History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences

de James McElvenny

NovoPodcast episode 66: John Joseph on Benveniste and the eternal return of the speaker14 de novembro de 2026 · 20 min

Episódios: 66
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Último episódio: 14 nov 2026

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History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences explores the history of the study of language in its varied social and cultural contexts.

Episódios 66

Podcast episode 66: John Joseph on Benveniste and the eternal return of the speaker
14 de novembro de 202620 min
In this interview, we talk to John Joseph about the elision of the speaking subject in linguistics and Emile Benveniste’s efforts to bring them back. Emile Benveniste in 1947 Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to John Joseph about the elision of the speaking subject in linguistics and Emile Benveniste’s efforts to bring them back.
Emile Benveniste in 1947
Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
Hiphilangsci theme music by Luca Dinu.
References for Episode 66
Benveniste, Émile (1956) “La nature des pronoms,” in For Roman Jakobson, The Hague: Mouton, 34–7 (repr. in Benveniste 1966a, 251–7).
—— (1966a) Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris: Gallimard.
—— (1966b) “La forme et le sens du langage,” in Le langage: Actes du XIIIe congrès des sociétés de philosophie de langue française, Genève, 2–6 août 1966, par la Société romande de philosophie, vol. 2, 29–40 (followed by discussion, 41–7), Neuchâtel: La Baconnière (repr. in Benveniste 1974: 215–29, 230–8).
—— (1969) “Sémiologie de la langue,” Semiotica 1/1–12, 127–35 (repr. in Benveniste 1974: 43–66).
—— (1970) “L’appareil formel de l’énonciation,” Langages 17:12–18 (repr. in Benveniste 1974: 79–88).
—— (1974) Problèmes de linguistique générale 2, Paris: Gallimard.
—— (2012) Dernières leçons: Collège de France, 1968 et 1969, ed. by Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène Fenoglio, Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Gallimard, Seuil. English version, Last Lectures: Collège de France, 1968 and 1969, tr. by John E. Joseph, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
Culioli, Antoine (1990–2018) Pour une linguistique de l’énonciation, 4 vols, vol. 1 (subtitled Opérations et représentations, 1990), vol. 2 (Formalisation et opérations de repérage, 1999), vol. 3 (Domaine notionnel, 1999), Paris: Ophrys; vol. 4, Tours et détours, ed. by Rémi Camus, Limoges: Lambert-Lucas, 2018.
Derrida, Jacques (1967) De la grammatologie, Paris: Minuit (English version, Of Grammatology, tr. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
Ducrot, Oswald (1984) Le dire et le dit, Paris: Minuit.
Eco, Umberto (1975) Trattato di semiotica generale, Milan: Bompiani (English version, A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1976).
Firth, John Rupert (1930) Speech, London: Benn.
Greimas, Algirdas Julien (1966) Sémantique structurale: Recherche de méthode, Paris: Larousse (English version, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, tr. by Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer and Alan R. Velie, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Hénault, Anne (1992) Histoire de la sémiotique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Jakobson, Roman (1957) “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb,” Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Dept. of Slavic Language & Literatures (repr. in Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 2: Word and Language, 386–92, The Hague: Mouton, 1971).
Joseph, John E. (2025) “The Distributed Invention of Enunciation Theory,” Historiographia Linguistica 52/1.1–40.
—— (2026) “Addendum to ‘The Distributed Invention of Enunciation Theory’,” Historiographia Linguistica 53/1.171–6.
Kristeva, Julia (2012) “Préface: Émile Benveniste, un linguiste qui ne dit ni ne cache, mais signifie”, in Benveniste (2012: 13–40, English version, “Preface: Émile Benveniste, a Linguist Who Neither Says Nor Hides, but Signifies, in Benveniste 2019 [2012]: 1–30).
Lacan, Jacques (1958) “Le désir et son interpretation,” seminar of 12 Nov. 1958, https://ecole lacanienne.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1958.11.12.pdf (for published version see Lacan 2013).
—— 2013. Le séminaire, livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation (1958–1959), ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: La Martinière (English version, Desire and Its Interpretation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI, tr. by Bruce Fink, Cambridge & Medford, Mass.: Polity, 2019).
Latour, Bruno (1991) Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essai d’anthropologie symétrique, Paris: La Découverte. (English version, We Have Never Been Modern, tr. by Catherine Porter, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.)
Leskien, August (1876) Die Declination im slavisch-litauischen und germanischen, Leipzig: S. Hirzel.
Lotman, Yuri M. (1990) Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, tr. from the Russian by Ann Shukman, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
—— (1923) “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” supplement to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., pp. 451–510.
Osthoff, Hermann and Karl Brugman (1878) Preface to Morphologische Untersuchungen auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen 1, iii–xx (English tr. by Winfred P. Lehmann in A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics, 197–209, Bloomington & London, Indiana University Press, 1967).
Pāṇini (1898) The Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, tr. into English by Srisa Chandra Vasu, Benares: Sindhu Charan Bose.
Parry, Milman (1971) The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. by Adam Parry, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931–58) Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6 (1931–35) ed. by C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss; vols 7–8 (1958) ed. by A. W. Burks, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Ricœur, Paul: cited in Benveniste (1974 [1966a]: 236).
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1916) Cours de linguistique générale, ed. by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger, Paris & Lausanne: Payot. (2nd ed. 1922; subsequent eds essentially unchanged. English version, Course in General Linguistics, tr. by Wade Baskin, New York: Philosophical Library, 1959.)
—— (2002) Écrits de linguistique générale, ed. by Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler, assisted by Antoinette Weil. Paris: Gallimard (English version, Writings in General Linguistics, tr. by Carole Sanders and Matthew Pires, with the assistance of Peter Figueroa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Sebeok, Thomas A. (2001) Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Whitney, William Dwight (1875) The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science, New York: D. C. Appleton & Co., London: Henry S. King (German version, Leben und Wachsthum der Sprache, tr. by August Leskien, Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1876.)
Podcast episode 65: Micaela Verlato on the Humboldts and American languages
14 de outubro de 202634 min
In this interview, we talk to Micaela Verlato about how the work of Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt on Native American languages contributed to the development of comparative linguistics. Schiller, Wilhelm …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Micaela Verlato about how the work of Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt on Native American languages contributed to the development of comparative linguistics.
Schiller, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, and Goethe in Jena (Wikimedia Commons)
Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 65
Adelung, Johann Christoph and Johann Severin Vater (1806–1817) Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde mit dem Vaterunser als Sprachprobe, 6 vols, Berlin: Vossische Buchhandlung.
Andresen, Julie Tetel (1990) Linguistics in America 1769-1924, London/New York: Routledge.
Boas, Franz (1911) “Introduction,” in Franz Boas (ed.) Handbook of American Indian Languages, Part 1, pp. 1–83. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40, Washington.
Bunzl, Matti (1996) “Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition: From Volksgeist and Nationalcharakter to an Anthropological Concept of Culture,” in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.) Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, pp. 17–78, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Drechsel, Emanuel J. (2024) Wilhelm von Humboldt and Early American Linguistics: Resources and Inspirations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Duponceau, Peter Stephen (1819) “Report of the Corresponding Secretary to the Committee, of his Progress in the Investigation of the General Character and Forms of the Languages of the American Indians”, APS 1819: xvii-xlvi.
––––– (1827) “The Translator’s Preface,” in David Zeisberger, Grammar of the Language of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians, Philadelphia: James Kay, Jun. Reprint New York: AMS Press 1978.
––––– (1838) Mémoire sur le système grammatical des langues de quelques nations indiennes de l’Amérique du Nord, Paris : Pihan de la Forest.
Fortescue, Michael, Marianne Mithun and Nicholas Evans (2017) The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haas, Mary (1969) “Grammar or Lexicon? The American Indian Side of the Question from Duponceau to Powell,” International Journal of American Linguistics 35/3: 239-55. Reprint: “The Problem of Classifying American Indian Languages: From Duponceau to Powell,” in Haas (1978), pp. 130–163.
––––– (1978) Language, Culture, and History: Essays, ed. by Anwar S. Dil, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Humboldt, Alexander von (1808) “Ueber Amerikanische Sprachen: Aus einem Briefe des Herrn Kammerherrn Alexander von Humboldt,” in F. J. Bertuch and J. S. Vater (eds.), Allgemeines Archiv für Ethnographie und Linguistik, vol. 1, pp. 363–6, Weimar: im Verlage des Landes-Industrie-Comptoirs.
––––– (1810) Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de L’Amérique, Paris : F. Schoell.
––––– (1814–1825) Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland. Première Partie. Relation historique, vol. 1, Paris: G. Dufour (1814); vol. 2, Paris: N. Maze (1819); vol. 3, Paris: J. Smith et Gide Fils (1825). Reprint ed. by Hanno Beck, Stuttgart: Brockhaus 1970.
––––– (1993) Briefe aus Amerika: 1799-1804, ed. by Ulrike Moheit, Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1836–1839) Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java, nebst einer Einleitung über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts, 3 vols. Berlin: F. Dümmler.
––––– (1903–1936) Gesammelte Schriften (= GS), ed. by Albert Leitzmann, 17 vols. Berlin: Behr (cited as GS, followed by volume and page numbers).
––––– (1988) On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, tr. by Peter Heath, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
––––– (1994–2022) Schriften zur Sprachwissenschaft (= SSW), established by Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, ed. by Tilman Borsche, Bernhard Hurch, Jürgen Trabant and Gordon Whittaker, 11 vols., Paderborn: Schöningh.
––––– (1994) Mexikanische Grammatik, ed. by Manfred Ringmacher (= SSW III/2), Paderborn: Schöningh.
––––– (1997) Essays on Language, ed. by T. Harden and D. Farrelly, Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang.
––––– (2009) Mittelamerikanische Grammatiken, ed. by Manfred Ringmacher and Ute Tintemann (= SSW III/4), Paderborn: Schöningh.
––––– (2010) Schriften zur Anthropologie der Basken, ed. by Bernhard Hurch (= SSW II/1), Paderborn: Schöningh.
––––– (2011) Südamerikanische Grammatiken, ed. by Manfred Ringmacher and Ute Tintemann (= SSW III/5), Paderborn: Schöningh.
––––– (2012) Baskische Wortstudien und Grammatik, ed. by Bernhard Hurch (= SSW II/2), Paderborn: Schöningh.
––––– (2013) Nordamerikanische Grammatiken, ed. by Micaela Verlato (=SSW III/6), Paderborn: Schöningh.
––––– (2016) Einleitende und vergleichende amerikanische Arbeiten, ed. by Manfred Ringmacher in collaboration with Ute Tintemann (= SSW III/1), Paderborn: Schöningh.
––––– (2017a) Von den Sprachen Amerikas zum allgemeinen Typus der Sprache, ed. by Bettina Lindorfer and Jürgen Trabant (= SSW IV/1), Paderborn: Schöningh.
