bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Syntactic concepts and terminology in mid-20th century American Linguistics
Authors: McCawley James D. 
Published: November 2010

Summary
This paper deals with the notions and terminology that figure in the syntactic works of Bloomfield, Fries, Hockett, Gleason, and early Chomsky. Notwithstanding Bloomfield’s commitment to constituent structure and his profound influence on syntactic research in the United States, constituency had a surprisingly peripheral role in such works as Fries (1952) “Immediate constituents” (is the last of its syntactic chapters) and notions of dependency structure a much more central role. Many false generalizations by descriptivists (e.g., treatments of Therer-insertion as inversion) result from a failure to consider complex expressions as constituents of the various constructions. Notwithstanding descriptivists’ denunciations and generativists’ endorsements of traditional grammar, it is the descriptivists whose syntactic category notions came closer to those of traditional grammar. The unusual category scheme of Fries did not deviate all that much from traditional schemes, and its innovations were not applied consistently. 1960s generative syntax shared with Fries’s approach a conception of gender features and referential indices in English as borne by Ns rather than by NPs, and a failure to treat inter- and intra-saentential anaphora uniformly. Gleason (1965) is the most honorable exception to the dismal quality of this era’s literature on parts of speech.
Samuel Greene
Authors: Perlman Alan M. 
Published: November 2010

Summary
In his studies of the structure of the English language, Samuel Green, a 19th-century grammarian and educator, made extensive use of paraphrase as a descriptive device. This paper argues that in doing so, Greene anticipated some of the methods and concepts of early transformational theory — and even some of the transformations themselves. It first presents a short history of the concept “transformation”, then discusses the transformations in four of Greene’s works. Greene’s use of transformations follows plausibly from his view of language, as is shown by excerpts from the prefaces to his books. Greene’s status as a transformationalist is then reconsidered with reference to the characteristics of transformations as inferred in the early part of this paper. Comparisons with other 19th- and early 20th-century grammarians demonstrate that Greene was unusual in his concern for underlying meaning and in his use of process in linguistic description.
Langue and Parole Since Saussure
Authors: Hewson John 
Published: November 2010

Summary
It is not possible and in fact not necessary to review everything that has been written since the publication of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale concerning the langue / parole diachotomy. What is attempted in the present article is first of all a concrete analogy for langue and parole, so that these two notions, which have been so often misunderstood, can be presented in as concrete a manner as possible, and secondly to follow certain interesting developments of the basic Saussurian notions. The concrete analogy which is used is that of the child’s construction set, such as a Meccano set for example. The set itself is an analogy for langue, and the models, such as planes, cars, machines, etc., that the child makes are a model for parole or discourse. This concrete analogy also serves to illuminate ‘the infinite use of finite means’, the finite means being langue, and the infinite use parole. Next an examination is made of certain of the Saussurean notions that have provoked discussion over the years:
(1) langue as a pure ίοrm; (2) psychologism; (3) the sociological notions; (4) synchrony as static linguistics. Subsequent to (4) the notions of process and generation are examined, and this leads first of all to a critical examination of the terms competence and performance, along with their underlying notions, and then to a discussion of the psychomechanics of Gustave Guillaume. It is pointed out that Guillaume’s theory is an interesting development’ of the Saussurian notions and that some of the criticisms by Wunderli in HL 1:1/1974 are based upon a fundamental misapprehension of the notion of parole in Guillaume.
Teaching Grammars of the Middle Ages
Authors: Bursill-Hall G. L. 
Published: November 2010

Summary
Grammar enjoyed a privileged position in the medieval curriculum; along with the other members of the Trivium it provided a thorough foundation which probably accounts for much of the intellectual success of the medieval schoolmen. This article discusses the material used in the Middle Ages for the teaching of grammar and aims at an exhaustive list of pedagogical material which can still be found, for the most part unedited, in European manuscripts collections; this material served not only for the teaching of Latin grammar to students whose mother tongue was not Latin but also as an introduction to the study of grammatical theory. The article refers to the changes that took place in grammar, i.e., from being a literary discipline it became a logical, speculative discipline, which is reflected in this pedagogical material. Furthermore, this material provides important indications of developments in grammatical theory and their effect on grammatical pedagogy. What is very striking is that certain text-books which enjoyed a widespread influence were written when there was not only a greatly increased demand for text-books but also when every discipline was undergoing radical change.
An Ergative Historiography
Authors: Seely Jonathan 
Published: November 2010

