NAAHoLS Abstracts (Boston, 2004)
David Boe (Northern Michigan University)
Linguistics, philosophy, and the status of “grammar”
Within the field of linguistics, several broad
conceptualizations of “grammar” can be identified. The expression
“traditional grammar” refers to a pre-linguistic approach to the study
of language, and is often associated with prescriptivism. A “descriptive
grammar”, on the other hand, represents a systematic account of the structure
of a particular language on its own terms. And a “generative grammar”
can be viewed as an attempt to establish the formal rules which can produce
an infinite number of sentences in a language (and ultimately, in any human
language). In a more restrictive sense, “grammar” can simply refer
to sentence-level organization, consisting of the branches of syntax and
morphology. Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations (1953),
by contrast, appropriates the term “grammar” to highlight his realization
that the essence of language lies in rule-governed, socially contextualized
language use, that is, in linguistic practice. However, these rules
of language usage should not be viewed as comprising some sort of structured
system; rather, they are treated as analogous to overlapping rules of “language
games”, which are embedded in the social practices of linguistic communities.
This paper examines the historical evolution of the term “grammar” within
linguistics, and considers the ways in which linguistic philosophers, Wittgenstein
in particular, have given “grammar” a rather different sense.
Hope C. Dawson & Brian D. Joseph (The Ohio
State University)
Columbus's contribution to the foundations of
the LSA
As the Linguistic Society of America reaches its
80th anniversary, a consideration of the early days of the Society is in
order. The 264 Foundation Members (FMs) of the LSA constituted a diverse
group with regard to gender, academic status, affiliation, etc., and in
this paper we explore one particular grouping based on geography, i.e.,
FMs from central Ohio. We observe that The Ohio State University played
an important role in the early days of the LSA, inasmuch as two key members—Leonard
Bloomfield, one of the signers of the call for the formation of a linguistic
society, and George Bolling, the first editor of Language—both hailed from
Columbus and were affiliated with The Ohio State University. Attention
on this region is also justified by two geographic measures. Ohio ranks
third with respect to the number of FMs by state, and Ohio State ties for
third with respect to affiliation. Accordingly, we offer synopses of the
careers of the 10 FMs from Columbus, hoping to develop a sharper sense
of their specific involvement in the emergence of the Society and to shed
some light on the personal dynamics at work in the formative days of the
LSA.
John Joseph (University of Edinburgh)
"The unilingual republic of the world": Reactions
to the 1872 proposal to make English the national language of Japan
In his second inaugural address of 1873, President
Grant expressed his belief that “our Great Maker is preparing the world,
in His own good time, to become one nation, speaking one language.”
Recent developments in communications technology and transoceanic travel
appeared to be making it inevitable that English would soon be the global
language. Grant’s prediction actually had a specific impetus: Mori
Arinori (1847-1889), the Japanese chargé d’affaires in Washington,
had published an open letter in June 1872 calling for English--in a somewhat
modified form--to replace Japanese as the national language of Japan.
Arinori also wrote to leading educationists and scholars soliciting their
views on his proposal, and one of the more detailed and considered replies
he received was from the linguist William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894).
“Accept the English language in its form as spoken and understood by those
to whom it is native,” Whitney advised Arinori, “for the standard and classical
language of the new Japanese culture”. The belief that the spread
of English was unstoppable for a combination of cultural and technological
reasons may have been the main impetus for the proliferation of artificial
international languages in the 1870s, intended above all to prevent English
from achieving its perceived ‘manifest destiny’.
A similar belief is widespread today, and the paper will consider the likely
future spread of English in the light of implications drawn from the history
examined here.
Douglas Kibbee (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Prescriptive traditions in linguistics
Steven Pinker condemned the work of "language
mavens" as psychologically unnatural. Modern linguists have
frequently stated that "native-speakers make no mistakes.” Nonetheless,
grammatical correction is not merely an activity of language mavens.
It is a daily activity that establishes speakers' identity as members of
a linguistic community. So-called language mavens are only
one band in a spectrum that runs from a parent correcting a child, to a
government correcting its citizens. Can something so pervasive be
abnormal or unnatural? In this historical study of prescriptivism,
we will look at representative French texts from the time education became
a matter of the state (during the French Revolution) to the present-day.