––––– (2017b) Südsee- und Südostasiatische Sprachen: Vorarbeiten zu “Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java”, ed. by Ulrike Folie, Volker Heeschen and Frank Zimmer (= SSW VI/1), Paderborn: Schöningh.
––––– (2022) Schriften zur Geschichte und Frühgeschichte der Basken und des Baskischen, ed. by Bernhard Hurch (= SSW II/3), Paderborn: Brill Schöningh.
––––– (2023) Online-Edition der Sprachwissenschaftlichen Korrespondenz, Berlin, Version von 15.03.2023, URL: https://wvh-briefe.bbaw.de
Iturrioz Leza, José Luis (2001) “Inkorporation,” in Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible (eds.) Language Typology and Language Universals. An International Handbook (= HSK 20.1), pp. 714–25, Berlin/New York: W. de Gruyter.
Jefferson, Thomas (1955) [1787] Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. by William Peden, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Joseph, John E. (1999) “A Matter of Consequenz: Humboldt, Race and the Genius of the Chinese Language,” Historiographia Linguistica XXVI/1-2: 89–148.
––––– (2017) “The Reception of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Linguistic Writings in the Anglosphere, 1820 to the Present,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 53/1: 7–20.
Mueller-Vollmer (1976), “Wilhelm von Humboldt und der Anfang der amerikanischen Srachwissenschaft: Die Briefe an John Pickering,” in Klaus Hammacher (ed.) Universalismus und Wissenschaft im Werk und Wirken der Brüder Humboldt, pp. 259–334, Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann.
––––– (1990) “Eine Einleitung zuviel. Zur Hermeneutik und Kritik der Editionen von Humboldts Einleitung in die Kawi-Sprache,” in Kodikas/Code. Ars Semeiotica 13/1–2: 3–19.
––––– (1993) Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachwissenschaft: Ein kommentiertes Verzeichnis des sprachwissenschaftlichen Nachlasses, Paderborn: Schöningh.
Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt and Markus Messling (2023), “Wilhelm von Humboldt,” in Eduard N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023 Edition), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/wilhelm-humboldt/. (last access: 24 November 2025)
Ringmacher, Manfred (2001) “Die Klassifizierung der Sprachen in der Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts” in Sylvain Auroux, E. F. K. Koerner, Hans-Josef Niederehe, Kees Versteegh (eds.) History of the Language Sciences: An International Handbook on the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginning to the Present, vol. 2, pp. 1427–36, Berlin/New York: W. de Gruyter.
––––– (2016) “Wilhelm von Humboldt und die amerikanischen Sprachen,” in Humboldt (2016), pp. 1–20.
Schlegel, Friedrich (1808) Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier: Ein Beitrag zur Begründung der Alterthumskunde, Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer.
Solleveld, Floris (2023) “‘Primitive structures’, Polysynthesis, and Peter Stephen du Ponceau” in James McElvenny (ed.), The Limits of Structuralism: Forgotten Sources in the History of Modern Linguistics, pp. 11–50, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vater, Johann Severin (1808) “Proben Amerikanischer Sprachen mit Uebersichten ihres Baues in den beigefügten grammatischen Bemerkungen,” in F. J. Bertuch and J. S. Vater (eds.), Allgemeines Archiv für Ethnographie und Linguistik 1: 341–4.
––––– (1810) Untersuchungen über Amerika’s Bevölkerung aus dem alten Kontinente, Leipzig: Vogel.
Verlato, Micaela (2013) “Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Erforschung der nordamerikanischen Sprachen” in Humboldt (2013), pp. 1–116.
––––– (2015) “The Challenge of Polysynthesis: Wilhelm von Humboldt and Early Comparative Americanist Linguistics” in Language & History 58/2: 82–94.
––––– (2020) “Linguistic Description and Language Philosophy in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s North American Grammars” in Émilie Aussant and Jean-Michel Fortis (eds.) History of Linguistics 2017 : Selected Papers from the 14th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHOLS 14), Paris 28 August – 1 September, pp. 21–33, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Podcast episode 64: Martin Konvička on the Dutch Signific Movement
31 de agosto de 202619 min
In this interview, we talk to Martin Konvička about the Dutch Signific Movement, which adapted the ideas of Lady Welby in the early 20th century. Spreker en hoorder (van Ginneken 1936, 100) Download | Spotify | …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Martin Konvička about the Dutch Signific Movement, which adapted the ideas of Lady Welby in the early 20th century.
Spreker en hoorder (van Ginneken 1936, 100)
Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 64
Primary sources
Brouwer, Luitzen E. J. 1916. “Review of J.I. de Haan – Rechtskundige significa en hare toepassing op de begrippen “aansprakelijk verantwoordelijk, toerekeningsvatbaar”. Groot Nederland 14: 333–336.
Brouwer, Luitzen E. J. 1946. Synopsis of the signific movement in the Netherlands. Prospects of the signific movement. Synthese 5: 201–208.
Brouwer, Luitzen E. J., Frederik van Eeden, Jac. van Ginneken S.J. & Gerrit Mannoury. 1939. Signifische Dialogen. Utrecht: Erven Bijleveld.
Ginneken, Jac. van.1935. Wat is taal? Onze Taaltuin 3: 265–275.
Ginneken, Jac. van. 1936. Het woord. Onze Taaltuin 4/5: 97–109.
Haan, Jacob Israël de. 1912. Nieuwe rechtstaalphilosophie. Rechtsgeleerd Magazijn 31: 480–522.
Haan, Jacob Israël de. 1916a. Wezen en taak der rechtskundige significa. De Gids 80: 281–300.
Haan, Jacob Israël de. 1916b. Rechtskundige significa en hare toepassing op de begrippen:‘aansprakelijk, verantwoordelijk, toerekeningsvatbaar. Amsterdam: W. Versluys.
Eeden, Frederik van. 1975 [1897]. Redekonstige grondslag van verstandhouding. Utrecht: Het Spectrum.
Mannoury, Gerrit. 1934a. Die signifischen Grundlagen der Mathematik. Erkenntnis 4: 288–309.
Mannoury, Gerrit. 1934b. Die signifischen Grundlagen der Mathematik: II. Anwendung der signifischen methode auf die Mathematik. Erkenntnis 4: 317–345.
Mannoury, Gerrit. 1938. Enige opmerkingen over taalgradatie. Synthese. Maandblad voor het Geestesleven van onze Tijd 3: 372–375.
Mannoury, Gerrit. 1947. Handboek der analytische signifika. Deel I. Geschiedenis der begripskritiek. Bussum: F.G. Kroonder.
Mannoury, Gerrit. 1948. Handboek der analytische signifika. Deel II. Hoofdbegrippen en methoden der signifika. Ontogenese en fylogenese van het verstandhoudingsapparaat. Bussum: F.G. Kroonder.
Mannoury, Gerrit. 1949. Signifika. Een inleiding. De Haag: N.K. Servire.
Vuysje, David. 1953. Significs: Its tendency, methodology, and applications. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 80: 223–270.
Welby, Victoria. 1883. Links and Clues. London: Macmillan.
Welby, Victoria. 1896a. Sense, meaning and interpretation (I). Mind 5: 24–37.
Welby, Victoria. 1896b. Sense, meaning and interpretation (II). Mind 5: 186–202.
Welby, Victoria. 1903. What is Meaning? London: Macmillan.
Welby, Victoria. 1911. Significs and Language. London: Macmillan.
Secondary sources
Elffers, Els. 2023. Jacques van Ginneken and Significs. Historiographia Linguistica 50: 227–267.
Foolen, Ad. 1997. Language and emotions: the case of Jac. van Ginneken’s Principes de linguistique psychologique. In Bernard Caron (ed.) Proceedings 16th International Congress of Linguists. Oxford: Pergamon.
Hardwick, Charles S. 1977. Semiotic and Significs: The correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Kirkels, Mireille. 2019. Gerrit Mannoury (1867–1956). Een relativistisch denker. Ph.D. dissertation. Rotterdam: Erasmus University.
Nieuwstad, Jacques van. 1978. De Nederlandse significa: Een documentatie. Kennis en methode 4: 341–362.
Noordegraaf, Jan. 1980 Jac. van Ginneken en de signifische beweging. Was ik er ooit eerder? Een bundel opstellen aangeboden aan Dr. H.A. Wage ed. by S. A. J. Van Faassen. ‘s-Gravenhage: BZZTôH. 41–61.
Petrilli, Susan P. 2009. Signifying and understanding: Reading the works of Victoria Welby and the Signific movement. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Petrilli, Susan P. 2015. Victoria Lady Welby and the Science of Signs: Significs, semiotics, philosophy of language. New Brunswick: Transaction.
Schmitz, H. Walter & James McElvenny. 2022. Victoria Lady Welby. In James McElvenny (ed.) Interviews in the history of linguistics: Volume I. Berlin: Language Science Press. 67–74.
Schmitz, H. Walter. 1984. Searle ist in Mode, Mannoury nicht: Sprech‑ und Hörakt im niederländischen Signifik‑Kreis. Zeitschrift für Semiotik 6: 445–463.
Schmitz, H. Walter. 1985. Significs and language. The articulate form of our expressive and interpretative resources. With an introduction by H. W. Schmitz. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Schmitz, H. Walter. 1990. De Hollandse significa: een reconstructie van de geschiedenis van 1892 tot 1926. Assen: Van Gorcum.
Schmitz, H. Walter. 1992. What moved the signific movement? Concerning the history of significs in the Netherlands. Kodikas/Code 15: 79–90.
Schmitz, H. Walter. 1993. The semantic foundations and implications of signific language gradations. Histoire Épistémologie Langage 15: 53–79.
Podcast episode 63: Kristine Palmieri on comparativism
14 de agosto de 202643 min
In this interview, we talk to Kristine Palmieri about comparativism in Germany of the early 19th century. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube Image credit: Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Kristine Palmieri about comparativism in Germany of the early 19th century.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
Image credit: Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin
References for Episode 63
Primary Sources (selected)
Bopp, Franz. Ausführliches Lehrgebäude der Sanskrita-Sprache. Berlin: Druckerei der Königl. Academie der Wissenschaften, 1827.
Bopp, Franz. Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Gothischen und Deutschen. Vol. 1. Berlin: Druckerei der Königl. Academie der Wissenschaften, 1833.
Creuzer, Friedrich. Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker. Besonders der Griechen. 4 vols. Leipzig und Darmstadt: Carl Wilhelm Leske, 1810–1812.
Hermann, Gottfried. De Mythologia Graecorum antiquissima Dissertatio. Leipzig: Littris Staritzii, 1817.
Hermann, Gottfried. Briefe über Homer und Hesiodus vorzüglich über die Theogonie. Heidelberg: August Oswald’s Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1818.
