| .
ABSTRACTS
1. Amsler, Mark (Eastern Michigan University): "Humanism and Linguistics"
In this paper, I rethink current linguistics'
socio-disciplinary position and critically explore the relations between
linguistics as social discourse and language attitudes. I propose
a model for understanding the social reality of language attitudes, which
present themselves historically as developing asynchronously or unevenly
on three tracks: among different segments of society, among educators and
language policy makers, and among linguists. Second, I propose we revive
the social and intellectual ideal of the linguist as humanist.
Over the last 100 years, the specific disciplinary
position of linguistics within education debates and language policy decisions
has shifted away from theorizing grammatical or phonological systems and
toward applied linguistics. In the first half of the 20th century,
U.S. linguistics in anthropology and languages developed a difficult but
productive relationship with school and college teachers of English, foreign
languages, and language arts. After WWII, theoretical and general
linguistics became increasingly separated as disciplinary knowledge and
discourse from educational theory and practice. As a result, the educational
controversies of the 1960s-1990s -- whole language vs. phonics for teaching
reading, nonstandard Englishes in the classroom, students' right to their
own language, bilingualism and English-Only -- only sporadically and tactically
engaged with contemporary linguistic theory and models.
2. Boe, David (University of Nevada-Reno): "Lithuanian Studies
and 19th-century Comparative
Philology"
The Lithuanian language is often referred to
as the most "archaic" of the living Indo- European languages, primarily
because it appears to retain a number of inflectional features that apparently
existed at an earlier stage in the evolution of this family of languages.
Lithuanian, along with Latvian and Old Prussian, is part of the Baltic
branch of languages deriving from Proto-Indo-European, and is characterized
by numerous unchanged word stems, a pitch accent phonology, and a highly
inflected case system. This paper discusses the central role of Lithuanian
scholarship in the growth and development of diachronic linguistics.
During the 19th century, many prominent Indo-European scholars studied
Lithuanian, largely for the purpose of getting a sense of how the various
European languages looked during an earlier stage of linguistic evolution.
The German linguist August Schleicher, who developed the family-tree model
of language change, emphasized the importance of Lithuanian studies in
his "Lithuanian Grammar" (I 856), and Ferdinand de Saussure, now well-known
for his synchronic structuralism, carried out research on Lithuanian as
part of his earlier diachronic work. By the end of the century Lithuanian
had become an important object of linguistic study internationally.
3. Broden, Thomas (Purdue University): "A. J. Greimas's La Mode en 1830
(1948) and the
Development of Modem French Lexicology"
In February the Presses Universitaires de France
(PUIF) published a volume of juvenalia by A. J. Greimas (1917-1992), the
French-language linguist and semiotician, which challenges the established
account of his career. Rather than illustrating traditional philology,
the first projects already reject existing practice in lexicology and strive
to elaborate new approaches to the social history of French vocabulary.
Conversely, a 1956 manifesto often cited as an encomium to structuralism
actually disavows the approach's panchrony and its perceived ahistoricism
and argues for maintaining a vigorous historical perspective.
Greimas's Sorbonne dissertation, La Mode
en 1830 (1948) turns its back on the established blueprint for a vocabulary
thesis focusing on the innovations wrought by liteary authors, and aligns
itself instead with attempts to expand lexicological data and to develop
modern methods of analysis. Signaling fundamental social transformations,
"witness words" cluster about and lead to "key words," the crucial concepts
underlying a culture. The contrasts between witness words and key words
point to tensions between the philological and the semantic bases of the
approach envisioned, between its atomism and its nascent structuralism,
between its positivistic pursuit of exhaustive data and its Annales-inspired
quest for explanation and synthesis.
4. Darnell, Regna (University of Western Ontario): "Americanist Linguistics
a Handmaiden to Ethnology"
This paper will contextualize the Boasian/Americanist
tradition in terms of dictionary, grammar and texts by ethnologists with
minimal training in linguistics, collaborations with native speakers, the
role of fieldwork in defining the place of linguistics in four-field anthropology,
and the separation of linguistics from anthropology with professionalization
of the former. I argue that this Americanist linguistics continues to have
a specific and unique role in the North American discipline of linguistics.