We will trace the appearance and disappearance of specific points of conflict,
as well as of types of conflict, and types of argument to defend positions.
The specific points of conflict allow us to pinpoint the areas of prescriptive
concern, the historical range of our database permits us to identify trends
in prescriptive behavior, and the source of linguistic authority helps
us to understand how the acceptable limits of language are argued and imposed.
Through this study we will study the limits of the natural in linguistics.
al-Husein N. Madhany (University of Chicago)
Siibawayh’s phonetic and phonological rules concerning
the Arabic letter waaw /w/ in the primary position: A critical translation
and commentary
Siibawayh (145-177 AH/ 762-793 CE) is known as
one of the fathers of Arabic linguistics due in large part to his 1000+
page masterpiece, Al-kitaab. Siibawayh includes in Al-kitaab detailed
sections on phonetic and phonological analyses that have left little room
to improve upon due to their depth and breadth. One such section
includes his analysis of the two weak (mu’tal) letters in Arabic, the waaw
/w/ and yaa’ /y/. The waaw and yaa’ are considered weak because they
often drop out of words depending on their position in the word when inflected.
In the body of this paper, I present my translation of one chapter of Siibawayh’s
section on the waaw in which he details the rules for such transformations.
In the conclusion, I discuss Siibawayh’s paradigm as well as the meta-language
of the chapters under discussion, both of which are necessary ingredients
to fully understand the genius of Al-kitaab.
Danilo Marcondes (Pontifícia Universidade
Católica do Rio de Janeiro)
Kant’s influence on the philosophy of language
Although Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is not usually
considered by historians of philosophy as a philosopher of language or
as having influenced the development of the philosophy of language, it
can be argued that his critical philosophy is an important contribution
to the philosophical conception of language found in contemporary analytic
philosophy. Kant’s criticism of the models of mind found in Descartes
and in Locke, was influential in the shift from an epistemology based on
the analysis of mental processes to an epistemology based on a logico-linguistic
attempt to establish the foundations of knowledge. In this sense, Kant’s
criticism of representational ideas is important for the later development
of the philosophy of language. In his formulation of a structural conception
of mind, Kant proposes, in the transcendental deduction, a table of categories
and of judgments that can be understood as logico-linguistic, i.e., as
having a propositional nature. The roots of philosophy of language
in modern philosophy and the antecedents of the “linguistic turn” in contemporary
thought have only recently begun to be analyzed in a more systematic way,
and an examination of Kant’s philosophy is essential for this purpose.
Angelo Mazzocco (Mount Holyoke College)
Reflections on the linguistic state of ancient
Rome and on the development of the Romance vernaculars in fifteenth-century
Spain
The paper examines a little known 15th-century
Spanish document (Escorial MS S. II. 13) on the nature of Latin in ancient
Rome and on the development of the romance vernaculars. The objective of
this paper is to demonstrate that the Spanish document is a spin-off of
a major polemic on these same issues that took place in Italy throughout
the 15th century and that involved most of the leading Italian humanists
of the time. Indeed, the Spanish document is closely connected to
Guarino Veroneses and to Biondo Flavios "De Verbis Romanae Locutionis."
It thus reinforces Guarino and Biondo's argument that ancient Rome was
monolingual rather than bilingual as maintained by Leonardo Bruni, among
others, and that the romance vernaculars are traceable to the disintegration
of Latin rather than to identical linguistic entities prevalent in the
ancient world as Bruni argued.
Marc Pierce (University of Michigan)
Leonard Bloomfield and Germanic linguistics
Although he is primarily remembered today for
his contributions to general linguistics, and secondarily for his contributions
to the study of Native American languages, Leonard Bloomfield was also
productive in several other fields of linguistics, including Germanic linguistics.