Jones, William. “The Third Anniversary Discourse, Delivered 2 February 1786: ‘On the
Hindus.’” In The Works of Sir William Jones. Vol. 1. Edited by Anna Maria Jones, 19–34. London: Robinson, 1799. Available online here: https://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil_elib/Jon786__Jones_3rdAnniversaryDiscourse1799.pdf
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. “Sprachwissenschaft: De Originibus Gentium (1700).” In Schriften und Briefe zur Geschichte. Edited by Malte-Ludolf Babin and Gerd van den Heuvel, 354–390. Hannover: Hahn, 2004.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Indische Bibliothek. 3 Vols. Bonn: Eduard Weber, 1823–1830.
Schlegel, Friedrich. Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Ein Beitrag zur Begründung der Alterthumskunde. Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1808.
Schleicher, August. Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft. Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1861.
Whitney, William Dwight. “Strictures on the Views of August Schleicher Respecting the Nature of Language and Kindred Subjects.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 2 (1871): 34–64.
Selected Secondary Sources
Blok, Josine H. “Quests for a Scientific Mythology: F. Creuzer and K. O. Müller on History and Myth.” History and Theory 33, no. 4 (1994): 26–52.
Dunkelgrün, Theodor. The Multiplicity of Scripture: The Making of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Canada, 2024.
Figueira, Dorothy M. “Karoline Von Günderrode’s Sanskrit Epitaph.” Comparative Literature Studies 26, no. 4 (1989): 291–303.
Fornaro, Sotera. “Friedrich Creuzer (1771-1858) à l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.” Flaubert et l’histoire des religions 4 (2010). DOI: 10.4000/flaubert.1212.
Fornaro, Sotera. “Storia della religione antica tra XVIII e XIX secolo, tra Germania e Francia.” In Historiographie de l’antiquité et transferts culturels. Edited by Chryssanthi Avlami, Jaime Alvar, and Mirella Romero Recio, 255–263. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
Koerner, E. F. K. “Pilot and Pirate Disciplines in the Development of Linguistic Science.” Folia Linguistica Historica 1, no. 1 (1980): 213–224.
Koerner, E. F. K. “Models in Linguistic Historiography.” Forum Linguisticum 6, no. 3 (1982): 189–201.
Koerner, E. F. K. “Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Historical-Comparative Grammar.” Lingua e Stile: Rivista di Storia della Lingua Italiana 22, no. 3 (1987): 341–365.
- NOTE: Revised or updated versions of all pieces can be found in: Koerner, E. F. K. Practicing Linguistic Historiography: Selected Essays. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 1989.
Lindner, Thomas. Indogermanische Bibliothek. Band IV/1: Komposition. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015.
Marchand, Suzanne. Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Marchand, Suzanne. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
McElvenny, James. “August Schleicher and Materialism in 19th-Century Linguistics.” Historiographia Linguistica 45, nos. 1–2 (2018): 133–152.
McGetchin, Douglas T. Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism: ancient India’s rebirth in modern Germany. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2009.
Muller, Jean-Claude. “Early stages of language comparison from Sassetti to Sir William Jones.” Kratylos 31 (1986): 1–31.
Palmieri, Kristine. “Philology as a Way of Knowing: Classical Philology in the Reformed German Universities, 1730–1830.” PhD Diss., University of Chicago, 2022. DOI: 10.6082/uchicago.3968. (please contact the author if you want to see the diss. while it is still under embargo).
Palmieri, Kristine. “Berlin as a Philological Site.” In Philological Practices: A Comparative Historical Lexicon. Edited by Glenn W. Most and Martin Kern. Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming.
Paulin, Roger. The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel: Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016.
Pfeiffer, Rudolf. History of Classical Scholarship. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968-1976.
Phillips, Denise. “Francis Bacon and the Germans: Stories from when ‘science’ meant ‘Wissenschaft’.” History of Science 53, no. 4 (2015): 378–394.
Rocher, Rosanne. “Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Sir William Jones, and Comparative Indo-European Linguistics.” In Recherches de Linguistique. Hommages à Maurice Leroy, 173–189. Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1980.
Rocher, Rosanne. “The Knowledge of Sanskrit in Europe until 1800.” In History of the Language Sciences. An international handbook on the evolution of the study of language from the beginnings to the present. Vol. II. Edited by Sylvain Auroux, E. F. K. Koerner, Hans-Josef Niederehe, and Kees Versteegh, 1156–1163. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001.
Sandys, John Edwin. History of Classical Scholarship.3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903–1908.
Schwab, Raymond. Oriental renaissance: Europe’s rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Timpanaro, Sebastiano. “Friedrich Schlegel and the Development of Comparative Linguistics in the 19th Century.” In Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Edited by E. F. Koerner, XI–LVII. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1977.
Trautman, Thomas. “The Lives of Sir William Jones.” In Sir William Jones, 1746 –1794: A Commemoration. Edited by Alexander Murray, 91–122. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Van Hal, Toon. “On ‘the Scythian Theory’: Reconstructing the Outlines of Johannes Elichmann’s (1601/1602–1639) Planned Archaeologia Harmonica.” Language & History 53, no. 2 (2010): 70–80.
Van Hal, Toon. “Protestant Pioneers in Sanskrit Studies in the Early 18th Century: An overlooked chapter in South Indian missionary linguistics.” Historiographia Linguistica 43, nos 1–2 (2016): 99–144.
Van Hal, Toon. “Sprachen, die Geschichte schreiben. Zu Leibniz’ sprachhistorischem Forschungsprogramm und dessen Nachwirkung.” In Einheit der Vernunft und Vielfalt der Sprachen – Beiträge zu Leibnizens Sprachforschung und Zeichentheorie. Edited by Wenchao Li, 177–206. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014.
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Podcast episode 62: Peter Austin
31 de julho de 202642 min
In this interview, we talk to Peter Austin about his career in field linguistics and the history of language documentation in Australia, in particular how the role of Indigenous community members has changed …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Peter Austin about his career in field linguistics and the history of language documentation in Australia, in particular how the role of Indigenous community members has changed over the past 50 years.
Preparing Diyari language materials, Port Augusta, May 2024 (Reggie Warren, Peter Austin, Michelle Warren, late Rene Warren)
Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 62
Austin, Peter K. 2025. Adding value to legacy linguistic fieldnotes: an Australian case study. Submitted to SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics.
Dobrin, Lise , Peter K. Austin and David Nathan. 2009. Dying to be counted: the commodification of endangered languages in documentary linguistics. Language Documentation and Description 6, 37-52.
Dobrin, Lise and Saul Schwartz. 2022. The social lives of linguistic legacy materials. Language Documentation and Description 21, 1-36.
Peter Austin’s website: https://peterkaustin.com/projects/
Podcast episode 61: Adam Schembri on sign language linguistics
14 de julho de 202644 min
In this interview, we talk to Adam Schembri about the nature of sign languages, how they have been studied in the past, and how they are studied today. Image: HamNoSys base hand shapes, from “HamNoSys …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Adam Schembri about the nature of sign languages, how they have been studied in the past, and how they are studied today.
Image: HamNoSys base hand shapes, from “HamNoSys – Representing Sign Language Data in Language
Resources and Language Processing Contexts” by Thomas Hanke
Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 61
Baker, A., van den Bogarde, B., Pfau, R., & Schermer, T. (2016). The Linguistisc of Sign Languages: An introduction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Hill, J.C., Lillo-Martin, D.C. & Wood, S.K. (2025). Sign Languages: Structures and Contexts. London: Routledge.
Johnston, T. & Schembri, A. (2007) Australian Sign Language (Auslan): An introduction to sign language linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kendon, A. (1988) Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia: Cultural, Semiotic and Communicative Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Klima, E.S., Bellugi, U. (1979) The signs of language. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Schembri, A., Fenlon, J., Cormier, K, Johnston, T. (2026) Sign Language Linguistics: Exploring BSL and ASL. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stokoe, W. C. (1960) Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication System of the American Deaf. Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers, Vol. 8, Buffalo, NY: University of Buffalo.
Wilkinson, E. & Morford, J.P (2024). Understanding Signed Languages. London: Routledge.