5. Davis, Daniel (University of Michigan- Dearhorn): "Zeuss and the
Re-definition of Celtic Linguistics
1850-1900"
The period 1850-1900 saw the academic foundation
of the modem subject of Celtic linguistics. Johann Kaspar Zeuss's Grammatica
Celtica, published in 1853, was the first text to make use of the advances
in comparative philology in the early nineteenth century, applying this
method to an extensive corpus of manuscript materials in the Celtic languages
to formulate a detailed and comprehensive comparative grammar. This
mainstream of Celtic philology is elaborated by John Rhys' Lectures
on Welsh Philology (I1877), Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville in,
Études
grammaticales sur les langues celtiques (1881), and Whitley Stokes'
Celtic
Declension (1885).
Zeuss's impact was not only on purely linguistic
studies, but also inspired literary and ethnological research. Matthew
Arnold used Zeuss as the basis for his linguistic discussion of Celtic
in the context of literary studies. Arnold develops a theory of Celtic
literature based on a ethnolinguistic definition of the Celtic peoples
which includes the English and their literature in his work On the study
of Celtic Literature (1867). An ethnological and philological
approach is given a popular treatment by Thomas de Courey Atkins in The
Kelt or Gael: his ethnography, geography, and Philology (I 892).
Despite these fundamental changes in the subject,
earlier traditions of the historical study of the Celts with emphasis on
language are continued in John Jones Thomas's Britannia Antiquissima, or,
A Key to the Philology of Hivtory (Sacred and Profane) (I 860), notable
for its publication in Australia. Neo-druidic themes receive attention
in John Williams's Gomer; or a BriefAnalysis ofthe Language and Knowledge
ofthe Ancient Cymry (I 854). These texts indicate that understanding and
acceptance of Zeuss's work did not occur instantaneously, but took place
gradually as the new methods and approaches displaced these earlier modes
of study.
6. Eto, Hiroyuki (Georgetown University):,George J. Adler's (1821-1868)
Treatise on Wilhelm von
Humboldt's Linguistic Achievements"
In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (I
965), Noam Chomsky claims that Wilhelm von Humboldt's "Introduction (1836)"
is "famous but rarely studied." Despite Chomsky's precise and comprehensive
knowledge of Humboldt's linguistic views, this conclusion is not a perfectly
appropriate judgment. In fact, the "Introduction" as well as other linguistic
works of Humboldt were scrutinized and evaluated with high precision by
George J. Adler some one hundred years before the publication of Aspects.
Adler was not primarily a Humboldt specialist,
but a talented teacher of German, who was famous in America for his widely
used German text-books and dictionaries. In his Wilhelm von Humboldt's
Linguistical Studies (1866), apparently the first study in America
of Humboldt's linguistic achievements, Adler deals with Humboldt's linguistic
theory mostly in his "Introduction," whose interpretation and explanation
are still worth being the subject of close examination today.
The present study examines this treatise by
Adler, focusing on a comparative analysis of Adler's remarks and Humboldt's
original statements, in order to evaluate Adler's work of Humboldt's linguistic
theory, to confirm the existence of high scholarly level Humboldt studies
in nineteenth-century America, and further, to establish a new chapter
in the history of the Humboldt reception in American linguistics.
7. Fagyal, Zsuzsanna (University oflllinois at (Jrbana-Champaign): "Articulatory
phonetics for speaking
machines: a brief history of teaching human sounds
to automata from the Middle Ages to this day"
Despite their importance in ancient mythologies,
speaking machines are relatively recent inventions. In the 17th century,
Athanasius Kircher was the first to declare that it is theoretically possible
to build a figure endowed with the power of moving its lips and tongues
while emitting intelligible human sounds. In his work, elements of articulatory
phonetics were presented for the first time as theoretical background for
the construction of such a device. Charles Sorel Sieur de Souvigny published
the first description, in French, of such a multilingual speech synthesis
system in 1667, Sorel envisioned a combination of consonants and vowels
into syllables, words and sentences, and raised the problem of coarticulation
by calculating the number of speech units to store by a rudimentary "dictionnary":
a rotating cylinder. Wolfgang von Kemplen (1791) is considered the first
scientist to have actually built a speaking machine. His wooden box, whose
construction necessitated outstanding knowledge of acoustic phonetics,
pronounced vowels and consonants in isolation, as well as a few words in
German and French. The paper will relate these achievements to general
phonetic knowledge published in grammar books and manuals.
8. Hutton, Chris (University ofhong Kong): "Chinese and its dialects
in western eyes: one language or
many?"
