James Harris's Revision of Hermes
Masataka Miyawaki (Kanagawa, miyamasa@lib.bekkoame.or.jp)
The Foundation of Grammatical Categories in James
Beattie's 'The Theory of Language' (1783) in Comparison to Condillac's
'Grammaire' (1775)
Lieve Jooken (Leuven, lieve.jooken@arts.kuleuven.ac.be)
Hervás y Panduro's Position in the History
of Anthropological Linguistics
Gerda Haßler (Potsdam, hassler@persius.rz.uni-potsdam.de)
Reasons for the non-Development of Syntactical
Theory in the Hellenstic Period
Dirk M. Schenkeveld (Amsterdam)
Symposium on the History and Nature of Figures
and Tropes
James J. Murphy (Davis, Ca., jermurphy@ucdavis.edu), Lynette Hunter
(Leeds),
Peter Mack (Warwick), Dirk M. Schenkeveld (Amsterdam)
English in Denmark in the Period 1678-1800 with
special reference to Frideric Bolling, Henrik Gerner, Chresten L. Nyborg,
Charles Bertram and Johan Clemens Tode
Hanne Lauridsen (Copenhagen)
English in Denmark in the 19th Century - with
Special Reference to the First Two Professors of English at the University
of Copenhagen, Thomas Christopher Bruun (1750-1834) and George Stephens
(1813-1895)
Inge Kabell (Copenhagen, kabell@engelsk.ku.dk)
A Matter of 'Consequenz': Humboldt on Chinese
John E. Joseph (Edinburgh, john.joseph@ed.ac.uk)
Keichû and the Native Japanese Linguistic
Tradition
Ann Wehmeyer (Gainesville, Fl, wehmeyer@aall.ufl.edu)
South American Missionaries and the Description
of the General Languages
Cristina Altman (São Paulo, altman@usp.br)
Language and Dialect in the History of Linguistics:
a Case-Study of the Politics of Anglo-Norman
Douglas A. Kibbee (Urbana, Illinois, dkibbee@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu)
Cornish Lexicography from the 9th Century AD to
the Present Day
Jon Mills (Luton, jon.mills@luton.ac.uk)
Problèmes d'interprétation lexicologique
des anciens vocabulaires multilingues
Adel Sidarus (Évora, asidarus@mail.telepac.pt)
"Valency Theory" in German Grammars of the 18th
and 19th Century
Kjell-Åke Forsgren (Skövde, Forsgren@isp.his.se)
From Psychological Linguistics to Psycholinguistics
Els Elffers (Amsterdam, Els.Elffers@let.uva.nl)
Le Traitement de la Quantification d'Ajdukiewicz
à Montague
Béatrice Godart-Wendling (Paris, beatrice.godart-wendling@linguist.jussieu.fr)
The Unity of the Chomskyan Research Programme
Pius ten Hacken (Basel, tenhacken@ubaclu.unibas.ch)
Introito e porta, however, is not the first book of its kind, although the first one printed. A manuscript of 1424 called Liber in volgaro, written in Venice by one Master George of Nuremberg, is of a very similar type (Pausch 1972). It also presents nouns and adjectives in a topical order, adjectives with the various methods of comparison, verbs with their conjugation paradigms and conversations. Although a direct dependence of Introito e porta on the Liber in volgaro cannot be proved, it is obvious that Adam of Rottweil must have known the earlier work or some derivative which was extant in the intervening 52 years. This is particularly obvious in the noun and adjective section and in the collection of set phrases for conversations.
The topical word-lists of both works show a close similarity to word-lists in dictionaries meant to serve the teaching of Latin. There was an obvious tradition at work here which arranged lexemes in a certain order, irrespective of the languages involved. There are differences, but they are only of a gradual kind. This can be shown by the relevant part of the Latin-German textbook written by Johannes Murmellius in 1513 and published in Cologne. This author (Reichling 1880) stresses the 'scientific' categories of word-order, whereas the two later authors are ostensibly more interested in the needs of everyday communication and gear the order of their vocabulary to it. But even so, the 'scientific' skeleton of the topical word-order can be recognised in the background. This can be demonstrated by a comparison between the three word-lists.
Within the next century, Introito e porta spread over all the relevant parts of Europe and was translated into all the relevant languages, eventually into as many as eight of them in one edition (Bart 1984). There must have been an estimated 30,000 copies on the market.