Adam Schembri’s website: https://sites.google.com/view/adamcschembri/home
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:09] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:12] Today we’re in Birmingham, England, talking to Adam Schembri, who’s Professor of Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. [00:19] Adam is, among other things, an expert on sign language linguistics. [00:24] He’s co-author, along with Trevor Johnston, of the 2007 book Australian Sign Language: An Introduction to Sign Language Linguistics, which can claim to be the standard work on Auslan, and co-author of Sign Language Linguistics, which is coming out in June 2026 with Cambridge University Press. [00:45]
AS: They’ve just told us it’s coming out in July. [00:47]
JMc: Oh, it’s coming out in July, OK. [00:49] So in this interview, Adam’s going to tell us about how sign languages fit into the broader theoretical landscape of linguistics. [00:57] So to get us started, can you tell us what sign languages are, what are their defining characteristics, and why do we consider them a kind of language? [01:06] I mean, etymologically, our word ‘language’ is derived from a word meaning ‘tongue’, which suggests to me that we think of speech, sounds that we make with our mouths and that we hear with our ears, as being the essential characteristic of language. But obviously modality is not the key thing if sign languages are also languages, so what’s going on there? [01:27]
AS: Yeah, I mean, I think for a long time, if you look at the history of linguistics, sign languages were certainly dismissed. [01:33] So, you know, some of the big names in early 20th century linguistics, Bloomfield and other people, they didn’t consider sign languages to be languages. [01:42] Actually, though, if we go back a bit further in time in the 19th century, there are psychologists and others who did recognize sign languages as languages. [01:51] In particular, there are a couple of books written by scholars who worked on topics related to educating Deaf children who recognized sign languages as languages. [02:00] I mean, I think what I find really interesting is, I think sign languages are, you know, used by a tiny minority of the world’s population, and yet the implications for linguistics are enormous because they have really, I think, very subtly reshaped the whole focus of the field. [02:21] So I think there’s a lot more interest today in spoken language as multimodal systems, as speech and gesture packaging, and I think that’s probably come about because of the influence of sign languages. [02:34] But modern sign language linguistics, we generally consider an American researcher, William Stokoe, to be the key figure in the history of modern sign language linguistics. [02:48] There was earlier work by a Dutch researcher called Tervoort, which anticipated the work of Stokoe’s, but it was really Stokoe that was most influential because he took kind of a standard structuralist linguistic perspective and applied it to American Sign Language. [03:04] It must be said, he was working at Gallaudet College, which is a tertiary institution in the United States, rather unique in being a university or college that was established for Deaf people specifically. [03:18] So he was working there, and ironically, he was working there with Deaf and hearing academics, all of whom dismissed his interest in American Sign Language. [03:26] They thought this was just a kind of slang, broken English kind of way of speaking, so very similar to the attitudes that existed to African American Vernacular English at the time. [03:36] They kind of just thought of it as a broken form of English, but he learned to sign using what we would call signed English, so sign-supported English, so he would speak in English and he would support his spoken English with key signs. Right? [03:50] That was what he was told to do as a method of instruction, but often the Deaf students wouldn’t understand him, and he would see them translating for each other in class, and he’d go, “What’s going on there?” Like, “They’re communicating more effectively with each other than I am with them.” Right? [04:04] “I want to understand what they’re doing.” [04:06] And so he published a work which basically applied the minimal pair analysis to American Sign Language and showed that American Sign Language, the signs of American Sign Language were composed of smaller parts, right? [04:20] Sublexical elements. [04:22] He called them by fancy Latin names that we don’t want to use today, but generally in the field, they were known, they’re now known as handshape, location and movement, and he saw that the signs that the Deaf students were using at Gallaudet College were all combinations and recombinations of a set of handshapes, movements and locations. [04:44] And so by applying that analysis, he was able to demonstrate that signs weren’t, American Sign Language signs weren’t just holistic, imagistic symbols, but were created from sublexical components in the same way that spoken language words are. [05:02]
JMc: So is the key thing duality of patterning. [05:04]
AS: So it was the duality of patterning, yes. [05:06] I mean, it’s a bit more complicated than that, because we’ve realized actually the duality of patterning thing is a bit problematic for sign languages. [05:13] Many of these sublexical elements actually are meaningful as well, but that came later, and Stokoe actually revised his thinking on this much later. [05:23] But initially he was able to demonstrate in a 1960 publication, which didn’t have a huge impact at the time… [05:30] I think, kind of what really happened a bit later was two other researchers, Edward Klima, who was a linguist in San Diego and his partner, Ursula Bellugi, who was a psycholinguist, neuroscientist, they got really interested in this topic from about the late ’60s because they were interested in, if children have some kind of innate tendency to learn languages, what happens in the case of sign languages? [06:00] So they were really interested in this, and they set up a lab and some of the first sign language researchers, both Deaf and hearing, were trained in that lab and learned their craft there, and they published a book called The Signs of Language in 1979. [06:15] So like nearly 20 years after Stokoe, but this, it was the ’70s where sign language linguistics really took off in the United States, and then it began to spread to other parts of the world, including to Europe, and like the first international sign language research conference was, was in, I think in Stockholm in 1979, and so then it gradually spread from there. [06:34] And meanwhile, you know, there were these researchers like Adam Kendon and others, David McNeill, doing studies on co-speech gesture, and I think the two areas started to come together in the 1990s when people started to think about, “Okay, so how much are gestures like signs and how much are, how much signing can be equated with gestures?” [06:55] And I think both of the fields have fed off each other, but in linguistics, there’s still a lot of focus… [07:00] Like if you look at typology, for example, there’s still a huge focus only on spoken languages, right? [07:06] That’s partly our fault as sign language researchers. [07:09] We’re not very good at communicating with spoken language researchers or indeed at publishing things that are accessible to spoken language researchers. [07:16] It’s a two-way thing, right? [07:17] So sign, spoken language linguists, some part, you often don’t pay enough attention to the work that we’re doing or see implications in our work for their understanding of spoken languages either. [07:29] It’s clear it’s a language because it has both the structure of language and the use and the function of language, so it’s used in all the same ways. [07:39] Sign languages are used in all the same ways that spoken languages are. [07:42] You have sign language poetry, you have sign language… you can pun in a sign language. [07:47] You know, I mean, there’s so many ways that they are the same, right? [07:52] But the key difference is the visual modality, and there’s a lot of iconicity in spoken languages, but there’s a lot more, obviously, I will stand by this — even though there are people in my very department who have explored this issue, like Marcus Perlman and Bodo Winter, who are in my department here at Birmingham and have explored the iconicity of spoken languages and revealed that there’s a lot more iconicity in spoken languages than people realise — but I would still maintain iconicity is a much stronger driving factor in sign languages. [08:23]
JMc: So just on the structural level, so you mentioned that typologists, linguistic typologists are generally only interested in spoken languages. [08:31]
AS: Yeah, that’s often because the data is more easily accessible to them, to be honest. [08:35]
JMc: But are there direct equivalents between the sort of formal properties of spoken languages and the formal properties of sign languages? [08:42]
AS: Yeah, I mean, you can talk about sublexical structure, you can talk about a phonology of sign languages. [08:48] We’ve pretty much accepted that term, even though, as you point out, ‘language’ is based on the word for tongue, ‘phonology’ based on the word for sound. [08:55] We’ve been talking about the phonology of sign languages for the last 40 years, right? 40 or 50 years. [09:01]
JMc: What does that mean? [09:02]
AS: It means research into how the sublexical components of signs work: the hand shapes, the locations, the movements. [09:11] We now think of signs as being composed of five sublexical features: hand shape, hand orientation, location and movement. [09:20] So signs can contrast in all of those features, and there’s an additional fifth factor, which is called non-manual features, which involve things like facial expressions, or mouth gestures, or mouthing of English words, for example, which often co-occurs with signing. [09:35] All of these things can have meaningful, have a contrastive role to play in sign languages as well. [09:39]
JMc: Yeah, and you can parametrize them in the same way that you can parametrize like places of articulation. [09:44]
AS: That’s right. Right. [09:45] So it’s very similar. [09:46] It really is actually a lot more similar than you think, because if you think about it, speech is based on gestures of the oral tract, right? [09:53] So you have a place of articulation that’s equivalent to a location for a sign. [09:57] You have a manner of articulation that’s equivalent to the movement of the hand. [10:01] You have articulators. Are they the lips? Are they the tongue? And that’s equivalent to the handshapes, right? [10:06] So it’s a lot more similar when you think about speech as based on physical gestures. [10:12] Of course, we listen to the result of those gestures, but we also look at each other’s articulators and we use mouthing, you know, to assist our comprehension in face-to-face communication. [10:26]
JMc: Well, I guess it can also override auditory signals, like the McGurk effect, is it called? [10:30]
AS: Exactly. So we know that both things are really, really important. [10:33] There is actually studies showing that hearing signers like myself use more co-speech gesture, and in fact, our signing interferes with our co-speech gesture. [10:44] So we’ll often do a co-speech sign when we’re speaking. [10:48] Even to non-signing hearing people, that still happens. [10:52] Really interesting stuff about, we know now that bilinguals are actively suppressing one of their languages while using the other, because we know that with bimodal bilinguals like me, people who have a spoken language and a sign language, we don’t have to suppress the sign language as much, so it tends to come out. [11:11] Of course, you can’t do that if you’re a spoken language bilingual. [11:14] You can’t really simultaneously articulate words of two languages, but we know from bimodal bilinguals that actually you’re busy suppressing your other language while you’re speaking the one that you’re using at the time. [11:27] Anyway, so there’s also a morphology, so we can talk about, you know, derivational and inflectional processes in sign languages. [11:35] Obviously there’s a syntax, because you’ve got a vocabulary and there are ways to combine those elements to create a clause. [11:41]
JMc: So can we just talk about the morphology? How does that work? [11:45]
AS: Well, okay. So you get examples in sign languages of what many linguists would consider inflection, involve, for example, modifying verb signs to indicate subject and object arguments. [11:58] So there’s a subset of verb signs, which are called, they’re known by various names: agreement verbs, indicating verbs, directional verbs. [12:06] It depends on your theoretical framework, which what you call them. [12:09] I call them indicating verbs because they literally point to locations associated with the subject and the object argument. [12:16] Now, you’re sitting in front of me, James. So I can take the sign for ‘ask’, for example, and I can start the sign close to you and move it towards my chest, and that would mean in BSL, ‘You ask me’, and I do the reverse, you know, from me towards you, and that means ‘I ask you’, right? [12:36] And if there are two third-person arguments, neither you nor me, you know, I might set them up on the right and the left, and I would associate. [12:43] So I might say, you know, Mary on the right and John on the left, and so I’d fingerspell that name, point to the right, fingerspell John, point to the left, and then I can move the sign ASK from Mary to John, and that would mean ‘Mary asked John,’ right? [12:59] So this is considered… That’s why they’re sometimes called agreement verbs. [13:02] It’s considered a kind of person agreement marking. [13:05] It’s certainly… I don’t know whether you want to call it agreement. [13:08] Not all of us agree on whether it should be called agreement, but certainly it is flagging arguments, because it’s telling you who the subject and object arguments of the verb are. [13:18]
JMc: But is there a formal distinction in how the signs are produced between what you’re calling morphology and what you might call syntax, or is it those signs correspond to what is called verbal agreement in a spoken language, and so that’s why you consider it morphology? [13:33]
AS: Yes. Well, it becomes more syntactic if you have the arguments actually realized and to create the clause. [13:39] So obviously when you’ve got a clause with just a verb, you know, not much syntax going on because there’s just a single element, right? [13:46] But you can specify the arguments, or you can put in noun phrases that refer to the arguments and then get, you know, a fuller kind of clause with, with argument structure. [13:56] There’s a lot of research showing that, well, British Sign Language and Auslan are strongly pro-drop languages. [14:03] So there’s a lot, you know, in a narrative, for example, we’ve done studies of narratives, and you’ll find a majority of clauses are verb-only, but if you do have a transitive verb and you have two arguments, it tends to be SVO, right? [14:18] We suspect this is the influence of the surrounding spoken language, but you do find in sign languages that, like spoken languages, the word orders tend to be predominantly SOV or SVO, but you can get more flexibility in the argument structure. [14:33] So you can get, you know, other types of combinations, but sometimes they might be signalled in some way. [14:39] So for example, if you want to topicalize the object and move it to the front and have something like OSV, you might mark the object, because it’s not in an expected word order, with a brow raise, for example, or there might be a slight pause after the object. [14:53] So there are ways of signalling that you have topicalized that element. [14:57] So these are examples of the syntax of sign languages. OK. [15:01]
JMc: OK, and I guess that’s sort of equivalent to intonation in spoken language. [15:04]
AS: Yes. OK. Yeah. Very similar to the intonation patterns of spoken language. Yeah. [15:07]
JMc: OK. And when you talk about things like word order, you’re talking about the temporal order in which
Podcast episode 60: Penny Lee
30 de abril de 202625 min
In this interview, we talk to Penny Lee about her research into Whorf and linguistic relativity. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube Photo by Mike Clarke. Note: On reviewing the recording, Penny Lee …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Penny Lee about her research into Whorf and linguistic relativity.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
Photo by Mike Clarke.
Note: On reviewing the recording, Penny Lee noticed a slip of the tongue in her reference to a new Afterword in the 2012 edition of Whorf’s Language, Thought and Reality. This edition, in fact, features a new Foreword by Stephen C. Levinson.
References for Episode 60
Alford, Danny K. (Moonhawk). 1981. ‘Is Whorf’s relativity Einstein’s relativity?’. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 7.13-26.
Bohm, David. 1980. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Capra, Fritjof. 1975. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, Bungay, Suffolk: Fontana/Collins.