-
This paper looks at the debate within western
19th and 20th century linguistics about the status of Chinese and the Chinese
dialects. When the tradition of vernacular nationalism out of which modern
European linguistics emerged came to be applied to China by missionaries
and colonial officials a significant breach occurred in traditional Chinese
understandings of language. Western missionaries, particular in southern
China, had a strong incentive to promote the study of regional language
varieties as they were anxious to communicate directly with the ordinary
uneducated people. They often rejected the high literary or official language
variety as unsuited to the direct communication of simple truths. Various
forms of linguistic reform offered themselves as means of circumventing
the influence of the traditional Chinese literati, including the invention
of transcription systems, vernacular Bible translations, reform of the
written language, and the promotion of literacy in women. In the 20th century
with the rise of modem linguistics as an academic discipline, these debates
have continued, conducted both by western linguists and Chinese intellectuals
and linguists. This paper asks whether these two positions can be reconciled
and considers what this debate might teach us about the impact of western
linguistics on Asian societies.
9. Kerecuk, Nadia: "Language and Consciousness in Potebnia"
This paper offers a summary of the arguments
about language and consciousness in Oleksander Potebnia's (1835-1891) theory
of language. In it, every speech act is simultaneously an act of
understanding, of objectivisation, of consciousness, of interpretation
of thought, of cognition (c.f 18621, 1874, 1882). Many forms of thought
exist and develop without language. However, there are mental activities
that require language. Potebnia argues that 'language is necessary
for mental activity so that the mental activity can become conscious' (1862:37).
Firstly, both language as 'passage from unconsciousness
to consciousness' (Ibid.) and language autonomy in relation to the mind
('higher order cognising activity') are discussed. The role of language
in perception and apperception is discussed next with his critique of Steinthal,
Herbart, Lotze, Lazarus. The conscious (trans)formation of representations
follows along with the arguments that speakers have the capacity to objectivise
thought by means of language, create objects of thought, cognise the world.
This includes child language acquisition along with the development of
consciousness and cognition. The paper concludes with the role of language
and consciousness as pathways to the human thought development.
10. Koerner, E. F. Konrad (University of Ottawa): "The Origins of Morphophonemics"
As recently as 1997, Noam Chomsky reiterated
his position that when working out his ideas of rule ordering for his Master's
thesis on Morphophonemics of modern Hebrew in 1951, he had not had
access to Bloomfield's "Menomini Morphophonemics" paper of 1939, suggesting
that a generative model of linguistic analysis he developed at the time
was entirely original with him. The present paper demonstrates that
even if he did not have access to a copy of the Travaux du Cercle Linguistique
de Prague, vol. 8, prior to the completion of his M.A. thesis, he had
undoubtedly absorbed the essentials of Bloomfield's ideas about rule ordering
through reading the proofs of his supervisor's main theoretical work, Zellig
S. Harris' Methods in Structural Linguistics, in early 1947, in
which the author discusses the salient points of Bloomfield's 1939 argument
in a section entitled"Morphophonemics".
Furthermore, Harris' Methods contains the
essentials of the generative approach to language which is by now almost
exclusively associated with Noam Chomsky's name. The present paper
suggests that there has been much more continuity and cumulative advance
in American linguistics than we have been made to believe,
11. Mackert, Michael (German-Enghsh Language Services): "Horatio Hale's
Grammar of "The Poetic
Dialect of English"
In the history of North American linguistics,
Horatio Hale (1817-1896) is well-known for his achievements during the
Wilkes Expedition (Hale 1846; cf Mackert 1994, 1999) and his supervision
of Franz Boas' (1858-1942) early fieldwork in British Columbia (Hale 1890,
1891; cf. Gruber 1967; Mackert 1995). By contrast, his work on the grammar
and lexicon of English poetry, which only exists in manuscript form (Hale
n.d., c.a. 1882- 1889), has received no attention at all. However, Hale's
manuscript is of importance because it documents Hale's only full-fledged
attempt to apply the tools of linguistic analysis available to him to poetry.
The section on grammar is of particular interest for the following reasons:
1) Hale offered criteria for differentiating between languages, dialects,
and slang. 2) Based on these criteria, he suggested that the corpus
of English poetical texts temporally delimited by the work of John Milton
(1608-1674) and Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) be considered a dialect of
English. 3) His grammatical analysis of this posited dialect exhibits an
understanding of etymology that differs from Hale's (1846) earliest conception
of that subdomain of grammar. 4) Guided by his view of poetic language
as a dialect, Hale critiqued William Wordsworth's (1770-1850) rejection
of poetic diction in favor of the "language of men" (Wordsworth 1849-40).
