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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]

Swiss linguistic research did not have a major impact on American linguistics in the inter-war period. Nevertheless, there was a perhaps surprising awareness of the results of Swiss scholars among American linguists active in that period. This paper documents both their numerous references to the work of the linguists of the Geneva School as well as the recognition given to Swiss scholars in general by the Linguistic Society of America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-World War II era was one of great triumph for American linguists-and yet linguistics is all but absent from the historical literature on postwar social science. This paper aims to illuminate this curious situation: to understand its provenance, evaluate its merits, and contextualize it broadly. I argue that the historiographic lacuna results from two factors: (1) the opt-out of linguists from the wider American social science community, and (2) historical-developmental and -orientational factors that stand linguistics apart from the social science mainstream. The resultant isolation of linguistics has led to a parallel isolation in the historical literature. Ultimately, this paper poses a pivotal and timely question: How is the postwar social science space construed within the existing historiographic framework, and how should it be construed in order to maximize understanding? I propose a rethink of the received historiography centered on intellectual transformations and cross-disciplinary integration. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has seen an explosion of work on the history of the human sciences during the Cold War. This work, however, does not engage with one of the leading human sciences of the period: linguistics. This article begins to rectify this knowledge gap by investigating the influence of linguistics and its concept of study, language, on American public, political and intellectual life during the postwar and early Cold War years. I show that language emerged in three frameworks in this period: language as tool, language as weapon, and language as knowledge. As America stepped onto the international stage, language and linguistics were at the forefront: the military poured millions of dollars into machine translation, American diplomats were required to master scores of foreign languages, and schoolchildren were exposed to language-learning on a scale never before seen in the United States. Together, I argue, language and linguistics formed a critical part of the rise of American leadership in the new world order — one that provided communities as dispersed as the military, the diplomatic corps, scientists and language teachers with a powerful way of tackling the problems they faced. To date, linguistics has not been integrated into the broader framework of Cold War human sciences. In this article, I aim to bring both language, as concept, and linguistics, as discipline, into this framework. In doing so, I pave the way for future work on the history of linguistics as a human science. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Examines the history of codeswitching research in the United States during the 1950s. Analysis of diary studies of bilingual children; Link between language use and social function; Evidence of codeswitching research in the US by Aurelio M. Espinosa; Factors affecting the lack of recognition for codeswitching researches.

Discusses the history of linguistics teaching at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York from 1946 to mid-1970s. Description of the courses the university offered before 1946; Role played by the university in the provision of language-and-area-courses in Italian and Russian during World War II; Developments made in the university's curriculum as of 1970.