for alternatives, as well as a hitherto unknown but indispensable model for Schuchardt's linguistic worldview in the ideas of the American linguist William D. Whitney. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from Native American Studies, I explore how the LSA Statement on Race (2019) applies to Native Americans, who are unique among racial groups in the United States since 'Native American' is also a political status and tribes are nations. Focusing on the fundamental tenet of tribal critical race theory that colonization is endemic to society (Brayboy 2005), I argue that the ways in which Native American languages are represented in linguistic scholarship reflects colonial norms, which also guide the severe underrepresentation of Native Americans in the discipline. Integrating these ideas into antiracist frameworks facilitates social justice in linguistic science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a linguistic and historical overview of the problem of integration and differentiation of kinship and affinity of languages, including the features of unions. Based on the conducted linguistic analysis, the authors come to the conclusion that if adverbs in languages of different genders and tribes of Turkic origin are the result of the integration of Turkic languages, then the division in the middle ages of Turkic languages (modern national languages, such as Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek and other languages) is the result of the division of Turkic languages into branches, groups and subgroups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historiographers of linguistics have typically claimed that by the 1970s, generative grammarians were organizationally dominant in the field of linguistics in the United States. I demonstrate that such is not true. To support my assertion, I present evidence based on who held LSA offices in the 1970s and 1980s, on what was published in the journal Language, on presentations at LSA meetings, on the composition of summer Linguistics Institutes, on grants awarded to linguists, and on jobs advertised in the field. My explanation for the lack of generative dominance is based on various factors, including the immaturity and diversity of the field of linguistics, on generative grammar not being a grant-dependent enterprise, and on the attitude toward the LSA exhibited by Chomsky and many of his closest co-thinkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution is product of the work conducted by the authors for the Project "Network of Knowledge" (financed by the Austrian Science Fund FWF 2012-2016, project number P 24400-G15, elaborated, proposed and directed by Bernhard Hurch), at the University of Graz, Austria. Even though the financed project has already concluded, the working on the archive of Hugo Schuchardt continues (see the website Hugo Schuchardt Archiv). This paper, resulting of the fusion of three articles of both authors related to the project, intents to show the importance of studying the contacts between scholars for the history of linguistics. The first part gives some background information about Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927) and Rodolfo Lenz (1863-1938), followed by a brief introduction of the project "Network of Knowledge" and the Hugo Schuchardt Archive and a short historiographical contexualization (cf. Hurch 2009a, 2009b, 2009c). The second part of the article deals with the letter exchange between Lenz and Schuchardt. Besides a short description of the correspondence inside the Archivo Lenz, comments will be made in regard to the letters and to the theoretical agreement between both authors in respect to the creole languages. The third part of this contribution contains the transcribed correspondence of Lenz and Schuchardt together with a translation into Spanish by Juan Ennis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emphasizes the importance of informed engagement with the history of language in projecting the future for early modern literary studies. Topics covered include inquiry about language change in English historical linguistics, literary criticism by philology, and tools available for scholars of early modern literary studies to become knowledge-makers working at the intersection between cultural and linguistic history.

This article deals with the studies on the mapuzungun undertaken in the Argentine Republic, in a period that spans from 1885 –the end of the so-called “desert campaign”– to 1945, from a Linguistic Historiography perspective. It analyses the apparent scarcity of works related to the subject among the references provided by the summary bibliographies on the country’s indigenous languages produced during those years. Through the analysis of different types of sources, we describe the main approaches adopted by the linguistic and ethnological studies in those decades in two research groups: actors from the La Plata Museum and territorial intellectuals from the Patagonian area. This allows us to observe how was alternatively privileged the erudite documentary approach, based on evaluation Jesuit and contemporary trans-Andean materials as referents, and the empirical analysis of field data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay will first contextualize the linguistic concerns of the French and Spanish nations as they vied for power in Europe and abroad. Then, after sketching the common linguistic concerns of the Romance languages, especially the extension of language and power, it will investigate the debates regarding the grammar and orthography of the national language that characterized France in the mid-sixteenth century. What has seemed a dispute regarding minutiae--namely, the picky and prickly details of spelling--appears, when viewed within the context of transnational preoccupations, to have been a profound debate about how France was to see itself and about the importance of the European past to the national identity. In debating the details of spelling, the grammarians were investing themselves in arguments about the place of Europe in the modern world and the importance of its traditions to its self-definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a publication and translation (with linguistic and philological commentaries) of a recently discovered piece of Old Amharic poetry, possibly dating to the first half/middle of the seventeenth century. The published text bears the title Märgämä kəbr ("Condemnation of glory"), but its content differs from that of several other Old Amharic poems (not entirely independent from each other) known under the same title. It is only the general idea and the main topics that are shared by all Märgämä kəbr poems: transience of the earthly world, the inevitability of death and of God's judgement, and the necessity of leading a virtuous life. One can thus speak of Märgämä kəbr as a special genre of early Amharic literature, probably originally belonging to the domain of oral literature and used to address the Christian community with the aim of religious education and admonition of laymen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the importance of traditions and innovations in the history of linguistics. Topics discussed include 13th International Conference of the History of the Language Sciences on the same, historiography of linguistics, its self-critical reflex and success in history writing.