This paper will provide an overview of Hale's project and grammar and discuss
in detail these four aspects of his study.
12. Marcondes, Danilo (Pontifical University, Rio de Janeiro): "Language
and Knowledge in Early
Modern Philosophy: Between the "Abuse
of Words" and the "Veil of Ideas"
The epistemic problem of errors and how to
avoid them has always been a major concern of philosophers since Antiquity,
as philosophy was considered the knowledge of truth. In the beginning
of the Modem Age this problem became especially relevant due to the breakdown
of many traditional scientific theories. How to avoid the errors
and false beliefs of tradition became a central problem.
The doctrine that language is one of the main sources of mistakes and
false beliefs was a common place at that time. We shall analyze this view,
distinguishing three different senses: (i) The doctrine of the abuse of
words maintaining that linguistic variation and the conventionality of
meaning make language an unreliable tool for the acquisition of knowledge.
(ii) The skeptical attack on traditional scientific theories arguing that
they offer only definitions depending on words, and not essential definitions,
revealing knowledge of reality. (iii) The rejection of the discourse of
tradition based on the view that language is a vehicle of false beliefs
of the past.
13. Subbiondo, Joseph (California Institutefor Integral Studies): "Benjainin
Lee Whorf and the New
Millenium: Rereading Language, Thought,
and Reality"
Much of Whorf's work was condensed and reduced
by many linguists into the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis -- a theory of language
and mind that was subject to many interpretations. For the most part,
the hypothesis was rejected by linguists who interpreted it as advancing
a notion of cultural and linguistic superiority. In this paper, I
will argue that the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis was misunderstood because it
was formulated during a time when there was little, if any, support for
multiple ways of knowing. In the emerging study of language and consciousness,
Whorf s Language, Thought, and Reality should be reread as it offers
a perspective that will be more appealing to linguists now than when it
was published in mid-century.
14. Thomas, Margaret (Boston College): "Roger Bacon and Martin Joos:
Often cited, but misconstrued"
This paper examines how two references to earlier
work in language science have been employed in modern linguistics.
One is Bacon's thirteenth-century assertion that grammar is substantially
one and the same in all languages, despite its accidental variations."
This statement has been repeatedly quoted as summarizing a core notion
of medieval speculative grammar. But as Bourgain (I 986), Hovdhaugen
(I 990), and Rosier (1984) have argued, the passage has been misconstrued:
Bacon actually had a quite different approach to language and universal
grammar, compared to that of the speculative grammarians. A second passage
from Joos (1957) has met a similar fate. He depicted American structuralists
as holding that "languages could differ from each other without limit and
in unpredictable ways," words often presented as evidence for anti-universalism.
But Hymes and Fought (1975) have pointed out that most structuralists wanted
more to defer than to ban cross-linguistic generalizing. These misinterpretations
of Bacon and of Joos often surface in discussions of the relationship of
generative linguistics to earlier language scholarship, revealing that
contemporary linguistics employs references to the past more as a resource
in its own self-description, than by way of inquiry into other cultures'
understanding of language.
15. Tsiapera, Maria (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill): "The
Logique and Port-Royal"
The Logique of Antoine Amauld and Pierre
Nicole was extremely successful long after the Grammaire générale
et raisonnée. The Logique was written for a young noble and
was intended to be a treatise on the basics of logic. The authors
thought it would be a public service to take what was useful in training
students in judgment from the standard logics and to present this with
many observations and reflections of their own. Further they acknowledged
that some of the observations were "des livres d'un célebre Philosophe
de ce sié cle, qui a autant de netteté d'esprit qu'on trouve
de confusion dans les autres." This is an obvious reference to Descartes,
although some of the observations were take from Pascal.
The four parts of the Logique represent
the various operations of the mind, namely conception, judgment, reasoning
and ordering. Speculation over the reasons for the Logique
is nothing more than that. A look at the history of the petites-écoles
suggests that the motive for the book was the Port-Royal educational philosophy
and perhaps it was intended to be a companion piece of the GGR,
as indeed later grammarians took it to be. Thus the discussion focuses
on the place of the Logique within Port-Royal education.
|