The international 'fate' of this book shows the growing need for learning foreign vernaculars arising in the last half of the 15th century. With our historiographical hindsight we can say that this was an almost revolutionary development. It also shows how quickly the new printing trade responded to this need. Moreover, it shows that the cultural unity of Europe, according to common opinion a result of Latin, was not touched by the new method of language learning at all. The growing awareness of vernaculars did not (yet) break Europe down into national linguistic countries.
The analysis of Introito e porta and related works is presented as a
case study for the interconnection of 'facts' and 'arguments' (ideas) in
the historiography of linguistics (Hüllen 1996).
Claes, Franz (1977): Bibliographisches Verzeichnis der deutschen Vokabulare und Wörterbücher, gedruckt bis 1600. Hildesheim: Olms.
Hüllen, Werner (1996): "Schemata der Historiographie. Ein Traktat." Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 6.1: 113-125.
Pausch, Oskar (1972): Das älteste italienisch-deutsche Sprachbuch. Eine Überlieferung aus dem Jahre 1424 nach Georg von Nürnberg. Wien: Hermann Böhlau. (Veröffentlichung der historischen Kommission der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften).
Reichling, Dietrich (1880): Johannes Murmellius. Sein Leben und seine Werke. Nebst einem ausführlichen Verzeichnis sämmtlicher Schriften und einer Auswahl von Gedichten. Freiburg. Reprint: [s.l.]: Nienkoop - de Graaf 1963.
The Paris manuscripts contain a faithful Latin translation of the tables printed on this broadsheet, and also of parts of the accompanying text containing explanatory matter. Apart from this, there are some fragments which do not correspond to the broadsheet. For instance, the document dealing with the language exemplifies the method Dalgarno used at an initial stage for forming artificial words. Thus the Paris manuscripts enable us to fill in some of the details of the development of Dalgarno's early scheme. Further, their very existence gives additional evidence how closely knit the network of scholarly contacts regarding universal language was. Finally, the fact that there are two manuscripts, one dealing with a character, the other with a language, illustrates once more the importance of the relationship between spoken and written language for seventeenth century ideas on universal language.
Probyn, Clive T. 1991. The Social Humanist: The Life and Works of James Harris (1709-1780). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
After the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain Hervás went to Italy and started working on a large encyclopedia of mankind which was published in Italian under the title of Idea dell'Universo from 1778 till 1787. Volume XVII of this encyclopedia is already a catalogue of the known languages of the world, and there are several other linguistic subjects treated by Hervás in this period. Later Hervás published a much more extensive catalogue of the languages of the world in Spanish (Catálogo de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas, y numeración, división, y clases de estas, según la diversidad de sus idiomas y dialectos, 1800-1805, 6 vols.). This work has to be seen in relationship with other anthropological publications by Hervás. His studies on the theory of language are subordinated to the attempt to create a synthesis between religious dogma and the new culture and philosophy which had appeared in the age of Enlightenment. In this context Hervás accepts empiricist methods of cognition. In a treatise on the origin of language which appeared as part of the Italian encyclopedia Hervás had repeated Condillac's hypothesis of two children grown up outside society who would develop language to communicate their needs. It had become clear that this hypothesis could be used to explain human language as created by man out of cries and gestures of a "natural" language. So Hervás had to reconcile this explanation with the biblical report on the creation of language. What helped him to do so was stressing the arbitrary nature of language signs. A work which is still sometimes held to be a precurser of historical-comparative linguistics had been motivated by religious and anthropological convictions and aims.
Hervás discusses four groups of authors who had already compared languages. The first type of author had been looking for universals behind the differences of languages, others had tried to put all languages down to one source or at least to one of the "mother-tongues" of a certain area. According to Hervás the very few treatises written on the history of peoples in the light of their languages are much more useful. But the most beneficial work which has been done in the study of languages is represented by grammars describing their real character. In this context he mentions the material on which his own study relies: the descriptions of foreign languages collected by missionaries. Finally he does not forget the already existing catalogue written by Pallas. Unfortunately Pallas was not really interested in the structure of languages, and this is the reason for Hervás to feel himself completely original.
My main points will be that, when teaching Greek language to boys being native speakers of Greek, the need for a syntax was not felt, the more so when a theory of solecism helped to correct their errors of syntax and the division of work between grammarians and rhetoricians put composition on the side of the latter teachers, who when teaching this subject looked at other aspects than grammatical syntax.
At the end of the 17th century cultural relations between Denmark and England were sparse, but growing. English was not taught in Danish schools or at the University of Copenhagen, so if a Dane wanted to learn English, he had to find a private teacher or go to England to study the language there.