Carroll, John B. 1953. The Study of Language: A Survey of Linguistics and Related Disciplines in America. Cambridge. Harvard University Press.
Carroll, John B. and Casagrande, Joseph B. 1958. ”The function of language classifications in behavior”. In E. E. Macoby et al. (eds), Readings in Social Psychology. New York: Hold, Rinehart and Winston, 18-31.
Chase, Stuart. 1938. The Tyranny of Words. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.
Evans, Nicholas. 2010. Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us. Wiley-Blackwell.
Harrison, K. David. 2007. When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hoijer, Harry. (Ed.) 1954. Language in Culture: Conference on the interrelations of language and other aspects of culture. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Leavitt, John. 2011. Linguistic Relativities: Language Diversity and Modern Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lee, Penny. 1996. The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction. Studies in the History of the Language Sciences. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Lee, Penny. When is ‘Linguistic Relativity’ Whorf’s Linguistic Relativity? In Pütz, Martin & Marjolijn Verspoor (eds) Explorations in Linguistic Relativity. Amsterdam Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, Series IV Current Issues in Linguistic Theory Vol. 199. John Benjamins: Amsterdam & Philadelphia. (45-68).
Lucy, John A. 1992a. Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lucy, John A. 1992b. Language Diversity and Thought: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. (Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language 12). Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Lucy, John A and Gaskins Suzanne. 2001. Grammatical Categories and the Development of Classification Preferences: A Comparative Approach. In: Bowerman, Melissa and Levinson Stephen. (Eds.) Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Language Culture and Cognition. Cambridge University Press (257-283).
Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Harcourt Brace and World: New York.
Sapir, Edward. 1949 Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality. (Ed.) by David G. Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California.
Slobin, Dan. 1996. ‘From “Thought and Language” to “Thinking for Speaking”. In Gumperz, John and Levinson, Stephen C. Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (70-96).
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1936. ’The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi’. Reprinted in Language, Thought and Reality. (65-71).
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1979. Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale Univ. Library.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 2012 [2nd Edition]. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Ed. by John B. Carroll, Stephen C. Levinson and Penny Lee. Cambridge Ma.: MIT Press. [LTR]
Podcast episode 59: Anna Wierzbicka
14 de abril de 202637 min
In this interview, we talk to Anna Wierzbicka about her life and research into semantics. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 59 Apresjan, Juri. 2000. Systematic Lexicography …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Anna Wierzbicka about her life and research into semantics.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 59
Apresjan, Juri. 2000. Systematic Lexicography, trans. by Kevin Windle. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Bromhead, Helen. 2009. Reign of Truth and Faith: Epistemic Expressions in 16th and 17th Century English. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Bromhead, Helen. 2018. Landscape and Culture – Cross-linguistic Perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Goddard, Cliff (Ed.) 2018a. Minimal English for a Global World: Improved Communication Using Fewer Words. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Goddard, Cliff, and Anna Wierzbicka. 2025. ‘Anchoring Anthropological Categories in Simple, Translatable Words: The Case of “Art” and “Religion”’. Current Anthropology 66(6). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/739001
Levisen, Carsten. 2024. Postcolonial Semantics: Meaning and Metalanguage in a Multipolar World. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111337432
Mel’cuk, Igor. 2012. Semantics: From Meaning to Text. Amsterdam: Benjamins
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1996. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2001. What did Jesus mean? Explaining the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables in Simple and Universal Human Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2014. Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2020. ‘Seven essential messages for the time of the coronavirus’. Russian Journal of Linguistics 24(2): 253–258.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2020. ‘Essential messages for our time’. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/essential-messages-for-our-time/
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2025. The Nicene Creed in Minimal English: Why Christianity Needs Universal Human Concepts. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan
Podcast episode 58: Ryan Nefdt on linguistic relativity and AI
31 de março de 202634 min
In this interview, we talk to Ryan Nefdt about the light latest work in “artificial intelligence” can cast on questions of linguistic relativity. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube Image: Cover of …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Ryan Nefdt about the light latest work in “artificial intelligence” can cast on questions of linguistic relativity.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
Image: Cover of Linguistic Relativity by Pelletier and Nefdt (Oxford University Press)
References for Episode 58
Bickerton, D. (2014). More than nature needs: Language, mind, and evolution. Harvard University Press.
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, syntax, and semantics. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 61–79). MIT Press.
Chemla, E., & Nefdt, R. M. (2024). No such thing as a general learner: Language models and their dual optimization. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/008355
Dennett, D. C. (1996). Kinds of minds: Towards an understanding of consciousness. Basic Books.
Haspelmath, M. (2010). Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies. Language, 86(3), 663–687. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lan.2010.0021
Huh, M., Cheung, B., Wang, T., & Isola, P. (2024). The platonic representation hypothesis. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2405.07987
Kallini, J., Papadimitriou, I., Futrell, R., Mahowald, K., & Potts, C. (2024). Mission: Impossible language models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 14691–14714). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.787
Mitchell, J., & Bowers, J. (2020). Priorless recurrent networks learn curiously. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 5147–5158). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Moro, A., Greco, M., & Cappa, S. F. (2023). Large languages, impossible languages and human brains. Cortex, 167, 82–85.
Nefdt, R. (2023). Language, science, and structure: A journey into philosophy of linguistics. Oxford University Press.
Nefdt, R. (2024). The philosophy of theoretical linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Pelletier, F. J., & Nefdt, R. (2025). Linguistic relativity: An essential guide to past debates and future prospects. Oxford University Press.
Pullum, G. K. (1989). The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 6, 579–588. (Reprinted in The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax and other irreverent essays on the study of language, 1991, University of Chicago Press.)
Reines, M., & Prinz, J. (2009). Reviving Whorf: The return of linguistic relativity. Philosophy Compass, 4, 1022–1032.
Podcast episode 57: Brigitte Nerlich
14 de março de 202623 min
In this interview, we talk to Brigitte Nerlich about her career in the history of linguistics and the public understanding of science Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube Image from Brigitte Nerlich …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Brigitte Nerlich about her career in the history of linguistics and the public understanding of science

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
Image from Brigitte Nerlich
References for Episode 57
Bréal, M. (1897). Essai de Sémantique: Science des significations. Paris: Hachette.
Gardiner, A. H. (1932). The Theory of Speech and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harris, R. (1980). The Language-Makers. London: Duckworth.
Harris, R. (1981). The Language Myth. London: Duckworth.
Harris, R. (1990). Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein: How to play games with words. London: Psychology Press.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Nerlich, B. (1983). Le même et l’autre. Le problème de l’identité en linguistique chez Saussure et Wittgenstein. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 37, 13-34.
Nerlich, B. (1986). La linguistique de Philipp Wegener. Une théorie du dialogue. DRLAV. Revue de Linguistique 34-35, 301-315.

Nerlich, B. (1986). La pragmatique: Tradition ou révolution dans l’histoire de la linguistique française?. Frankfurt/Bern/New York: Verlag Peter Lang.
Nerlich, B. (1990). Change in Language: Whitney, Bréal and Wegener. London: Routledge.
Nerlich, B. (1992). Semantic Theories in Europe, 1830-1930. From etymology to contextuality. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Nerlich, B. (1998). La métaphore et le métonymie: Aux sources rhétoriques des théories sémantiques modernes. Sémiotiques 14, 143-170.
Nerlich, B. and Clarke, D. D. (1996). Language, Action, and Context: The early history of pragmatics in Europe and America, 1780-1930. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Nerlich, B., & Clarke, D. D. (2001). Mind, meaning and metaphor: The philosophy and psychology of metaphor in 19th-century Germany. History of the Human Sciences, 14(2), 39-61.
Nerlich, B. and Clarke, D. D. (2007). Cognitive linguistics and the history of linguistics. In: The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, edited by D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Searle, J. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wegener, P. (1885). Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens. Halle: Niemeyer.
Wunderli, P. (1981). Saussure-Studien: Exegetische und wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zum Werk von F. de Saussure. Tübingen: Günter Narr.
Podcast episode 56: Nick Enfield on linguistic signs and concepts
28 de fevereiro de 202634 min
In this interview, we talk to Nick Enfield about his research into the connections between linguistic signs and concepts. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube Image from Nick Enfield’s website …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Nick Enfield about his research into the connections between linguistic signs and concepts.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
Image from Nick Enfield’s website
References for Episode 56
Dunbar, R. I. M. (2004). “Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective”, Review of General Psychology, 8(2): 100-110. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1037/1089-2680.8.2.100
Enfield, Nick J. (2022), “Linguistic concepts are self-generating choice architectures”, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 378: 20210352. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0352
Enfield, N. J. (2026). “The enchronic envelope”, Psychological Review, 133(2): 296–314. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000553
Kockelman, Paul. (2005). “The semiotic stance”, Semiotica, vol. 2005(157): 233-304. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.2005.2005.157.1-4.233
Langacker, Ronald W. (1987), Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, 2 vols. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Makkreel, Rudolf (2021), “Wilhelm Dilthey”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/dilthey/
Ogden, Charles Kay, and Ivor Armstrong Richards (1956 [1923]), The Meaning of Meaning, London: Kegan Paul.
Tomasello, Michael. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7551.001.0001
Podcast episode 55: Janette Friedrich
14 de fevereiro de 202636 min
In this interview, we talk to Janette Friedrich about her research and career. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 55 Bühler, Karl ([1934] 2009). Théorie du langage. La fonction …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Janette Friedrich about her research and career.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 55
Bühler, Karl ([1934] 2009). Théorie du langage. La fonction représentationnelle du langage, préface de Jacques Bouveresse, présentation de Janette Friedrich, traduction par Didier Samain. Marseille: Agone.
Friedrich, Janette (1993). Der Gehalt der Sprachform. Paradigmen von Bachtin bis Vygotskij. Berlin : Akademie-Verlag,
Friedrich, Janette (2010). Lev Vygotski : médiation, apprentissage et développement. Une lecture philosophique et épistémologique, 2e édition. Carnets des sciences de l’éducation, FPSE, Université de Genève. (brasilianische Übersetzung : Lev Vigotski : Mediação, aprendizagem e desenvolvimento. Uma leitura filosófica e epistemológica. Campinas SP Brasil : Mercado Letras, 2012)
Friedrich, J. (Hrsg.) (2018). Karl Bühlers Krise der Psychologie. Positionen, Bezüge und Kontroversen im Wien der 1920er/30er Jahre. Wien [u.a.]: Springer
Friedrich, J. (Hrsg.) (2022). Karl Bühler und das Wiener Psychologische Institut. Dokumente und Fundstücke, Bühleriana, Bd. 1. Lausanne: sdvig. https://karlbuehler.org/pub-216558
Friedrich, Janette & Cesalli, Laurent (éds.) (2014). Anton Marty & Karl Bühler – Between Mind and Language – Zwischen Denken und Sprache – Entre pensée et langage. Basel: Schwabe Verlag
Vygotskij, Lev S. ([1934] 2002). Denken und Sprechen. Psychologische Untersuchungen. Weinheim, Basel: Beltz.