The Estonian scholar Jakob Linzbach is primarily known for having published, in 1916, a Russian-language book with the title The Principles of Philosophical Language: An Attempt at Exact Linguistics. In this book, and in his other published and unpublished works, he aimed at creating a universal written language in which mathematics and images would mix. Linzbach's ideas have raised awareness among people from different (scholarly) fields - semiotics, interlinguistics, philosophy, cinema theory, informatics, etc. However, not much has been published about Linzbach's life. In one of his manuscripts kept in Tartu, there is a chapter that can be considered an autobiography and that provided, in the pencil of Linzbach himself, information about his life and work. This text is edited, translated into English and commented here for the first time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late work of the Hungarian émigré linguist and comparatist, Theodore Thass-Thienemann, presents a challenging combination of psychoanalytic discourse and the historical study of languages. His two-volume book entitled The Interpretation of Language (1973) sets out to complement the Freudian analysis of dream images and bodily symptoms via an investigation into the symbolism of ordinary verbal expressions as they appear in the languages of Indo-European cultures. His attention to the unconsciously inherited dimensions of particular idioms opens a path to the linguistic archeology of the human mind and a rethinking of the very notion of "idiom" in terms of "idiotism." After providing a brief overview of the life and late works of Thass-Thienemann, this study offers a comprehensive analysis of his book. Drawing on related essays written during the 1950s and 1960s as well as the 1984 manuscript of a projected but unfinished third volume, this analysis does not only attempt to spell out the stakes and insights of Thass-Thienemann's endeavor, but also to critically identify and examine some of the blind spots his discourse seems unable to overcome, such as his eurocentric and anthropocentric stance. In the final analysis, Thass-Thienemann appears as the provocative thinker of a spectral inheritance, from which even his own discourse is not exempt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This article explores 'political' dimensions of the Cognitive Linguistics (CL) movement, considered especially with reference to Ronald Langacker and George Lakoff. CL is discussed with respect to the institutional politics necessary for disciplinary survival in a changing US higher education system, and the broader socio-political circumstances of the field's origins and development. These factors intersect in Lakoff, responsible both for many of CL's major theoretical innovations, and for an assertive application of CL ideas in the public sphere. An exploration of Lakoff's political contributions allows affinities between CL and humanities research in the postmodern mainstream to be identified, and CL's overall position in the history of twentieth century linguistics and other humanities disciplines to be clarified. Highlights • Addresses the sociopolitical and intellectual contexts in which CL developed. • Critically examines Lakoff's application of CL theory to US politics. • Argues CL secured its survival by presenting traditional methods as science. • Argues role of expertise unites mainstream CL and Lakoff's political use of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Described as a 'sort of Human Genome Project for historical linguistics', the Evolution of Human Languages Project (EHL) is dedicated to promoting long-range genealogical research into linguistic prehistory. Toward that end, its architects have sought to collect and coordinate evidence of every known human language, roughly 6000 in all, fostering an interdisciplinary and internationally accessible environment for the study of historical universals and contemporary diversity. This article investigates the roots and branches of the Global Lexicostatistical Database – a component project of the EHL. It pays special attention to strategies for encoding epistemological pluralism in a web-based archive of global proportions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion note reviews responses of the linguistics profession to the grave issues of language endangerment identified a quarter of a century ago in the journal Language by Krauss, Hale, England, Craig, and others (Hale et al. 1992). Two and a half decades of worldwide research not only have given us a much more accurate picture of the number, phylogeny, and typological variety of the world's languages, but they have also seen the development of a wide range of new approaches, conceptual and technological, to the problem of documenting them. We review these approaches and the manifold discoveries they have unearthed about the enormous variety of linguistic structures. The reach of our knowledge has increased by about 15% of the world's languages, especially in terms of digitally archived material, with about 500 languages now reasonably documented thanks to such major programs as DoBeS, ELDP, and DEL. But linguists are still falling behind in the race to document the planet's rapidly dwindling linguistic diversity, with around 35-42% of the world's languages still substantially undocumented, and in certain countries (such as the US) the call by Krauss (1992) for a significant professional realignment toward language documentation has only been heeded in a few institutions. Apart from the need for an intensified documentarist push in the face of accelerating language loss, we argue that existing language