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NAAHoLS Abstracts (Chicago,
2008)
Elitzur Avraham Bar-Asher (Harvard University)
Traditions in linguistics: The relationship
between Ferdinand de Saussure and Louis Hjelmslev as a case study
It is very popular among historians of sciences
in general, and historians of linguistics in particular, to talk about
traditions within a specific field of interest. Speaking about a
tradition, one usually has in mind some notion of continuity -- a course
of successive stages in which each stage is related to the other stages
directly, either by being built upon a preceding one or by reacting to
it. In this paper, I examine one branch among the “Structuralist
Traditions” – the Copenhagen school of linguistics, and especially the
work of Louis Hjelmslev. I ask whether it is appropriate to use the
term “tradition” in describing the relation between his work and the Saussurian
one.
David Boe (Northern Michigan University)
Ogden’s Basic English and the ‘third medium’
During the 1920s and 1930s, the philosopher and
linguist C.K. Ogden (1889-1957), along with the literary critic I.A. Richards,
developed the auxiliary language system known as Basic English. Consisting
of a core lexicon of 850 words, it was intended both as a structurally
simplified lingua franca, and as an initial stage in the second language
acquisition of English. In this presentation, I will provide an overview
of the history of invented/artificial languages, followed by a more detailed
description of Basic English. I will then compare Ogden’s ultimately
failed proposal with the recent English-language development referred to
as the “third medium”, the simplified hybrid of speech and writing found
in on-line communications.
Peter T. Daniels (New York, NY)
Chomsky 1951a and Chomsky 1951b
It is not widely realized that the December 1951
version of Noam Chomsky’s M.A. thesis “Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew,”
published in 1979, differs tremendously from the version submitted to the
University of Pennsylvania in June. This presentation describes the
June version and discusses and exemplifies the differences in purpose,
formalization, and philosophical background between the two versions, as
well as some details obtained in recent e-mail conversations with the author
that go beyond what he wrote in the 1975 Introduction to the published
version of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory.
Stuart Davis, Tracy Alan Hall, & Mikael
Thompson (Indiana University)
Francis Lieber's unpublished German grammar
of 1836
In this presentation, we provide some of the details
of Francis Lieber's unpublished and virtually unknown German grammar of
1836, found amongst the Lieber Papers in the Huntington Library.
After first providing some background on Francis Lieber, an important but
largely forgotten figure of linguistics in Antebellum America (see Andressen
1990 and Davis 2003), we detail various aspects of the manuscript and compare
selected parts of its contents to some of the known German grammars of
the time, including Adelung (1781), Noehden (1800), and Follen (1828).
We also briefly detail Lieber's failed attempts to publish the grammar.
Hope C. Dawson & Brian D. Joseph (Ohio
State University)
Authorship provenance in Language: An increasingly
international scope
From its founding in 1924, even though in name
the Linguistic Society of AMERICA, the LSA has had a definite and discernible
international scope. One measure of this scope is the increasingly
international representation in the affiliation of authors of articles
published in Language, from the first non-US-affiliated author (Edward
Sapir in Lg. 1 (1925)), and up through recent issues, e.g., Lg. 83.1 (2007),
in which 93% of the authors were affiliated with non-US institutions. In
this paper, we document the international presence among Language authors
over its 83 years of publication. We develop statistics based on
published articles, supplementing them with further statistics covering
submissions to the journal since 2002.
Marcia Farr (Ohio State University)
Ethnolinguistic Chicago: Studies of language
in the city’s neighborhoods
Chicago is multicultural and multilingual, yet
until the 1980s, only sociologists and historians studied this diversity.
In the 1980s and 1990s an ethnolinguistic research program in the Language,
Literacy & Rhetoric Ph.D. specialization in the English Department
at the University of Illinois, Chicago, explored the languages, literacies,
and dialects of Chicago’s ethnic mosaic. This research greatly influenced
the fields of Composition & Rhetoric, Literacy Studies, and Education.
Grounded in Hymes’ Ethnography of Communication, it utilized theories of
Verbal Art as Performance, Genre and Textuality, and Indexicality, illustrated
here with examples from the research.
John Goldsmith (University of Chicago)
McCawley’s early views on generative phonology
In ‘On the role of notation in generative phonology,’
James McCawley asked what the relationship is, or ought to be, between
what phonologists take to exist and what the notational system of a generative
grammar obliges us to write down. An early generative phonologist,
he argued that the only aspect of this question that makes sense is asking
whether the rules identified by a generative grammar have the right epistemological
granularity: there should be a one-to-one mapping between the generativist’s
rules and real things out there in the world. Our goal will be to
reconstruct the intellectual context in which this proposal was made and
was important.
Eric P. Hamp (University of Chicago), &
Brian D. Joseph (Ohio State University)
Albanologist Karl Steinmetz revisited, and
reappreciated as a linguist
In Hamp & Joseph 2007 (NAAHoLS, Anaheim),
we introduced the early 20th century traveler to the Balkans, and to Karl
Steinmetz, by way of beginning to document the contributions his vocabulary
lists and grammatical sketch have made to the linguistic study of Albanian.
In this year's presentation, we discuss the man further, adding more biographical
information on him; we continue our enumeration of advances in Albanian
dialectology that his materials allow; and we offer an appreciation of
his analytic skills as a linguist by a consideration of an interesting
classification he made within the Albanian verbal system.