Transcript
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:29] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:33] Today we’re talking to Janette Friedrich, who has a fascinating international career in philosophy and the history of the human sciences, above all psychology and linguistics, [00:43] and as with a few of our recent interviews, we’re going to do this discussion in German. [00:48] Janette, willkommen im Podcast. [00:50] Kannst du uns erzählen, womit es alles angefangen hat? [00:53] Du bist also in der Nähe von Potsdam aufgewachsen und du hast dann in Russland Philosophie studiert. [01:01]
JF: Ja. Ja, danke James für die Einladung zu diesem Podcast. [01:06] Ja, ja, eigentlich ist es eine lange Geschichte. [01:09] Ich bin in Potsdam geboren und habe, bin dann aber in Ostberlin aufgewachsen und habe Philosophie studiert. [01:16] Damit hat es eigentlich angefangen. [01:18] Ich habe Philosophie studiert von 1979 bis 1984 in der ehemaligen Sowjetunion in Rostow am Don. [01:29] Warum Philosophie? [01:30] Ich wusste nicht so genau, was ich eigentlich studieren wollte. [01:34] Ich habe mich immer interessiert für Literatur, Theater. [01:38] Wir haben an der Schule auch Theater gespielt. [01:40] Dann hatte ich meine Jahresarbeit geschrieben zu Bertolt Brecht. [01:43] Der hatte damals Lehrstücke geschrieben. [01:46] Ja, und da merkte ich, dass ich Spaß habe am Argumentieren und am Denken. [01:52] Man könnte fast sagen am reinen Denken. [01:54] Ja, und da hatte ich dazu noch Freunde, die Philosophie studiert hatten, auch in der Sowjetunion. [02:01] Und da habe ich mir gesagt, warum nicht Philosophie? [02:05]
JMc: Aber wie hast du deinen Studienplatz in Russland ergattert oder in der Sowjetunion? [02:08]
JF: Ja, das ist eine interessante Geschichte, weil ich wollte nicht nur Philosophie studieren… [02:15] Ich wollte, dass… der zweite Wunsch bei mir. [02:17] Ich wollte nicht in der DDR studieren, sondern ich wollte raus. [02:20] Ich wollte woanders hin. [02:21] Die DDR war klein, die kannte man. [02:24] Und ja, da habe ich gesagt, das ist ein Abenteuer. [02:26] Warum nicht in die Sowjetunion? [02:29] Und in der DDR war ja alles sehr zentralisiert gewesen. [02:33] Das heißt, jede Erweiterte Oberschule, EOS, das, was man Gymnasium nennt hier, hatte sowas wie eine Studienplatzliste. [02:44] Und auf dieser Studienplatzliste standen bestimmte Fachrichtungen, die man sich auswählen konnte und wofür man sich bewerben konnte. [02:52] Ja, aber in meiner Schule gab es leider nur Medizin, Zahnmedizin und Erdöl. [02:58] Aber da mein Kriterium ja war, ich möchte unbedingt raus, habe ich mir gesagt, OK, dann bewirbst du dich für Erdöl. [03:04] Also habe ich mich für Erdöl beworben und bin dann eingeladen worden in Halle an der Saale zum Aufnahmegespräch und da saß dann eine etwas verdutzte Aufnahmekommission und sagte zu mir, na ja, Erdöl, das ist Aserbaidschan, das ist Baku, [03:20] da schicken wir nicht so gerne junge Frauen hin. [03:22] Außerdem müssen sie schweißen lernen, wollen sie nicht was anderes studieren. [03:27] Na ja, und so bin ich dann Philosophin geworden. [03:30] Ich habe gesagt, ja, dann nehme ich gerne die Fachrichtung Philosophie. [03:34]
JMc: OK. [03:35]
JF: Ja, und dann ging es fünf Jahre zum Studium in die Sowjetunion [03:40] und wir dachten natürlich, es geht nach Moskau oder nach Petersburg, [03:45] damals hieß es noch Leningrad. [03:48] Aber da war auch alles zentralisiert organisiert [03:52] und wir wurden also alle zentral verteilt nach Rostow am Don. [03:56] Ich musste dann erst mal auf der Landkarte nachschauen, wo sich diese Stadt eigentlich befindet. [04:01] Das ist eine Ein-Millionen-Stadt, vielleicht jetzt sogar schon mehr. [04:05] Also damals war es eine Ein-Millionen-Stadt. [04:07] Sie befindet sich südlich von Moskau, 1000 Kilometer und heißt eigentlich [04:12] das Tor zum Kaukasus, weil es immer über Rostow geht, [04:15] wenn man entweder ans Schwarze Meer, nach Sotschi oder in den Kaukasus will. [04:19] Ja, und das war eine sehr bunte Stadt, [04:23] weil viele unserer Studienkollegen kamen aus dem Kaukasus [04:26] und Rostow hatte einen großen armenischen Stadtteil gehabt, [04:32] also viel mit verschiedenen Kulturen und Völkern zu tun gehabt. [04:38] Ja, und dann habe ich dort Philosophie studiert [04:41] und das erwies sich dann im Nachhinein als interessanter, [04:45] als wenn ich nach Moskau gekommen wäre oder nach Leningrad. [04:49] Warum? Aber das haben wir auch später gemerkt, [04:52] weil ein Teil, ein kleiner Teil unserer Lehrer dort [04:57] eigentlich nach Rostow geschickt wurde, um dort zu arbeiten, [05:01] weil sie nicht so ganz auf der offiziellen Marxismus-Leninismus-Linie lag [05:05] und eigentlich so etwas wie einen kritischen Marxismus, [05:09] einen kritischen Materialismus vertreten haben. [05:12] Deshalb wurde es dort dann interessant für uns. [05:15] Man fragt sich immer, was wurde dort eigentlich gelehrt [05:20] in der Sowjetunion, wenn man Philosophie studiert. [05:23] Wir haben beziehungsweise die Geschichte der Philosophie gehabt, [05:26] gute Spezialisten in der Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie. [05:30] Dann hatten wir Wissenschaftsphilosophie, Geschichtsphilosophie. [05:34] Natürlich hat die Geschichte der Philosophie in den 20er Jahren aufgehört, [05:38] weil das alles, was danach kam, als bürgerliche Philosophie zählte [05:42] und das wurde nicht gelehrt. [05:44] Was aber interessant war, war dieser schon genannte kritische Marxismus oder kritische Materialismus. [05:53] Ein Teil unserer Lehrer waren Schüler von Ewald Wassiljewitsch Iljenkow. [06:00] Den Namen hat man vielleicht manchmal schon gehört. [06:03] Das war, wie gesagt, ein sowjetrussischer Philosoph, [06:07] der sozusagen versucht hat, einen intelligenten Marxismus zu entwickeln [06:13] aufbauend auf einer Spinoza- und Hegel-Lektüre. [06:16] Das war, was er dann so eine kritische Marx-Lektüre nannte. [06:21] Ja, es gibt sogar Übersetzungen von Iljenkow ins Deutsche. [06:29] Schon 1979 hat man seine Dialektik des Abstrakten und Konkreten im Kapital von Karl Marx übersetzt. [06:36] Ja, und 1994 ist ein kleiner Sammelband, Dialektik des Ideellen, herausgekommen von Iljenkow. [06:43] Und diese Dialektik des Ideellen, das ist interessant, [06:47] weil dort beginnt dann eigentlich mein Interesse, [06:50] was mich eigentlich mein ganzes Leben lang nicht mehr losgelassen hat. [06:54] Der Iljenkow hatte so eine ähnliche Idee, wie man sie auch bei Popper findet, [06:59] von der dritten Welt, die Existenz einer dritten Welt. [07:03] Also eine Welt der objektiven geistigen Inhalte, [07:07] die sozusagen losgelöst vom Individuum sind. [07:10] Also soweit das Individuum etwas schafft, [07:13] wird es zu Ideen, die dann sozusagen unabhängig von ihm existieren [07:18] und dann auch unterschiedlich interpretiert, [07:20] unterschiedliche Lebensformen annehmen. [07:23] Ja, das war sozusagen hinter der Idee des Ideellen von Iljenkow. [07:26] Und das Interessante war, er hatte diese damals in Zagorsk [auch Sagorsk geschrieben, russische Grussstadt 70 km nordöstlich von Moskau, seit 1991 trägt sie den Namen Sergijew Possad] [07:32] auch experimentell versucht nachzuweisen. [07:35] Er hat also mit Psychologen zusammengearbeitet, [07:38] mit Alexander Meschtscherjakow, [07:43] der damals ein Experiment mit taubstummen Kindern durchgeführt hat [07:47] und sie sozusagen in die Kultur angeeignet hat [07:52] und sozusagen dazu die Idee des Ideellen von Iljenkow benutzt hat. [07:57] Dieses Thema fand ich furchtbar interessant. [08:01] Da merkt man schon diesen Schnittpunkt zwischen einem Philosophen [08:04] und einem Psychologen, also zwischen verschiedenen Disziplinen. [08:08] Und damals in Rostow haben wir neben Iljenkow [08:12] noch andere Autoren gelesen, [08:14] die man eigentlich im Westeuropa kaum kannte, [08:17] die ich aber sehr spannend fand. [08:19] Und diese Autoren kamen dann nicht wie Iljenkow, [08:22] also aus dem 60er, 70er Jahren, [08:25] sondern die kamen aus dem 20er, 30er Jahren. [08:27] Zum Beispiel, das war eine meiner Entdeckungen, [08:34] die wir damals dort gelesen haben, [08:36] einen georgischen Philosophen, [08:37] der Konstantin Romanowitsch Megrelidze hieß. [08:40] Und der hatte so etwas gesucht [08:42] wie eine phänomenologische Soziologie der Ideen. [08:46] Wieder auch diese Idee, [08:48] es gibt bestimmte ideelle Gebilde, [08:50] die kann man soziologisch analysieren. [08:52] Ja, und Konstantin Romanowitsch Megrelidze [08:54] hatte zum Beispiel bei Husserl ein Jahr studiert, [08:55] war in Berlin bei den Gestaltpsychologen, [08:59] also war beeinflusst von der westeuropäischen Tradition, [09:03] hat aber dann, wie so oft, auch in dieser sowjetrussischen Tradition etwas Eigenes entwickelt. [09:08] Also das fand ich immer ganz spannend. [09:10] Ja, und ich bin damals auch bekannt geworden in Rostow mit Wygotski, [09:16] der war auch einer der Hauptautoren, [09:18] die wir gelesen haben. [09:19] Ja, ich erzähle das ausführlich, [09:22] weil in Rostow mit diesen Autoren wurde dann endlich auch mein Dissertationsthema geboren. [09:28] Und das, was mich immer interessiert hat, [09:32] ist dieser Zusammenhang zwischen Philosophie, Psychologie und auch Sprachwissenschaften. [09:38] Weil Megrelidze war zwar auch ausgebildeter Philosoph, [09:42] aber er hatte bei der Gestaltpsychologie [09:44] etwas studiert [09:46] und hatte dann zwei Jahre [09:48] bei Nikolai Marr in Leningrad gearbeitet und natürlich auch zur Sprachtheorie gearbeitet. [09:55] Also genau wieder dieses Zusammenkommen von philosophischen Ideen und einzelwissenschaftlichen Theorien und Experimenten. [10:05]