documentation efforts need to do much more to focus on crosslinguistically comparable data sets, sociolinguistic context, semantics, and interpretation of text material, and on methods for bridging the 'transcription bottleneck', which is creating a huge gap between the amount we can record and the amount in our transcribed corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The canonical view of clause requires that it include predication. Utterances that do not fit into this view because they lack a subject are usually regarded as elliptical or as non-sentential utterances. Adopting an integrative approach to the analysis of spoken language that includes syntax, prosody, discourse structure, and information structure, it is suggested that the only necessary and sufficient component constituting a clause is a predicate domain, carrying the informational load of the clause within the discourse context, including a "new" element in the discourse, carrying modality, and focused. Utterances that have not been hitherto analyzed as consisting of full clauses or sentences will be reevaluated. The utterance, being a discourse unit defined by prosodic boundaries, can thus be viewed as the default domain of a clause or a sentence, when the latter are determined according to the suggested integrative approach. A posição canônica sobre as orações requer que elas contenham uma predição. Enunciados que não se encaixem nessa visão porque não possuem um sujeito são usualmente considerados elípticos ou como enunciados não-oracionais. Adotando uma visão integrativa para a análise da língua falada, que inclui a sintaxe, a prosódia, a estrutura discursiva e a estrutura informacional, sugere-se que o único componente constituinte necessário e suficiente para uma oração é um domínio predicativo, o qual carregue a carga informacional da oração no contexto do discurso, incluindo-se um "novo" elemento no discurso, que carregue modalidade e foco. Enunciados que até então foram classificados como não sendo orações ou sentenças completas serão reavaliados. O enunciado, sendo uma unidade discursiva definida por fronteiras prosódicas, pode assim ser visto como o domínio de uma oração ou sentença por excelência, quando estas são determinadas através da abordagem integrativa sugerida. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1935, the Russian linguist Prince Nicolai S. Trubetskoi and the French mythologist Georges Dumézil engaged in a vicious debate over a seemingly obscure subject: the structure of Northwest Caucasian languages. Based on unknown archival material in French, German, and Russian, this essay uses the debate as a pathway into the 1930s scientific and political stakes of IndoEuropeanism – the belief that European cultures emerged through the spread of a single IndoEuropean people out of a single “motherland.” Each of the two authors held strong commitments to visions of European order and its origins – in “Eurasia” for Trubetskoi and a Northern European Heimat for Dumézil. The North Caucasus, long a privileged site for Russian and European scholars, now became key to the renegotiation of the origins and reach of imagined prehistoric IndoEuropean conquerors, but also the 1930s’ debate over the value of different disciplines (linguistics, mythology, archaeology, folklore studies) for the origins of language, myth, and the European deep past. As a moment in the history of modern speculations about prehistory, pursued in the shadow of Nazi scholarship, the debate transformed fields of research – notably linguistics, comparative mythology, and structuralism – and the assumptions about the shape of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This contribution is dedicated to William Dwight Whitney (1827–1897), a scholar who generally has a modest space dedicated to him in the historiography of linguistics, despite his name and works having had considerable circulation among his contemporaries. His originality and method are outlined with particular attention being given to his reception in Europe and in the setting of Italian studies of theoretical and empirical linguistics. Whitney was among the first to contest Schleicher's concept of language as a natural fact, claiming, instead, that it has social nature, as an 'institution' created by man; he was a forerunner in recognizing the relevance of signs and their value, and of language acquisition. In his demonstrations and in his methods he proposes a science of historical linguistics but at the same time it is open to 20th century linguistics and the concept of language as a complex system ordered and crossed by relationships. Both his unique approach to the study of Sanskrit, which emphasised the study of its use and its variants, and his interest for modern languages, makes him a particularly interesting scholar, as he and his reception testify the rise, in Europe and especially in Italy, of a new approach to linguistic issues, no longer exclusively historical-comparative, but also theoretical and general. Nonetheless, Whitney ought to occupy a prominent place in the history of linguistics, because he was also the author of one of the first introductory texts of the discipline, which was published in 1875; in that same year a French translation came out, which was soon followed by an Italian, and a German translation (both 1876).The number of almost contemporaneous translations gives an idea of the gap which a general and introductory work like Whitney's filled and illustrates that there was a clear need for it. In several works, including recent ones, De Mauro identified the specific characteristics of Italian linguistic studies: we can find a good many of these