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NAAHoLS Abstracts (Oakland, 2005)
David Boe (Northern Michigan University)
Tolkien and linguistic (re)construction
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) has recently experienced
a resurgence in popularity as a result of the release of the film versions
(2001, 2002, 2003) of his Lord of the Rings trilogy. While many are
familiar with Tolkien’s fictional descriptions of Middle-earth, which include
numerous examples of quasi-natural invented languages, fewer perhaps are
aware of his background as a linguist, both in the popular sense of one
who is able to speak numerous languages, as well as in the technical sense
of one who is an academic scholar of language. This paper contrasts
Tolkien’s background as a historical linguist with his interest in inventing
languages for literary purposes.
Stuart Davis (Indiana University)
Francis Lieber and the "corruption" of European
languages in America
In 1835, Francis Lieber, an important but largely
forgotten figure in American linguistics during the antebellum period,
was occupied with a survey or essay on the "corruption" of languages.
In particular, he was gathering information on the corruptions which the
European languages had undergone in America. During this brief period,
Lieber specifically corresponded with individuals regarding the creole
of Haiti and the Bozal Spanish of Cuba while making his own observations
on Pennsylvania German. This paper documents Lieber's interest in
corruptions and presents some of the relevant unpublished materials found
in the Lieber papers at the Huntington Library.
Richard Janda, Brian Joseph, J. Marshall Unger,
Meg Daly, John Freudenstein, Christopher Randle, & John Wenzel (The
Ohio State University)
Shifts that pass in the night: Missed opportunities
in the recent history of linguistics and biology
Linguistics and biology have jointly benefited
from exchanging metaphors (family trees) and sharing substantive notions
(replication). Yet linguists and biologists have both overlooked
innovations in each other's fields which would have allowed progress or
avoided impasses. Biologists missed the breakthrough potentially
achievable by adopting life-science analogues of the linguistic typology
of Greenberg and others since ca. 1950. Historical linguists have
attended insufficiently to evolutionary biologists’ discussions of the
(ir)reversibility of particular changes, the (in)constancy of change rates,
and the reshaping of ritualized behaviors under varying ecological conditions,
which might have forestalled much apriorism, circularity, and sterility
besetting current “theory” of “grammaticalization”.
Brian Joseph & Hope Dawson (The Ohio State
University)
A forgotten genre, the academic obituary,
and the Language obituary project
Our subject here is the academic obituary. We
note how they differ from journalistic obituaries, as to timing relative
to a person's demise and scope -- assessment of a scholar's oeuvre versus
a statement of the facts of a person's life. Nonetheless, academic
obituaries are not uniform in style or focus. To draw attention to
this variety and announce a project aimed at collecting all obituaries
in Language (selected as representing a leading and venerable journal in
the field), we offer here quantitative and qualitative surveys of the range
of obituaries found in the journal since its inception in 1925.
John Joseph (University of Edinburgh)
Concrete language and madness in psychiatric
and linguistic thought (1938-1946)
This paper contrasts a range of views in psychiatry,
which in this period locates the key to schizophrenia in the inability
to pass beyond concrete language to form abstractions; and linguistics
(Whorf, Lee) and general semantics (Chase, Hayakawa), which locate cognitive
problems in linguistic representations that veer erratically from the concrete
to the abstract. For Chase, mental clarity demands complete elimination
of abstractions in favour of concrete words. Orwell, meanwhile is moving
away from a view similar to Chase's and toward the opposite conclusion:
abstract language is a requirement of human freedom, and its elimination
would indeed lead to madness.
Danilo Marcondes (Pontifícia Universidade
Católica do Rio de Janeiro)
The study of language in the Enlightenment:
Why doesn’t Hume have a philosophy of language?
I propose to analyze the main reasons why although
language was a subject matter of considerable importance in the Enlightenment,
David Hume, a highly representative philosopher of that period, did not
show any systematic interest in language as relevant to philosophy. However,
I shall also try to show that Hume’s theory of judgment and his analysis
of the role and nature of conventions in our experience are a relevant
contribution for the future development of philosophy of language.
W. Keith Percival (University of Kansas)
On the genealogy of structuralism
I investigate the circumstances surrounding the
first appearance of the terms “structuralism”, “structural linguistics”,
etc. in the late 1920s and situate texts in which these new terms appear
within the atmosphere of theoretical opinion prevailing at that time.
I focus attention on publications of the Linguistic Circle of Prague and
argue that the main impulse was provided by Roman Jakobson, who had moved
to Prague in 1920 and was involved in founding the Circle in 1926.
Marc Pierce (University of Michigan)
The book and the beech tree revisited: The
life cycle of a Germanic etymology
One of the most famous Germanic etymologies is
that of the word for “book”. The traditional etymology links the
“book” word to the word for “beech (tree)”. While this proposal was
widely accepted, it was later challenged on both morphological and semantic
grounds. However, the most current work in this area has largely
rejected these objections and reinstated the traditional etymology.
This paper offers a historigraphical perspective on this etymology, tracing
its life cycle from its original proposal by the Brothers Grimm to its
current rehabilitation.
Giedrius Subacius (University of Illinois, Chicago)
Attempts to adopt Cyrillic scrip for Lithuanian
(1864–1904)
Latin letters were banned for Lithuanian in 1864–1904.
Russian government attempted to instill the Cyrillic alphabet for Lithuanian
then. Producing Lithuanian Cyrillic texts certain authors—those, who significantly
modified Cyrillic alphabet (e.g., introduced specific non-Russian letters
or rejected some of them)—usually made efforts to denote Lithuanian sounds
as precisely as possible and to achieve a letter to sound correspondence.
Some other authors, however, were only imitators of Russian orthography.
They paid much more attention to the superficial effect—to make a Lithuanian
text appear more Russian—than to any linguistic peculiarities. Most often
they were only passive transcribers of Latin letters into Cyrillic ones
(not active writers).
Patricia Casey Sutcliffe (Colgate University)
Maria Whitney: Probable ghost writer for William
Dwight Whitney’s Century Dictionary
This paper constructs a picture of the linguistic
work of Maria Whitney (1830-1910), the younger sister of Yale philologist
William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894). Specifically, it is argued that
Maria Whitney probably provided help to her brother and wrote contributions
for his Century Dictionary, which he edited from 1889-1891. Family letters
show she studied comparative Germanic philology in Germany and would have
worked on the New English Dictionary (later the OED) in London with Murray
if family circumstances had not required her to return to America .
Margaret Thomas (Boston College)
Saussure’s arrows, Chomsky’s vectors
Information designer Edward Tufte demonstrates
how visual images embedded in scientific texts communicate—sometimes mis-communicate—powerfully.
I extend Tufte’s analytic techniques and vocabulary to images in works
by Saussure and Chomsky, linguists who rely heavily on visual artifacts
to represent their ideas. Both make prolific use of pointers or arrows,
rarely defining explicitly what they “stand for” although their meanings
(causality; equivalence; path; change of state) are not always obvious.
Pointers sometimes imply multi-dimensional relationships not fully indicated
in the accompanying text, so that an image carries the burden of a complex
meaning more fully than the accompanying words.
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