The first three authors mentioned all published their works in the last quarter of the 17th century. They studied theology and became clergymen, but they also acquired a good knowledge of the English language: Gerner actually studied at Oxford, Nyborg acted for some time as a chaplain to a company of Danish mercenaries in England, and Bolling - after having spent some years in the Far East - was taken prisoner by the English at sea, and was kept by them for several months. They all wrote English grammars for Danes, especially concentrating on pronunciation; Bolling: Fuldkommen Engelske Grammatica (1678), Gerner: Ortographia Danica eller det Danske Sproks Skriffverichtighed: Item en Kort Undervjssning om det Engelske Sprogs Pronunciation (1679), Nyborg: Adresse til Det Engelske Sprogs Læssning (1698). The originality of these first Danish works on the English language is especially conspicuous in the contrastive analyses, especially when Danish and English pronunciation are compared.
Bolling also wrote an alphabetically arranged bilingual dictionary: Friderici Bollingii Engelske Dictionarium (1678), the very first English-Danish dictionary to be published. It is a small dictionary based on English-Latin dictionaries, but characterized by the author's common sense and pedagogical insight.
Charles Bertram was an immigrant from England, and must have been bilingual. He was a learned scholar, though not an academic. He left a large library suggesting that he knew many languages. He was for some years a teacher of English at the Naval College of Copenhagen. He wrote two grammars, both in Danish: Rudimenta Grammaticæ Anglicanæ (1750), and Royal English-Danish Grammar (1753), the second being an enlarged version of the first. These grammars are much more comprehensive than those of Bolling, Gerner and Nyborg, and they show real, scholarly insight into the English and Danish languages.
The last writer to be commented on here is Johan Clemens Tode. He was by profession a doctor, became professor of medicine, and Vice-chancellor of the University of Copenhagen, but he had no experience as a language teacher. He had, however, spent much time in England (studying medicine) and had consulted native speakers of English as well as English grammars when writing his works on the English language. He published five works on English pronunciation from 1787-1789, and a grammar in two volumes in 1790: Engelsk-Dansk Grammatik. He praises Bertram's grammars, but as they were out of print, Tode felt confident that his book would be a useful contribution. Apart from his theoretical works on the English language Tode translated most of Tobias Smollett's novels into Danish. These translations were very popular and later translations of Smollett's novels were partly based on Tode's translations.
In my paper I shall discuss in more detail the works mentioned above, whereas my colleague, Inge Kabell, will comment on English in Denmark in the 19th century.
That century was for Denmark a century marked and marred by war; at the beginning, there was a long period (1801-1815) during which the country suffered under incompetent leadership resulting in its siding with Napoleon against Britain, an ill-considered and unhappy decision which had a number of dire consequences: the bombardment of Copenhagen by the British navy, the surrender of the Danish navy to Britain, the bankruptcy of the Danish State, and the loss of Norway to Sweden. So, from being a prosperous neutral country at the turn of the century Denmark ended up as a poor, amputated state with a capital in ruins and no money for an immediate reconstruction of the many buildings - among them the University - which had been destroyed by bombs and fire.
In the middle of the century new political tensions were looming on the horizon with the very intricate problems concerning Schleswig-Holstein and its relations to Denmark and to our southern neighbour; once again the result was war, actually two, in the period 1848-1864, and in the latter Denmark disgracefully suffered defeat and had to surrender a large part of the kingdom to Prussia. As may be expected, these defeats (to Britain and to Prussia) led to feelings of animosity towards the enemies; likewise they gave rise to a growth of patriotism which, regarding literature, language and culture in a broader sense, made poets and scholars begin to seek inspiration in a national past which was more glorious and heroic than the present. At the beginnning, this corresponded very well with the Romantic Movement coming to Denmark by then from abroad, and the period of our past of which we are now so proud and which we have given the name "The Golden Age" actually flourished at a time when the country was as poor as ever - with poets/authors like Hans Christian Andersen, Adam Oehlenschläger and N.F.S.Grundtvig and a scholar like Rasmus Rask. In the university world this interest in the Nordic past continued most of the century and was undoubtedly the main reason why George Stephens actually chose Denmark as his new and second home.
What has been said above provides the background for the lives and activities of T.C. Bruun and George Stephens, the principal themes of my lecture today.