Summary
The most widely accepted definition of ‘ergative’ is in terms of a grammatical case, namely, the subject of a transitive verb, wherein that case is opposed to a second case, the ‘absolutive’ (‘nominative’), which includes both the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive. Languages which have been referred to as ‘ergative’ or as containing ‘ergative constructions’ include Basque, Eskimo, most languages from the Caucasus and from Australia, some Polynesian languages, Burushaski, the Paleosiberian languages, Sumerian, Hittite, some Papuan languages, Tibetan, most members of the Indic branch of Indo-European, and many American Indian languages.
Insight into speculation on the nature of the ergative leads to a study of the terminology applied before the coinage of the term ‘ergative’ in 1912 (by Adolf Dirr). The term itself has been given varied definitions. Fillmore pictured the ergative as a causative construction; John Anderson suggested ‘ergative’ as a semantic marker; John Lyons describes an ‘ideal ergative’ which is agentive in nature. The bizarre conjecture surrounding the study of ergative languages has included a long debate as to the active or passive nature of the ergative construction and, secondly, the fantasy that an ergative language was a ‘primitive’ one whose speakers had a ‘Weltanschauung’ opposed to that possessed by speakers of a nominative-accusative language.
Rather than either active or passive it has also been postulated that the verb is bidirectional and that verb and nouns in some ergative constructions are in a kind of apposition with each other; in addition, these often occur in sets of relationships which are determined by the semantic nature of the nouns and verb. The term ‘semantic ergative’ is suggested here to describe the presence of the ergative marker due to semantic features as +movement, +voluntary, or + emphasis. Although found most commonly as subject of a transitive verb, this semantic ergative may nevertheless also be found as subject of an intransitive.
The Concept of Articulatory Settings
Authors: Laver John 
Published: November 2010

Summary
‘Articulatory setting’ is a modern term for the component of a speaker’s voice quality that derives from a habitual muscular adjustment (such as tending to keep the tongue low in the mouth). The general concept of settings, as long-term tendencies underlying the momentary segmental and suprasegmental articulations of speech, however, has been the subject of discussion in writings on phonetics since the middle of the 17th century. The article explores aspects of the historical development of the concept, particularly with regard to the aspect of voice quality that characterizes the pronunciation of different languages, usually referred to as ‘basis of articulation’. The writings of Wallis, Wilkins, Holder and Cooper in the 17th century, Bayly, Herries and Webster in the 18th, Sweet in the 19th, and Heffner, Honikman and Abercrombie in the 20th, are discussed.
Condillac, Mandeville, and the Origin of Language
Authors: Schreyer Rüdiger 
Published: November 2010

Summary
The study of 18th-century theories on the origin of language offers interesting insights into history of linguistics. These theories are intimately linked with 17th-century inquiries into the social and intellectual nature of man, and particularly with the views of Hobbes, Locke, and the Cartesians. 18th-century thinkers analyse these problems from a genetic viewpoint. Condillac in his Essai sur Vorigine des connoissances humaines (1746) tries to solve them by advancing a theory of the progress of the operations of the mind, a theory in which a central role is attributed to language. This theory has recently attracted the attention of historians of linguistics, since it is considered the main source of an international debate on the origin of language culminating in Herder. It can be shown, however, that a large number of Condillac’s ideas were anticipated in Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1729). The present study suggests that Condillac was very likely familiar with the theses of the Fable and that he made use of them in his Essai. This suggestion is supported by an anlysis of the arguments and of certain fundamental concepts common to both works and by an account of the influence of Mandeville’s theses in France during the first decades of the 18th century. But, as Condillac mentions neither Mandeville nor his Fable, his indebtedness to his precursor cannot be proved once for all. Nevertheless, the evidence presented makes it very plausible that Condillac profited from the original and innovative ideas of Mandeville.
Andreas Kempe (1622–89) and the Languages Spoken in Paradise
Authors: Elert Claes-Christian 
Published: November 2010

Summary
Several textbooks in general linguistics (by Crystal, Fromkin & Rodman, and Waterman) mention a 17th-century Swede who maintained that, in Paradise, God spoke Swedish, Adam Danish, and the serpent French. The name of this Swede is Andreas Kempe (not Kemke, as given in the above-mentioned books), a religious dissenter, persecuted in his Lutheran homeland. In this paper it is shown that the view that Swedish was the original language agrees with that of his contemporary scholars. The statement on Danish and French, however, appears in a context where it is clear that it was to be interpreted as an expatriate’s attempt to ridicule his adversaries among the Swedish clergy, and should not, therefore, be quoted as a serious opinion.
Theme, Rheme, and Word Order
Authors: Adjémian Christian 
Published: November 2010