JMc: Ja, OK. [10:07] Ja, aber deine Dissertation hast du dann in Berlin geschrieben, oder? [10:10] Du hast also 1991 in Berlin promoviert. [10:13]
JF: Genau, ich bin da zurück und ich hatte dann, [10:16] 1986 oder 1987, [10:19] hatte ich dann eine Aspirantur bekommen. [10:23] Aspirantur, das hieß in der DDR ein Stipendium, ein Doktorandenstipendium, würde man heute sagen, also [10:31] sozusagen ein Stipendium, um in drei Jahren meine Doktorarbeit zu schreiben. [10:34] Ich hatte wirklich nichts anderes zu tun als die Doktorarbeit zu schreiben und dazu bin ich sozusagen nach Leipzig geschickt worden, von Berlin, [10:43] weil in der Zwischenzeit hatte ich an der Hochschule für Ökonomie in Berlin angefangen zu arbeiten. [10:49] Die hatten mich nach Leipzig geschickt und haben gesagt, komm mit einem Doktortitel wieder, [10:55] was natürlich gut war, weil das heißt, es war kein Thema vorgegeben. [11:00] Ich habe mein Thema selber ausgesucht [11:02] und ich hatte das Glück, dass Leipzig das auch akzeptiert hatte. [11:06] Ich wurde betreut von einem Philosophen, [11:08] der spezialisiert war in der Philosophie der Industrie. [11:11] Das heißt, er hatte keine Ahnung von meinem Thema, was mich nicht sehr beunruhigt hat, [11:17] weil ich wusste ja, wozu ich arbeiten will. [11:20] Und ich habe dann meine Doktorarbeit geschrieben, dort in Leipzig. [11:26] Wie gesagt zu… [11:31] Die Doktorarbeit hatte vier Kapitel, kann man sagen. [11:34] Ein Kapitel zu Megrelidze, eins zu Wygotski. [11:37] Und nach der Doktorarbeit habe ich dann das nächste Kapitel noch dazu geschrieben zum Bachtin-Kreis, [11:43] weil ich fand es ganz wichtig war, dass man die Ideen von Bachtin und seine Sprach- und Zeichenauffassung auch mit reinnimmt. [11:50] Das waren also sozusagen die drei Kapitel meiner Doktorarbeit. [11:56] Aber es gab ein erstes Kapitel und das war mir ganz wichtig, weil dieses erste Kapitel hatte ich der Theorie von Iljenkow und Alexander Leontjew gewidmet, [12:07] der ja auch ein Psychologe war und ein Tätigkeitstheoretiker. [12:12] Und warum habe ich dieses Kapitel geschrieben? [12:15] Das war ein wichtiges Objektiv meiner Doktorarbeit. [12:20] Ich konnte nämlich damals in der DDR die Schriften der Kritischen Psychologie lesen. [12:24] Die gab es in den Bibliotheken in Berlin. [12:28] Und die Kritische Psychologie um Klaus Holzkamp [12:32] hatte sich ganz stark mit der Tätigkeitstheorie Leontjews beschäftigt und diesen Tätigkeitsansatz als Hauptquelle reingebracht, auch mit in ihre Psychologie. [12:44] Und ich fand, dass bei Leontjew ein ganz wichtiger Aspekt immer fehlte, [12:48] nämlich der Zeichen- und Sprachbegriff, und sozusagen die Bedeutung der Sprache [12:56] in der Denkentwicklung und in der Bewusstseinsentwicklung. [12:59] Und genau diese Ideen konnte ich mit den Denkern aus den 20er, 30er Jahren hineinbringen. [13:07] Das heißt, das erste Kapitel war so etwas wie ein Abgrenzungskapitel sozusagen. [13:12] Ja, das kann man so sehen, aber man kann es auch noch anders sehen und dadurch natürlich auch das Interesse an den Sprachtheorien, weil ich das damit hereingebracht hatte. [13:23]
JMc: Ja, OK. [13:24]
JF: Ja. Ja, die Doktorarbeit, [13:27] das ist vielleicht noch interessant, die erschien 1993, ich habe sie 1991 verteidigt an der Humboldt-Universität. [13:36] Ich habe sie verteidigt vor einer Kommission, [13:41] die dann von Hans-Peter Krüger geleitet wurde. [13:44] Hans-Peter Krüger war ein Philosoph, der an der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR gearbeitet hatte. [13:50] Hans-Peter Krüger war Habermas-Spezialist. [13:54] Wenn man die Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns von Habermas liest, dann findet man auch Verweise auf Wygotski, [14:01] kurz in den Fußnoten, wie zum Beispiel auch auf Bühler, also auch ein Interesse an dieser Art von Theorie. [14:09] Ja, die hatte ich sozusagen vor einer gemischten Kommission verteidigt. [14:16] Herr [Peter] Keiler von der Kritischen Psychologie war auch an der Kommission gewesen. [14:19] Es gab also eine sehr interessante Diskussion dazu. [14:24] Die Dissertation ist erschienen 1993 im Akademie-Verlag unter dem Titel [14:31] Der Gehalt der Sprachform. Paradigmen von Bachtin bis Vygotskij. [14:37] Vielleicht zu diesem Buch vielleicht noch ein Wort. [14:44] In bestimmten Sinne ist das Buch ins Leere gelaufen. [14:49] Kann man vielleicht so sagen. [14:51] Ich hatte ja einen Adressaten unter vielen, die kritische Psychologie. [14:56] Die war aber nach dem Mauerfall mit etwas anderen Dingen beschäftigt. [14:59] Mit sich selbst und ihrem eigenen Platz, glaube ich, wahrscheinlich in der Psychologielandschaft [15:07] Und ich selber war auch nicht mehr da. [15:09] Ich hatte nämlich 1991 Deutschland verlassen und bin nach Frankreich gegangen. [15:14]
JMc: OK, ich hätte ein paar Fragen dazu, und zwar… also apropos Mauerfall. [15:19]
JF: Ja. [15:20]
JMc: Wie war das denn damals als frisch Promovierte oder als Doktorandin zur Wendezeit? [15:28]
JF: Ja, als Doktorandin war es eigentlich nicht so schwierig gewesen für mich, [15:38] aber das hat etwas zu tun gehabt mit dem Thema, einfach ne. [15:42] Das heißt, das war ein Thema gewesen, [15:43] das ich mir selbst gewählt hatte. [15:46] Es ging um die Geschichte, [15:47] um die Geschichte der sowjetrussischen Psychologie und Sprachtheorie an irgendeiner Stelle und zu etwas, [15:54] wozu noch nicht geschrieben worden war. [15:56] Das heißt, es war also auch nicht ideologisch motiviert in dem Sinne, [16:01] sodass ich gesagt hätte, oh, ich schreibe zu etwas. [16:03] Das ist jetzt total passé. Das braucht man nicht. [16:08] Ich wusste einfach, deshalb auch der Dialog mit der Kritischen Psychologie, dass ich etwas geschrieben habe für eine Diskussion. [16:15] Nicht nur für eine Diskussion, die in der DDR oder in den osteuropäischen Ländern lief, [16:19] sondern für eine Diskussion, die auch in Westeuropa lief, weil die Franzosen hatten ja zum Beispiel auch begonnen, Wygotski zu übersetzen. [16:28] Es gab natürlich eine englischsprachige Rezeption von Wygotski. [16:32] Der Bachtin-Kreis wurde auch stark rezipiert von [Renate] Lachmann damals in Westdeutschland. [16:38] Natürlich habe ich die Doktorarbeit nicht geschrieben mit dem Glaube, dass wir in diese Diskussion mit einsteigen können, weil wir saßen ja hinter der Mauer. [16:49] Aber verunsichert in Bezug auf das Thema war ich eigentlich nicht. [16:53] Ich habe die Doktorarbeit dann einfach in Ruhe weitergeschrieben. [16:58] Sie war dann fertig im Herbst 1990. Genau? [17:05] Genau, im Herbst 1990 habe ich sie im Januar 1991 verteidigt. [17:10] Und ich hatte dann irgendwie das Glück, dass sie dann fertig war und dann auch vor einer gemischten Jury verteidigt wurde. [17:17] In dem Sinne auf dem Arbeitsgebiet war es eigentlich nicht sehr beunruhigend oder auch nicht zweifelhaft. [17:28] Die Arbeit ist dann sozusagen, ja, in die breitere Diskussion eingestiegen. [17:34]
JMc: Ja. [17:35]
JF: Wie man das privat erlebt hat oder sozial, [17:37] das sind natürlich andere Fragen. [17:39] Aber, ja, zu der Doktorarbeit selber, eigentlich hat sich damit das Tor aufgemacht [17:45] und ich hatte damit sehr viel mehr Gesprächspartner als davor, [17:49] weil ich hatte die Doktorarbeit ja doch ganz allein in meinem Kämmerchen geschrieben, [17:53] ohne Doktorvater und auch kaum mehr mit Kontakten in die Sowjetunion, [17:58] weil das ja doch 3.000 Kilometer waren und sobald man aus der Sowjetunion weg war, wurden die Kontakte auch immer weniger. [18:09]
JMc: OK. Ja. Und wie bist du denn nach Frankreich gekommen? [18:13] Das hast du auch kurz erwähnt. [18:16]
JF: Ja, ich weiß es
Podcast episode 54: Neil Cohn on Speaking in Pictures
31 de janeiro de 202638 min
In this interview, Neil Cohn tells us about his theory that visual art and spoken language draw on the same underlying cognitive abilities. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, Neil Cohn tells us about his theory that visual art and spoken language draw on the same underlying cognitive abilities.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 54
Cohn, Neil, and Joost Schilperoord. 2025. A Multimodal Language Faculty: A cognitive framework for communication. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Cohn, Neil. 2026. Speaking in Pictures: A vision of language. London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/speaking-in-pictures-9781350402164/
Lerdahl, Fred, and Ray S. Jackendoff. 1985. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Publishing.
