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NAAHoLS Abstracts (Anaheim,
2007)
David Boe (Northern Michigan University)
Chomsky’s linguistic historiography
This past year marks the fortieth anniversary
of the publication of Noam Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in
the History of Rationalist Thought (1966). Despite some critical
responses after its publication (e.g., Aarsleff, 1970), Chomsky continued
to invoke and elaborate these Cartesian antecedents throughout his career,
and in a recently reissued second edition (2002), the text is left largely
unchanged (apart from English translations provided for the numerous foreign-language
passages). This presentation considers how Chomsky’s rationalist
perspective has fared since the 1960s, particularly in light of subsequent
neo-empiricist developments in cognitive science, and revisits several
earlier critiques of this work.
Hope C. Dawson (Ohio State University) and Brian
D. Joseph (Ohio State University)
Linguistics: Humanities or science?
Evidence from trends in multiple authorship
Linguistics has always straddled the line between
the humanistic and scientific disciplines. This dual status is reflected
in the degree of co-authorship, with humanistic disciplines, e.g., classics,
having single authorship as typical, and scientific disciplines, e.g.,
biology, having multiple authorship as usual. We offer data on co-authorship
for articles published in Language and other linguistics journals, and
add data on recent submissions to Language and comparisons to journals
in other fields. As measured by a growing percentage of co-authored
papers since 1925, linguistics is moving toward the sciences, a trend supported
also by an increasing average number of authors per paper. The numbers,
though, fall short of those for the sciences, so linguistics is still positioned
between humanities and the sciences.
Eric P. Hamp (University of Chicago) and Brian
D. Joseph (Ohio State University)
Austrian Engineer Karl Steinmetz -- forgotten
Albanologist, sometime linguist
Documentation on Albanian from the pre-modern
period is exceedingly sparse. Thus, several previously obscure and
generally ignored early 20th century works by Austrian engineer Karl Steinmetz
-- his "Not-Woerterbuch" (Sarajevo, 1912), "Grammatik" (Sarajevo, 1913),
and "Feldwoerterbuch" (1913) -- based on visits to pre-World War I Albanian-speaking
territory, are actually important Albanological contributions. We present
here information on Steinmetz and discuss noteworthy linguistic aspects
of these works. Together, they present a fresh view of the early
20th century Geg dialect and reveal Steinmetz as a keen and accurate observer
of the language. They thus bear unexpectedly valuable early, if under-noticed,
witness to pre-WWI Albanian dialectology.
John E. Joseph (University of Edinburgh)
‘All consciousness is of difference’: The
career of a concept from philosophy to linguistics via physics and geometry
Saussure’s conception of a language as a system
of values generated purely by differences between elements became the cornerstone
of modern linguistics. In the early 1890s, while critiquing papers
on Riemannian geometry by his brother René, Saussure encountered
excerpts from an 1882 study of the concepts of modern physics by J. B.
Stallo, who wrote that “Thought, in its most comprehensive sense, is the
establishment or recognition of […] relations of identity and difference”.
Stallo attributed to J. S. Mill this idea that “all consciousness is of
difference”. The present paper retraces the contexts within which this
concept was formulated and transmitted.
Nadia Kerecuk (London, UK)
Ukrainian grammars: Towards a history of ideas
The compilation of grammars of Ukrainian has undergone
successive waves of political manipulation and language prohibitions in
the Old Russian Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Soviet Union, until
their respective demises. Written both in and outside the territory
of Ukraine, these grammars have built on a long eastern and western European
tradition. By the end of the 19th century, several trends had emerged,
which spilled over into Europe with the migrant grammarians through the
interwar period, and subsequently traveled to the New World after WWII.
This paper examines the factors that have impacted the compilation of Ukrainian
grammars.
Marcin Kilarski (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Algonquian and Indo-European gender in a historiographic
perspective
In this talk, I examine the degree to which Algonquian
gender has been regarded as semantically and culturally motivated, and
suggest analogies with accounts of gender in Indo-European. The presence
of exceptions in Algonquian has led to conflicting interpretations: while
some focused on the arbitrary nature of the categorization, others regarded
them as culturally based. Algonquian languages provide an example
of how claims that have traditionally been made about Indo-European gender,
particularly its semantic arbitrariness, have been extended to languages
apparently less suited for the purpose.
Danilo Marcondes (Pontifícia Universidade
Católica do Rio de Janeiro)
Roots of the notion of structure
Structuralism is one of the main currents of the
study of language in contemporary thought, though there are different versions
of it since “the structuralist turn” of the beginning of the twentieth
century. Structuralist theories of meaning have their roots in Ancient
philosophy, e.g., in Plato and Aristotle. We shall follow Ernst Cassirer’s
analyses of the structural principle from its origins up to its influence
in contemporary theories of language. “Structure” is defined as:
1) providing a hierarchical principle of organization; and 2) establishing
a set of rules determining the valid relations among elements which are
parts of a whole.
Andreas Schmidhauser (University of Geneva)
The semantics of pronouns according to Apollonius
Dyscolus
At the heart of ancient reflection on language
stands the theory of the parts of speech. Apollonius Dyscolus, the
great Alexandrian grammarian of the second century AD, defines each part
of speech by means of several criteria. In the case of the pronoun,
one can clearly distinguish a syntactic, a semantic, and a morphological
condition in his definition. I shall examine the semantic condition—that
pronouns define a person. Apollonius has an argument for it: Pronouns
are either deictic or anaphoric; but deictic pronouns evidently define
a person; and anaphoric pronouns, too, define a person since they signify
a person already known, and what is known is definite: hence, pronouns
define a person. The argument is valid—are its premisses true?
Margaret Thomas (Boston College)
The evergreen story of Psammetichus’ inquiry
The pharaoh Psammetichus (664–610 BCE) isolated
two newborn children, cared for by a goatherd who never spoke. When
the children’s first word was reported to be bekos, Phrygian for ‘bread,’
Psammetichus conceded that Phrygians, not Egyptians, were the oldest people.
Re-told by Herodotus, this story has shaped western reflection on language
ever since: in 16th-century conceptualization of the first human language;
in 19th-century debate about the origin of language; and in modern discussion
of language acquisition. Enlarging on the third such environment,
I analyze how Psammetichus’ inquiry is employed to make the past seem both
inappropriately familiar (therefore less threatening), and inappropriately
strange (therefore less valuable).
Hana Zabarah (Georgetown University)
The ‘noun’ in history: A diachronic analysis
in medieval Arabic grammatical theory
The notion of “nouns” developed gradually in Arabic
grammatical theory in medieval times, starting with simple descriptions
to more elaborate definitions. Examination of these early definitions
and exploring their development from the 2/8th century thru the 6/12th
century should lead us to a deeper understanding of the progression of
Arabic grammatical theory of the period. This paper will attempt
to follow the development of these definitions through careful study of
works by well-known grammarians of the period. The influence from
logicians and philosophers will be briefly examined as it pertains to the
grammarians’ understanding of the concept of the noun.
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