SummaryHenri Weil’s thesis, published in Paris during the first half of the 19th century, is the first cogent theory of word order in European linguistics. Weil’s work is the first to argue that discourse structure has an effect on the internal structure of the sentence. His ideas are the direct ancestors of the concepts ‘psychological subject’ and ‘psychological predicate’ which so highly influenced stylistic work into the 20th century. Weil’s insights had very little direct influence on French linguistics but are the source of V. Mathesius’ ‘theme’ end ‘rheme’ and the subsequent Prague School theory of word order. This paper presents an overview of Weil’s thesis, followed by a critical evaluation, in the light of Weil’s work, of a sample of later studies on French word order. The fundamental concepts of Weil’s theory are traced into 20th-century linguistics, with particular attention to their evolution in Prague School theory. Finally, a brief survey of work in generative grammar on discourse and the sentence is presented. In conclusion it is claimed that the rediscovery in formal grammar of the role of discourse structure in shaping the internal structure of the sentence is a comtemporary confirmation of Weil’s thesis.
Some Notes on Trubetzkoy’s Abandonment of Disjunctive Oppositions
Authors: Eramian Gregory M. 
Published: November 2010

SummaryIn the earliest days of the Classical Prague School, Jakobson and Trubetzkoy held essentially the same views on phonological oppositions which they divided into ‘correlations’ and ‘disjunctions’. The former are binary oppositions which are shared by more than one pair of phonemes, while the latter include all other kinds of oppositions obtaining in a given language. Although Jakobson abandoned the dichotomy in his published works after 1931, Trubetzkoy retained it until his article of 1936, when he explicitly rejected the disjunction as too simplistic to account accurately for the more complex oppositions in the languages which he had studied. The gradual process whereby Trubetzkoy discarded the disjunction in favor of the more precise kinds of oppositions expounded inGrundzügehas remained unclear to historians of linguistics. The recent publication of Trubetzkoy’s letters, although somewhat disappointing on this matter, makes possible a more accurate reconstruction of Trubetzkoy’s theory of phonological oppositions.Examination of the relevant letters suggests that Trubetzkoy had begun considering the problems associated with the disjunction no earlier than May, 1933, and no later than the end of the summer of the same year. The letters also suggest that by Nov. 1935, in an outline for his 1936 article, Trubetzkoy had finally rejected the disjunction and had arrived at a new classification of phonological oppositions, which is basically retained with a few terminological changes inGrundzüge(1939). Unfortunately, the letters offer no evidence on the reasons for Trubetzkoy’s abandonment of the disjunction beyond the explanations in his published works (1936; 1939) which are reviewed in this article. Finally, the letters reveal that the final split between Jakobson, with his theory of strictly binary oppositions, and Trubetzkoy, with his theory of both binary and non-binary oppositions, occurred soon after Trubetzkoy (1936) and not after Jakobson (1938)as Vachek (1968) has suggested.As recent publications in phonological theory have shown, the question as to the difference between Jakobson’s and Trubetzkoy’s theories is by no means of purely historical interest. While Jakobson’s binarism and the distinctive feature approach have greatly influenced the Chomsky-Halle School and generative phonology, there has recently been a renewal of interest in certain aspects of ‘Trubetzkoyan’ phonology. The most important proponent of this new trend is P. Ladefoged who, like Trubetzkoy, bases his arguments on empirical grounds and allows multivalued as well as binary features. A few references to Ladefoged’s extensive publications reveal interesting parallels with Trubetzkoy’s views and show that the issue of strictly binary vs. multivalued oppositions is not yet resolved in modern phonological theory.
A Seventeenth-Century Polyglot Grammar
Authors: Sundby Bertil 
Published: November 2010

Summary
Jean Sterpin was a Frenchman who flourished in Copenhagen in the mid-nth century. His claim to recognition rests on his polyglot grammar, Institu-tiones Glotticæ (c. l668). Sterpin was acquainted with the language philosophy of Comenius, whose Janua Linguarum (1631) had set the pattern of the polyglot genre, with the work of Nathanael Duёz (fl. 1640–78), the polyglot lexicographer-grammarian, and with Erik Eriksen Pontoppidan’s Grammatica Danica (1668). The way in which Sterpin tackles the problem of teaching the grammar of three languages (French, English and Danish) and proficiency in four (incl. Latin) is superior to the schemes employed by Beyer (1661), Howell (1662), Smith (1674), and Colsoni (1688). His method of presentation is a skilful combination of typographic variation, Vertical alternation’, and the use of parallel texts. More important still, his description of the three languages involved is effected by interlanguage comparisons. The article touches on the parts of speech, case and gender distinctions, word-order, etc, but the strong and weak points of Sterpin’s contrastive-polyglot approach are best studied in his survey of English speech-sounds. Sterpin is sparing in his use of illustrative examples, the parallels he draws are not free from ambiguity, and his sound descriptions suffer from an imperfect understanding of the organs of speech. On the other hand, he shows practical skill in tongues, and his transliterations and ‘names’ of the letters of the four alphabets are no less ingenious than the contrastive layout as a whole. Especially helpful is a table of ‘diphthongues’ and ‘triphthongues’ on the basis of which it has been possible to assign the English long vowels their relative position in the vowel tract. In addition, there are comments on vowels in weak position and on consonants.
Modus Significandi
Authors: Kelly L. G. 
Published: November 2010