John E. Joseph (University of Edinburgh)
‘Unparalleled Babel’: Hearing linguistic prehistory
unfold in turn-of-the century Chicago
Carl Darling Buck’s “A Sketch of the Linguistic
Conditions of Chicago” (1903) declares that “The linguistic conditions
in some of our largest American cities are unique in the history of the
world — an unparalleled babel of foreign tongues”. Buck furthers
the project of Georg Hempl’s “Language-Rivalry and Speech-Differentiation
in the Case of Race-Mixture” (1898), which reexamines the differentiation
of the IE languages in the light of contemporary immigration and language
mixture. Buck moves beyond generalities to construct a detailed statistical
analysis, leading to conclusions that do not always support the innovative
perspectives Hempl inspired among 20th-century historical linguists.
Douglas A. Kibbee (University of Illinois--Urbana/Champaign)
Linguistics before a linguistics department
at the University of Illinois
Earlier works on the history of linguistics at
the University of Illinois in Urbana chronicle the post-war period, when
many linguistic departments were being formed, and the criteria for recognition
in the field were established. This contribution looks at how linguistics
was organized before linguistics had a structure of its own in the academy,
at least in United States. In particular, this paper will look at
linguistics at Illinois from the time Leonard Bloomfield arrived in Urbana
through the early years of the Linguistic Society of America, a time when
the field was fighting for its place among the disciplines.
Marcin Kilarski (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Cherokee classificatory verbs: Their place
in the history of linguistics
In this presentation, I examine the role played
by Cherokee classificatory verbs, particularly those related to ‘washing’,
in 19th and 20th century studies which postulated lexical redundancy and
the lack of generic terms in “primitive” languages. With a few exceptions,
such studies constituted the only description of Cherokee morphology until
the first modern accounts in the 1950s. These claims are then viewed
against the treatment of polysynthesis in other North American Indian languages,
as well as redundancy attributed to other nominal classification systems,
i.e., gender and noun classes.
Rae Arlene Moses (Northwestern University)
Subterranean linguistics, an undergraduate
linguistics curriculum, and the evolution of a department
At Northwestern University, a separate Linguistics
Department grew out of sufficient scholarly interest in language among
faculty members from departments of English, foreign language, psychology,
and anthropology. The academic department established in 1965 emerged
from the general scholarly interest in language, along with focused attention
on African languages. It sustained itself and avoided departmental
demise by initiating an undergraduate curriculum that exposed a large number
of undergraduates to the formal study of language, and also trained a small
number of linguistics majors and minors. At the same time, the graduate
program evolved, which reflects the scholarly interests of the faculty
of this small department.
Marc Pierce (University of Texas--Austin)
The spread and survival of a theory of Old
High German umlaut
The dismantling of linguistic theories can be
messy, as shown by the resilience of certain proposals that one might have
expected to have been discarded long ago. A parade example of this
phenomenon is Freeman Twaddell’s theory of Old High German umlaut, originally
developed in 1938, which survives to an extent today, despite the appearance
of a number of studies discrediting it. This paper examines some
possible reasons for the spread and survival of this theory, including
Twaddell’s status as a scholar and the elegance of Twaddell’s proposal.
Michael Silverstein (University of Chicago)
In praise of ‘exceptionless’: Linguistics
among the human sciences at Bloomfield and Sapir’s Chicago
For their four overlapping Chicago years, 1927-1931,
Sapir and Bloomfield engaged in distantly and mutually respectful indirect
intellectual dialogue, realizing the theoretical transition from diachrony
to synchrony (cf. Wells 1974) through the concept of the phonemic segment.
The next generation decisively made the transition, however. In the
latter ’20s, at the moment they were promulgating among insiders what would
become synchronic phonemics, Sapir and Bloomfield pointed out to disciplinary
outsiders the precision and predictive power of linguistics among the human
sciences on the very plane of diachrony – sound change and its Ausnahmslosigkeit
– that had been the rallying point of Neogrammarian professional consciousness.
Margaret Thomas (Boston College)
‘Fifty key thinkers in language and linguistics’
This presentation analyzes historiographical issues
raised by the task of identifying 50 ‘key thinkers in language and linguistics’
for a book with that title. Few precedents reflect on selection criteria:
Sebeok’s (1966) Portraits includes ‘seminal figures…whose work [has] lasting
relevance’; Bright’s (1992) encyclopedia included those ‘who made contributions
“across the board”.’ What counts as ‘lasting relevance’? Across
which ‘board’ must contributions be distributed? What relationships
exist between ‘key thinkers’ and ‘key discoveries / texts’? Are some
‘key ideas’ unassociated with ‘key thinkers’? I present data on contemporary
students’ knowledge of the history of linguistics, and their definitions
of ‘key thinkers’.
Barry Velleman (Marquette University)
Translation, acquisition, and the ‘organ of
language’: The work of Mariano Cubí y Soler (1801-1875)
Mariano Cubí y Soler was a Catalonian educator,
grammarian, lexicographer, and orthographic reformer who produced numerous
pedagogical materials in the United States during the 1820s and 1830s.
His concepts of language teaching and learning, which argue against the
Hamiltonian approach yet adapt certain elements of it, have not been widely
studied by scholars outside the Spanish-speaking world. The paper shows
how Cubí's conception of language use and acquisition was in harmony
with the nineteenth-century "science" of phrenology, which he would widely
promote in Spain upon his return there in the 1840s.
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