These two men, the first professors of English in Denmark, were not professors in the proper sense of the word, their titles being only honorary ones. One may say that first and foremost they acted as language teachers, and especially Bruun's activities within the subject of English can hardly be termed scholarly, let alone pioneering; he wrote a good, practical grammar of English, and that is all. According to many autobiographies of the time, he seems, however, to have been a popular teacher. As for Stephens, he published one scholarly work, a book in several volumes on the old Runic monuments of Scandinavia, but the system used by him met with severe criticism from his contemporaries, and it was soon totally forgotten. But again as a teacher, he was undoubtedly well liked.
The fact that neither of them can be said to have figured among the outstanding scholars in Denmark in the 19th century does not preclude, however, that both of them were gifted and fascinating personalities who did not seclude themselves from the world around them but partook in the life of the Danish capital - for better or worse!; some people would say that their main importance as the first professors of English was that they prepared the way for Otto Jespersen, our first real professor of this language - and a man who, unlike them, was to reach international renown.
Keichû drew from his knowledge of Sanskrit studies in Japan (Shittan) to analyze the structure of the sounds of Japanese, and he attempted to represent a universal classification of sounds, for which he has been accused of naiveté (Mabuchi 1993: 52). I will argue that Keichû's discussion of sounds, based as it is on place and manner of articulation, represents an attempt at an etic view of language, something which is missing in subsequent scholars of the tradition. An additional point which sets Keichû apart from those who followed is that he was well aware that one arrangement of the Japanese syllabary was based on the order of the Sanskrit alphabet, while subsequent scholars such as Kamo no Mabuchi rejected this origin and attributed the order to divine ancestors (Toyoda 1980: 187).
Keichû's view of language has been termed "esoteric" (Seeley 1991: 118). Keichû stands alone, however, in his attempt to analyze the relation between sound or written representation of sound and spirituality in a universal sense. While he acknowledged that the Japanese people had from antiquity viewed the spoken word as having magical properties (kotodama), he, unlike those who followed, did not view this as a unique feature of language to be found only in the Japanese language. I will argue that in the work of Keichû, one can find the beginnings of an etic analysis of language, while in the tradition as it developed after Keichû, the focus and methods of analysis were strictly emic in nature.
Mabuchi Kazuo. 1993. Gojûon zu no hanashi. Tokyo: Taishûkan shoten.
Miller, Roy Andrew. 1967. The Japanese Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Seeley, Christopher. 1991. A History of Writing in Japan. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Toyoda Kunio. 1980. Nihonzin no kotodama shisô. Tokyo: Kôdansha.
Although we do not know the exact number of the spoken languages at the time, we probably don't exaggerate if we consider the presence of hundreds of tribal languages and dialects side-by-side with several major contact and trade languages of variable degrees of geographical diffusion and prestige, like Araucano (Chile), Aymara (Bolivia and Peru), Quechua (from Chile as far as Equator), Tupi (Brazilian coast), and Guarani (Paraguay), to mention only some of those spoken in the territory which corresponds today to South America. While the former, the local languages, were absolutely secondary to the interests of the colonial powers, religious or terrestrial, and condemned for this reason to extinction rather sooner than later, these other languages were often chosen by both the Administration and the Church as supra-regional and supra-tribal means of communication, and hence were those preferably 'reduced to rules' and the subject of dictionary work by the missionaries. In most instances, before publishing their grammars and glossaries, the missionaries had lived for many years amongst the natives. As a result, it seems reasonable to suggest that, in the task of describing the indigenous languages, the missionaries not only applied their formal linguistic knowledge of Latin grammar, but also the intuition they had developed in the use of these languages. They may well have found different descriptive solutions when facing data from languages typologically different from their own.
This paper examines this hypothesis by comparing the grammars written by three contemporary Jesuits, who described different South American languages: Joseph de Anchieta (1534-1597) in his Arte de grammatica da lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil of 1595, Antonio Ludovico Bertonio (1555-1628), in his Arte Breve dela Lengva Aymara, para introduction del arte grande de la misma lengua of 1603, and Diego de Torres Rubio (1547-1638), with his Arte de la lengua Quichua, of 1619.
Partant de l'expérience d'une récente recherche menée sur les vocabulaires gréco-copto-arabes médiévaux, connus sous le nom de 'scalae', on tentera de dresser le tableau des questions théoriques et pratiques que pose une pareille entreprise et les solutions adoptées: état des langues en jeu, dialectique comparatiste, structure et nomenclature des textes, terminologies spécialisées et champs sémantiques, sédimentation de matériel ancien, traditions locales de lexicographie.
However, the hypothesis is only partially confirmed. Two of three new psychological approaches to speech production and comprehension that rejected the old psychology of representation and association, did not take over the study of linguistic processes in the predicted way. They maintained, each in its own way, the unity of linguistics and psychology of language.