Summary
During the Middle Ages, the various sciences shared both basic concepts and terminology without losing their autonomy. Between 1260 and 1330 grammatica speculativa, which had evolved under the influence of dialectic, asserted its independence while keeping the terminology common to philosophy and theology. This mixed autonomy and interdependence is demonstrated by the evolution and use of the term, modus significandi. The term was not proper to grammar: it is found in discussions of the sign in theology and philosophy. In these discussions, the philosopher or theologian in question often rested his case on grammatical considerations. At the beginning of our period, modus significandi is opposed in grammar to significatum, while, after 1280 or thereabouts, the significatum is termed modus significandi passivus and the modus significandi becomes modus significandi activus. It would seem that this change is due to certain implications in the way in which the Latin gerund was employed by scholastic theologians. In any case, the term, modus significandi, undergoes a parallel development in grammar, theology and philosophy; and, at the same time, is studied under different aspects according to the discipline in question. In grammar at the beginning of our period, in appearance modus significandi is a morphological concept, while, in the work of Gerson (1426), it is certainly of syntactic relevance.
Some Trends in Norwegian Linguistics 1800–1850
Authors: Hertzberg Frøydis , Hovdhaugen Even 
Published: November 2010

Summary
The first Norwegian university was founded in 1811; in 1814 Norway became independent from Denmark. These two factors were decisive for the establishment of a linguistic milieu in Norway and for the development of linguistics in that country during the 19th century. Three scholars of very different backgrounds and interests dominated Norwegian linguistics in the first half of the 19th century: One, Christopher Holmboe (1796–1882) was a pupil of A. I. Silvestre de Sacy in Paris and from 1825 on Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo (Christiania). The main bulk of his linguistic production lay within comparative Indo-European philology, but in some minor works he also made interesting observations on various non-Indo-European languages and on topics within general linguistics. The second, Ludvig Caesar Martin Aubert (1807–87), became professor of Latin in 1840. Besides writing important works concerning Latin syntax and general syntactic theory, he introduced comparative Indo-European linguistics to Norway in a series of lectures from 1843 on. His sober and critical attitude concerning language study made him much more influential than Holmboe, whose somewhat oldfashioned preconceptions made him an outsider on the scientific (though not on the organizational) level of the discipline. The third figure was Ivar Aasen (1813–96), who never held a university position, but who as the founder of landsmål (nynorsk), the initiator of Norwegian dialectology, and the author of the first grammar of modern Norwegian had a tremendous impact both on Norvegian linguistics and on the socio-cultural development of Norway in the 19th and 20th century. The paper attempts to depict the intellectual background and the relations between these three men, their relationship to previous and contemporary European linguistics, to some basic trends of Norwegian society of their time as well as to the subsequent development of Norvegian linguistics.
The History of General and Comparative Linguistics in 19th Century Russia
Authors: Berezin F. M. 
Published: November 2010

Summary
The article attempts to demonstrate how problems in general and historical-comparative linguistics were worked out and developed during the 19th century in Russia. Largely following the tradition established by 18th-century Russian scholars, especially M. V. Lomonosov (1711–65), who is regarded as the founder of Russian linguistics, 19th-century linguists displayed a lively interest in investigating the social nature of language. Other key interests of these scholars were the study of the systematic character of language, the development of the phonemic principle (including the distinctive feature concept), the typological study of related and unrelated languages, etc. It is shown that their work generally mirrored the intellectual trends of their period, with biologistic views giving way to sociological and psychological ones, as is evident in the work of N. I. Greč, A. X. Vostokov, A. A. Potebnja, J. Baudouin de Courtenay, F. F. Fortuna-tov, and many others. The intellectual climate of 19th-century Europe allowed for a free exchange of scientific information; thus, in its earlier stages, the Russian scientific scene was sometimes influenced by ideas from the West, whereas it can be said that Russian scholars working in linguistics paid back toward the end of the 19th and in the earlier 20th centuries by furthering research leading to a structural concept of language, the study of morphophonology, typology and language universals as is evident in the theories advanced by members of the Prague and Copenhagen schools.
Beauzée, Behaghel, and J. R. Ross on Heavy-NP Shift
Authors: Scaglione Aldo 
Published: November 2010

SummaryJ. R. Ross’ rule of Complex (or Heavy) NP Shift acquires a further dimension by tracing its background, first through the stylistic-grammatical tradition harking back to Etienne-Simon de Gamaches (1672–1756) and Nicolas Beauzée (1717–89), and then through the linguistic hypotheses of Henri Weil (1818–1909) and Otto Behaghel (1854–1936). Transformational linguists have not yet tackled the challenging problems raised by this universal rule as it becomes complicated by interference from intonation and sentence accent (bearing on the ordering of atonic particles).