traits in Whitney as well. Although the fruitful contribution of Whitney's ideas in an environment which is 'naturally' inclined towards the themes and methods the American linguist dealt with, i.e., the 'Italian linguistic school', has not been fully recognised until now, it is undeniable that his ideas provided an important stimulus for new interpretations and new models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the controversy over the publication of Friar Maturino Gilberti's book Diálogo de doctrina cristiana en lengua Mechuacán, a dispute sparked by Michoacán's first bishop, Don Vasco de Quiroga, which could not be settled until long after his death. This legal conflict will allow us to understand the decisive role played by ecclesiastic courts, both in and out of New Spain, to resolve the dilemmas faced by pastors when translating sacred and doctrinal texts into the indigenous languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper briefly discusses the problems and methods of language historiography thematizing Saussure's distinction between matière and objet. A number of representative nexuses are also commented on: the history of the phoneme, the supposed birth of scientific linguistics,the question of precursors, the relation between structuralism and phenomenology, the relation between language theories and research practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Aristotle and his linguistic conception in a civic environment". The figure of Aristotle appears in the all general works of the history of linguistics. His contribution to linguistic thought has been studied on his concepts of grammar and logic, as well as those of analysis of rhetorical and poetic discourse. Many historians have dealt with Aristotle historians. Of these, W. Thomsen, founder of the history of linguistics in 1902, R. H. Robins and others more recent, such as R. Harris, T. J. Taylor and V. Law, are taken into account here. The study of their comments, diverse and sometimes incompatible, illustrates the dynamic condition of historiography and the influence of paradigms in their critical task. The thesis of the paper is that the integral study of the work of Aristotle reveals that he was a visionary of linguistic reflection, placed at the service of a civic function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nilgiri hill communities have for a long time been the focus of anthropological inquiry, though they have rarely been the focus of historical inquiry that delves more deeply into the past than the colonial period. And, while the fields of history and anthropology have moved beyond tropes of primitive and timeless, our studies of those formerly so-called ‘timeless primitives’ have remained stuck in time. I argue, therefore, for an interdisciplinary modified Subaltern Studies approach, integrating data from anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and genetics, to develop a longue durée social history of the Nilgiri hills. For the Nilgiri communities, as with other tribal communities, narratives about their past have tended to emphasize their isolation until the modern period. In this article, drawing together data from several disciplines, I argue that the communities of the Nilgiris, especially the Toda, so frequently held up as examples of cultural isolation, were not truly isolated, neither from neighbouring tribal communities, nor from the states and empires of the plains below. I argue that the maintenance of distinctive religious, subsistence, and linguistic practices, despite contact with a wider world, is evidence of an active process of isolationist group formation/maintenance and resistance to other ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper examines the continuities and discontinuities in language teaching between the Middle Ages and the early modern era by drawing attention to the role of bilingual Latin-vernacular proverb collections in premodern education, a subject that has hitherto been neglected in the historiography of linguistics. The focus is on bilingual collections that are of Dutch origin. The paper aims to show that there was an active culture of teaching Latin through vernacular proverbs in Western Europe from the 11th century to the 17th century. After presenting some collections and surveying the arguments in favour of classroom use, it investigates the impact of humanism and the reformation on proverb-based teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Given the spread of English as a world language and the subsequent development of numerous varieties during the colonial and postcolonial periods, the emergence of local literatures using local varieties of English was only a matter of time. The sheer diversity of new Englishes, literary traditions and motivations to use the localised features in writing results in a wide range of strategies at the disposal of writers who choose to incorporate such features in their work. By compiling a corpus of selected literary works, an analysis of various distinctive features is performed, which makes it possible to address the following questions: Which localised features of English are represented in our corpus? What is the motivation to use a particular set of localised features? Is the representation of such linguistic variation in writing a symbolic or mimetic enterprise? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the issue of linguistic belonging as invented within national and colonial itineraries. More specifically, it explores the genealogy of the notion of ‘Judeo-Arabic language' and its axiomatic definition as a cohesive unit separate from Arabic. Underscoring instead the terms deployed by Arabic-speaking Jews themselves, the essay asks whether the concept of ‘Judeo-Arabic,' proposed by contemporary linguists, corresponds to the naming within the language itself or rather to a paradigm influenced by post-Haskala (Enlightenment) Judaic studies and Jewish nationalism. While recognizing the specificities of the Arabic(s) deployed by Jews, the essay interrogates the view of ‘Judeo-Arabic' as classifiable under the historically novel rubric of isolatable ‘Jewish languages' severed from their neighboring dialect/languages, in this case Arabic. It also casts doubt on an ‘endangered language' discourse premised on the Arabic/Judeo-Arabic split, by asking whether the idea of a salvage project for a ‘dying language' does not reproduce the same conceptual binaries that produced the disappearance of ‘the language' in the first place. Despite demographic dislocation from Arab spaces in the wake of Palestine’s partition, the essay suggests, the Arabic(s) spoken by Jews have always been and have remained intimately linked, even now across the Israeli/Arab divide, forming part of a living assemblage of Arabic variations. Examining Arabic vernaculars as performed along a discursive spectrum from erudite to popular culture, the essay highlights Arabic/Hebrew syncretism, tracing the presence of Arabic, for example, in music and literature. Within a transnational approach, the essay stresses the phantasmatic dimension that led to ‘Judeo-Arabic,' in the wake of its displacement from Arabic-speaking cultural geographies, being simultaneously rejected and desired. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Humboldt has had a complex reception in the English-speaking world. The thesis-antithesis-synthesis rhetorical structure he inherited from Fichte has contributed to misunderstanding of his views. In the later nineteenth century he was depicted as an evolutionist, including by his prominent American disciple Brinton. His thought helped to shape twentieth-century anthropology in the USA through the work of Boas, who, however, cited him only once, and it had an impact on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, though how much of one is debated. If Noam Chomsky's claim to be his intellectual heir is dubious, Humboldt's shadow looms over current work on embodied language, and is central to Taylor's (2016) attempt to redirect the Anglophone philosophical tradition towards a conception of man as 'the language animal'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Finno-Ugric linguistics, words are usually analyzed in terms of stems and affixes instead of abstract monosyllabic 'roots' in the Indo-European sense. However, there have been attempts to introduce the concept of 'root' alongside the historically disyllabic stems, in order to account for less regular connections between words and the non-canonic word formation mechanisms of the expressive vocabulary. Here, a few such attempts are critically analyzed in their historical and ideological contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prompted by Western science in late 19th century, Chinese linguistics gradually moved to a new direction after two thousand years of philological tradition centered on rhetoric and textual exegesis. Through the intense efforts of a few scholars in the early twentieth century, linguistic study in China became a science and a discipline. Yuen Ren Chao (1892-1982) and Wang Li (1900-1986) were first-generation linguists who led the movement to apply the methodology of modern linguistics to the systematic study of Chinese. This paper investigates the trend setting achievements of these founders of the discipline, and it introduces their biographical and scholarly backgrounds. It also provides a brief history of philology through the lens of Wang Li who was the first historian of Chinese linguistics. Contemporary linguists need both a critical mind to understand the philological legacy of Chinese and an open mind to welcome new interdisciplinary approaches that could produce innovative theories and facilitate the growth of the discipline. Moreover, this paper expands the history of linguistics by introducing linguistic features not found in Indo-European languages, thereby making the history of linguistics more inclusive than it has previously been. Consequently, this paper contributes to a rethinking of the definition of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the scholars who tackled the topic of language origins in the 19th century, the German philosopher Ludwig Noiré (1829-1889) deserves special mention. To him, the unique sociability of humans implies cooperation and cooperation in turn involves language. Remarkably, Noiré's theory deeply influenced the debate on language origins until the 1950s. Before offering some theoretical and historical explanations for the enduring influence of Noiré's theory, it is necessary to describe the general features of his theory and the context in which it arose. After dealing with the German-English debate on language origins during the 19th century, a section will be especially devoted to Noiré's theory of language origins. Finally, a comparison between Noiré's insights and the naturalistic framework of the 19th century is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educators are expected to take into account students' linguistic experiences when designing literacy instruction. However, official school records traditionally provide limited information about students' linguistic histories. This article presents educators with a linguistic survey that can help bridge this gap. The survey is an easy-to-use classroom resource through which educators