Bloomfield’s contributions to Germanic linguistics include articles on
various philological topics, papers using Germanic data to establish arguments
of more general linguistic interest, pedagogical works, and his influence
on other Germanic linguists, especially his own students. Thus, to
cite an example of each of these, Bloomfield published work on Germanic
compounds; in another paper, he used the distribution of certain Modern
German fricatives to argue that morphological information can also be employed
when performing phonemic analysis; he wrote an elementary German textbook
and two Dutch textbooks, and devoted a considerable amount of time to elementary
German instruction; finally, several of Bloomfield’s students became prominent
Germanisten in their own rights. This paper is intended as a preliminary
examination of Bloomfield’s Germanic work and his influence on the field
Giedrius Subacius (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Codification in the history of standard European
languages
Codification of form is a process that lasts for
a considerable length of time in the development of most standard languages.
Nevertheless, in every language we can discern a certain period of the
most fruitful codification efforts that is referred to as critical (final)
codification of the standard. Usually users/scholars of different standard
languages pick out a particular dictionary or a particular grammar that
they consider of crucial importance for the codification of their language.
The tendency is clear that users of predominantly synthetic languages (Lithuanian,
Czech, Slovenian, etc.) required a grammar more than a dictionary for codification
because of the complicated morphological structure that can be best described
in a grammar. On the other hand, English grammar, with its comparatively
simple morphological structure and quite confusing spelling system, forced
its users to find the need for a dictionary much more compelling.
Dictionaries are generally larger than grammars, so it takes more time
to compile them, especially those that can be called critical codifying
dictionaries; there may be some relation between whether a standard language
belongs to the early dialect selection (Renaissance) or to the late dialect
selection (Romanticism or later) group. Early selection languages generally
had more time to mature (to “obtain” a critical codifying dictionary).
Late selection standard languages were rushing to codify everything—grammar
books sufficient for this purpose could be created more quickly.
Patricia Sutcliffe (San Antonio, TX)
Friedrich Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science
of Language made silly:
Lewis Carroll’s Alice books as a reaction to
Müller’s popular lecture series?
This paper explores the impact of Friedrich Max
Müller (1823-1900) on Charles L. Dodgson (1832-1898), the Oxford logician
behind the Lewis Carroll pseudonym. Müller was a German-trained philologist
who worked at Oxford over roughly the same period as Dodgson. From
Dodgson’s diaries, a friendship between Müller and Dodgson in the
years 1863-1876 can be attested. Moreover, in this same span of years
(and just before), Müller’s very famous and popular Lectures on the
Science of Language were held and published in two series (1862 and 1865),
as were Carroll’s two most celebrated children’s books, Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872).
Numerous parallels in their linguistic theories
as presented in these works supplement the direct evidence of their friendship
to suggest that Müller, as the local mouthpiece of continental philology,
had a fairly profound influence on Dodgson’s linguistic ideas. These parallels
include the rejection of the eighteenth-century view of language as a logical
system and the corresponding acknowledgment of linguistic relativity, and
an awareness of the conventional (social and arbitrary), as well as political,
nature of language.
Margaret Thomas (Boston College)
Two proposals for the role of general grammar
in education: Eighteenth-century French Idéologues and contemporary
generativists
Most western discourse justifying the study of
language—as opposed to the study of particular languages, native or non-native
to the learner—has concentrated on its purported benefits intrinsic to
language itself. That is, study of language has mostly been valued
as a means of increasing students’ linguistic self-consciousness and therefore
of enhancing their skills in speech or writing. This presentation
examines two proposals outside that mainstream tradition, both of which
assert extra-linguistic value to the study of language. The Idéologues
of revolutionary France, especially Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), advocated
that grammaire générale be installed in the school curriculum
under the rubric of the ideological, moral, and political sciences.
Tracy depicted grammaire générale as the essential human
science, which prepares students for social life and brings them to understand
society as “both a harmonious and rational organization” (Chevalier 1972).
Late twentieth-century generative grammarians have also advocated the value
of the study of language in public education. O’Neil and Honda (1993,
1994) argue that students can be led to a sophisticated appreciation of
scientific method by exposure to the methods linguists employ. Idéologues
and generativists have similarly extrapolated the benefits of study of
language beyond the domain of language itself.
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