One approach elaborates the act-psychological view of language use, initiated by, for example, Marty and Bühler. Scholars like Mead and Révész develop a proto-pragmatic view of language along these lines, which, however, contributes to linguistics rather than to psycholinguistics, conceived as the study of concrete processes of language use. The new insights are answers to "what"-questions rather than to "how"-questions.
The second approach, the behavioristic one, in fact continues the unity of linguistic entities and processes (Bühler's "Sprachgebilde" and "Sprachhandlungen"), but reconstructs it in a way different from the representationist one. According to, for example, De Laguna and Kantor, the meaning of an utterance retains its process character, be it that the processes thought relevant are of a physical and observable type now, they are no longer the unobservable occurrences in the inner cinema of the mind.
It is only the third approach of non-behavioristic research of speech production and comprehension, partially "armchair" and partially empirical, conducted by, for example, Stählin and Delacroix, which exemplifies the predicted trend of new psycholinguistic research of processes of language use, based upon a recognition of the distinction between linguistic entities and processes and a corresponding division of labour between linguistics and psycholinguistics.
Defined with the help of a proper symbolism able to represent the scope of quantifiers, Ajdukiewicz's new category was, however, curiously ignored by Bar-Hillel and Lambek since neither the bidirectional grammar nor the associative syntactic calculus contains a treatment of quantification. We have to wait for Montague's paper "The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English" (1973) in order for this aspect to be again taken into consideration.
This presentation will first attempt to understand why Bar-Hillel's and Lambek's categorial syntaxes (which appear themselves as improvements of Ajdukiewicz's algebraic formalism and arithmetic treatment) never proposed another analysis of quantification - a topic which is well-known for its difficulty. We will then propose a comparative study of Ajdukiewicz's and Montague's treatment of quantification. In particular, we will evaluate the originality as well as the theoretical contribution of both unidirectional syntax and Montague's universal grammar - with respect to Bar-Hillel's and Lambek's theories.
In the discussion of the question whether the emergence of Chomskyan linguistics should be considered to be a scientific revolution, an argument which is often used against the revolution hypothesis or at least to relativize the importance of the Chomskyan revolution is that the history of Chomskyan linguistics itself is marked by a number of breaks that, though smaller, are not essentially different in character. Thus Kaldewaij (1986) concludes that it would be fairly arbitrary to call only the break due to Chomsky's earliest works a revolution, Matthews (1993) accepts the Chomskyan revolution but stresses the contrast between the first and second Chomskyan schools, and Murray (1994) calls Chomsky a "serial revolutionary".
The underlying idea of a hierarchy of scientific revolutions seems to be supported by Kuhn's (1970) explanation of the concept of disciplinary matrix. For Kuhn, there is a hierarchy of matrices with increasing degrees of specification and decreasing size of the groups of researchers sharing them, which ranges from the entire field of natural science to groups of around 100 people. Transposed to the area of linguistics, at some low level of the hierarchy we may find groups assuming different definitions of government within GB-theory; somewhat higher (in the 1970s) groups with or without the assumption that movement leaves traces; still higher the conflict between GB-theory and LFG and perhaps at the highest level linguists concerned with theory of grammar as opposed to sociolinguistics.
The problem with such a view of a hierarchy is that it obscures the borderline between theoretical and metatheoretical discussion. In the former, the issue is which theory offers the best prospect of explaining a given set of data against a given background. In the latter, the role of the theory itself is called into question. In metatheoretical discussions, rational arguments play only a limited role, because differing belief sets lead one side to deny the validity or relevance of the other side's arguments. After Kuhn (1970) this problem is often referred to as incommensurability effects. I will introduce the concept of the research programme as a basis for explaining incommensurability. It incorporates the set of assumptions that define the role a theory should fulfil and provide a background for explanation. I will show that the difference between Chomsky's (1965) model and the model assumed in newer works such as Chomsky (1986) is a difference between theories within the same research programme. On the other hand, LFG as outlined by Bresnan & Kaplan (1982) constitutes a separate research programme.
Chomsky, Noam (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.).
Chomsky, Noam (1986), Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use, Praeger, Westport (Conn.).
Kaldewaij, Jelle (1986), Structuralisme en transformationeel-generatieve grammatica, Foris, Dordrecht.
Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Edition, Enlarged, Chicago University Press, Chicago (orig. 1962).
Matthews, Peter H. (1993), Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Murray, Stephen O. (1994), Theory Groups and the Study of Language in North America: A Social History, John Benjamins, Amsterdam.