can gather information about their students' linguistic experiences. Notably, it is based on ideas about and research on bilingualism that are not traditionally discussed in mainstream literacy education. To illustrate the survey's potential for instruction, the article includes a case study of a 10th-grade student and discusses the implications of the type of information garnered by the survey for literacy pedagogy. As a whole, this article supports educators in making more linguistically informed decisions about literacy instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andean linguistics has not determined the geographic extent in which Quechua was spoken in Peru's Cajamarca region during the colonial period. The debate centers on whether it ranged beyond where it is currently found in the ‘enclaves’ of Porcón and Chetilla. No previous systematic efforts have attempted to clarify this problem. Here, we seek to reconstruct 17th-century Quechua distribution using data from trial interpretations (oral language translations carried out during the testimonies) in the document series ‘Protector de Naturales' (‘Advocate of the Indians’), held in the Regional Archive of Cajamarca. We represent this data cartographically using the dot density map technique, a visualization method that allows us to conclude that in the 17th century Quechua covered a wider territory than that which is currently observed. We suggest that this method could be applied in other contexts, to increase knowledge of the historical distribution of indigenous languages in South America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since its conception, Cognitive Linguistics as a theory of language has been enjoying ever increasing success worldwide. With quantitative growth has come qualitative diversification, and within a now heterogeneous field, different - and at times opposing - views on theoretical and methodological matters have emerged. The historical 'prototype' of Cognitive Linguistics may be described as predominantly of mentalist persuasion, based on introspection, specialized in analysing language from a synchronic point of view, focused on West-European data (English in particular), and showing limited interest in the social and multimodal aspects of communication. Over the past years, many promising extensions from this prototype have emerged. The contributions selected for the Special Issue take stock of these extensions along the cognitive, social and methodological axes that expand the cognitive linguistic object of inquiry across time, space and modality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on historiography of linguistics. Various factors of linguistics that are discussed in historiography include semantics, morphology and phonology. It further discusses general meeting on linguistics, list of scholars, readership in literature and informative reviews of literary works.

This article proposes a new way of defining Katz's natural languages. Katz defines natural languages as abstract objects, which are later understood as collections of sentences. This is due to the fact that linguistics is understood as a part of mathematics. He proposes a realist linguistics that is not easy to adopt. We think that a realist linguistics that does not consider that linguistics is a part of mathematics could be better embraced. If linguistics were not a part of mathematics, a new definition of natural languages as abstract entities should be provided. We propose to use a hierarchized ontology, and to define natural languages as linguistic states of affairs, which result from the instantiation of a linguistic property in lower level linguistic abstract entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An intense ideological debate concerning the future of Spanish in the independent nations took placein latin America during the 19th century. In Chile, most intellectuals (such as Andrés Bello) embraced rationalist ideals, seeking the international unity of Spanish for the benefi t of political interests. Within this frame, a negative attitude towards regional Chilean linguistic features of Spanish prevailed. At the end of this century, however, we fi nd a sole case which opposes the current dominant view: Nicolás Palacios' Raza Chilena (1904). Palacios, infl uenced by the racial thinking of Social Darwinists, shows a positive attitude towards Chilean Spanish. He considers it as an authentic manifestation of the soul of the Chilean race. Palacios uses different language ideological processes, such as iconization and erasure. Notwithstanding, the main ideological process used by Palacios is historicization. Within the frame of ethnolinguistic nationalism, Palacios re-tells the history of the Spanish language in a revisionist manner, in order to legitimize popular Chilean Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multifaceted concept of ‘form’ plays a central tole in the linguistic work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), where it is deeply entwined with aesthetic questions. H. Steinthal's (1823–1899) interpretation of linguistic form, however, made it the servant of psychology. The Formungstrieb (drive to formation) of Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) challenged Steinthal's conception and placed a renewed emphasis on aesthetics. In this endeavour, Gabelentz drew on the work of such figures as August Friedrich Pott (1802–1887), Hans Conon von der Gabelentz (1807–1874) and William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894). In this paper, we examine Gabelentz' Formungstrieb and place it in its historical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]