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:09] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:13] Today we’re talking to Neil Cohn, who’s a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands. [00:20] Neil’s developed a fascinating theory that visual art draws on the same cognitive faculties as human language. [00:28] He’s set out this theory in the book A Multimodal Language Faculty, co-authored with Joost Schilperood, published in 2024 with Bloomsbury Academic. [00:38] He’s going to present these same ideas in graphic novel form in the book Speaking in Pictures: A Vision of Language, which will appear in February 2026, also with Bloomsbury Academic. [00:50] So, Neil, could you outline your theory for us? [00:53] What are the links between visual art and language? [00:57]
NC: Well, first, thank you for having me. [00:59] I’m a big fan of the podcast, so it’s a pleasure to be on. [01:02] The way I often like to start is by kind of at a basis of human communication cognition, which is that human beings as a species have only three ways in which we can express our concepts: [01:14] We can create sounds (which is what I’m doing right now), we can move our bodies (which is also what I’m doing right now, but people won’t be able to see that), and we can draw things. [01:26] And that’s really all humans do in terms of our ability to express concepts overtly. [01:33] We don’t emit smells to each other. [01:35] We don’t secrete things and lick each other to communicate. [01:40] We don’t emit, say, light pulses or something. [01:43] We do these three things. [01:45] Given that, these three communicative faculties, why would we believe that they should be different from each other is, I guess, the basic foundational idea. [01:57] So given that they come from the same brain, why would we assume that they have different cognitive building blocks? [02:03] Certainly in the last, well, over a century, people have been interested in how the body conveys meaning. [02:11] As you know, I’m sure, people in the 1800s debated whether or not to actually include sign languages as part of the definitions of language and ultimately said, “Now we’re going to ignore those for now,” and then, of course, there was a resurgence in the structure of studying signed languages, to which we now believe that they share the same structural properties as spoken languages. [02:33] And I would argue that we should be adding one more modality to that, which is graphic representations. [02:39] Given that it comes from the same brain, they should have the same cognitive building blocks and structural properties. [02:46] So this follows from what I call generally the principle of equivalence, in a very lofty-sounding thing, which is that given that we have one brain, we should expect the mind and brain to treat all modalities in a similar way, given modality-specific constraints. [03:03] So the places where they should be different is motivated by the nature of the type of modality that they’re addressing, because sound and light are different things, and so we should imagine that that will yield different types of structure down the road, but it’s all still coming from the same brain. [03:20] So this is the path that I pursued. [03:22] I think to some degree, when people hear what I’m working on, they think I’m making an analogy, which is to say, graphics or pictures or drawing is like language, and that language is like a source domain for the metaphor of this mapping. [03:43] And that’s, I believe, you know, I’m not the first person who’s made these sorts of comparisons. [03:47] I believe that sort of analogic mapping is what people have done throughout the, say, 20th century in movements of structural semiotics, applying, you know, principles of linguistic structuralism to graphics. [04:02] You know, they would be searching for the whatever minimal units of emes there are, graphemes, logemes, whatever it is, and it would largely be taken as kind of the linguistic structuralism metaphor of mapping, “OK, here’s what’s happening in what we know as language to these other domains.” [04:21] And that’s not ultimately my argument, is, my argument is kind of to say that the human brain — and/or mind, however you want to think about the granularity — uses similar principles and structures and mechanisms that operate across modalities, no matter what those are. [04:43] So that puts spoken languages and, say, drawn visual languages on equal footing as both involving something more general, rather than it being an analogic comparison. [04:57] And to that extent, I actually don’t think that they are in competition with each other in any sort of sense, because ultimately, those three modalities that we have are complementary parts of one larger whole system, and ultimately, the language faculty or communicative faculty, or however you want to describe it, is multimodal across these three parts, [05:23] out of which there are emergent properties of different behaviors that share the same building blocks, but it’s ultimately a multimodal system, not a unimodal or amodal system. [05:34]
JMc: OK, and why do you think that there are these three specific modalities? [05:39] I mean, what about the case of, you know, like a famous case like, you know, Helen Keller with, who doesn’t have physical access to any of those modalities? [05:47]
NC: Sure. So I would first say that I think modality, the notion of a modality is important here, and the way we define the notion of a modality is, it’s an interaction between a sensory system and a cognitive correlate, abstract representation. [06:02] So in the canonical case of speech, we have sound is the sensory system, which we then have dedicated receptors to receiving through our ears and crucially producing through our mouths. [06:17] We then, in addition to that, have a corresponding cognitive correlate of a phonological system, which is… abstracts across the tokens of the individual sounds, right? [06:31] And this interplay is crucial, which is to say that a modality is not merely a sensory system—it’s an interaction between sensory systems that involve both input and output and abstractable cognitive correlates. [06:48] So in the case of, say, the body, that would be to say we have sensory systems of touch and vision involved in receiving those signals and also a corresponding, let’s call it phonology for the sake of ease for right now, and that abstracts across the individual tokens of those expressions. [07:11] And again, we’re not even talking about anything about meaning right now. [07:13] We’re just talking about individual expressions. [07:16] I should… And correspondingly, I would say that the graphics are the same. [07:19] So you have an experience in light that is then abstractable into, you know, basic, I don’t know if we’d want to call it phonological anymore, graphological cognitive correlates. [07:34] Now, part of that is also that all of our modalities are pretty, are multisensory, so none of these modalities are guided by the singular sensory system alone, which is why the McGurk effect exists, which is where you might be producing sounds with the mouth, but then seeing different articulations than the actual sounds, and you, your brain instead perceives it as being produced a different sound than what you’re actually hearing because of what you see. [08:10] So speech alone is not unisensory; it’s multisensory, and vision is actually involved in all of them. [08:19] So that makes sensory systems and vision in particular a poor characterization of modalities. [08:27] The production system is much more, a much stronger characterization of the nature of these things. [08:35] So you don’t produce speech sounds through anything but your mouth, right? [08:40] Our bodies move around to… with different articulation points to be expressive, primarily hands and faces. [08:47] You can also use body orientation and things like that as well, and graphic systems use various types of traces left in various types of materials to correspond to meaning, so it’s not just a sensory system. [09:03] And on the case of, say, Helen Keller, what you’re left with is a, the absence of receptive systems — that is, through the eyes or the ear —, and so you fall back on a different type of sensory aspect of the bodily production system, which is less used, but at least provides a point of access for that production system of the body. [09:30] If you look at children who are developing naturally, or typically developing, we should say, those typically developing children will naturally produce in these three ways. [09:43] They produce sounds, they produce bodily motions, and they will produce graphics without prompting, just through exposure and practice, and the onset of those expressions largely occurs around the same time in childhood, roughly eight months, plus or minus, given that children are different, right, and are exposed to different things. [10:09] So they generally will start doing things like pointing at the same time as they start babbling, maybe manually babbling if they’ve been exposed to signed languages, and they will produce graphic representations around that time. [10:26] By graphics, I mean smearing milk to make lines, or… in ways that they recognize that they are making a representation out of something that’s not merely just, “I’m making a mess,” but maybe, you know, “I’m going to create some sort of trace that is recognized as a trace.” [10:45]
JMc: Yeah. [10:47]
NC: So those are why I would say those are the three primary things. [10:50] And if you follow the developmental trajectories, children will develop, maybe to varying degrees of complexity, given the exposure and practice across all those three forms, [11:02] but not something like writing, right, where that requires explicit instruction to understand, “Oh, this graphic representation corresponds to this sound,” [11:16] in which case you’re creating a cross-modal representation across the existing modalities that are already there, [11:23] but with a new mapping that isn’t part of our innate capacity to have that correspondence, [11:31] which is why it’s an invention, because… [11:33] But it’s an invention that makes use of existing pathways that are purposefully there for drawing, and purposefully there for speaking. [11:41] It’s just that we fuse them together to make a very culturally useful tool, but it’s not part of our biological, you know, endowment, let’s say. [11:50]
JMc: Yeah. But what about something like music, you know, which is also auditory, but is also structured? [11:58]
NC: That’s right. So music is also seemingly an innate capacity. [12:03] I should say I am experiencing developmental things quite a lot. [12:06] I have a two-and-a-half-year-old who does draw, and he also loves singing, and making what one could construe as music, [laughs] if you are generous, has the development of tonality, at least, in singing some things. [12:26] So there definitely is an innate capacity of music, but music does not necessarily correspond to conceptual representations in the same way that drawing, and speaking, and gesticulating does, but I would argue music does share the same suite of cognitive capacities. [12:47] As you said, it’s structured and organized, but in this case, those structures do not necessarily correspond to meaning in a compositional way. [12:56] So they, you can certainly have correspondences between music and meaning, like that the Jaws theme we’ve associated with some sort of impending doom, right? Or, you know, movie references… [13:10] The Star Wars Imperial March gives you a sense of authoritarianism. [13:14] So we’ve clearly built up some correspondences between music and meaning, but we don’t do, “This set of notes and this set of notes each have independent meanings, and then we will compositionally, combinatorially create higher-order meaning out of them,” but we do do that with the other modalities. [13:36] So we have different classes. [13:38] What we describe is one of the challenges that I think the language sciences has faced over the last centuries is, you know, one, defining what language is, and usually looks to things like various features of… lists of features that are there or not there. [13:59] If language is a cognitive phenomena, I would say you need to define it by its cognitive building blocks, and part of the problem that you have when making these sorts of comparisons, say, when I say that there’s visual languages that are structured of graphics that are the same as other sorts of languages, then people come back and say, “Well, that can’t be language, because it’s graphic, and by principle, I can’t allow it to be language.” [14:26] But the structural properties are still there, and so are the cognitive principles that are seemingly the same across them. [14:33] So what do you do? [14:34] And mostly the challenge has been something like that we’re only allowed a binary, that, “Well, there are languages, and there are not-languages, and this is the options categorically that we have.” [14:50] So what do you do with things that maybe have the same properties as languages, but not fully? [14:55] So let’s say music is an example. [14:57] Like, for 40 years now, since Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s book, the Generative Theory of Tonal Music came out, [15:05] they’ve argued that there’s these hierarchical combinatorial structures in music, and corresponding cognitive research has shown that you mostly elicit the same sorts of brain responses as in sentence structure from manipulating sequences of music. [15:22] Now, it’s an ongoing debate to the degree to which the same patch of neurons might be used in both, but there at least seems to be similar mechanisms at the least, and this is work that my lab is also involved in. [15:36] Now, what do you do where you have… [15:37] Well, this thing is clearly language-like, let’s call it, but there’s clearly also facets that are not, like compositionality of meaning, right? [15:46] So how do you then want to class music? [15:48] Do you want to say it’s the language of music? [15:50] What do you do with, say, emoji, which my research and others have shown, well, there’s clearly systematic lexicons, but doesn’t really seem to have a grammar to sequencing of emoji. [16:01] OK, well, now what do you do with that, right? [16:04] Or what do you do with co-speech gesture, which clearly is meaningful, has a tight relationship with spoken languages, but do you want to say that it’s part of language, separate from language? [16:17] How do you ontologically classify these things? [16:20] So our approach has been to say that the existing categories structures are not helpful, and using a word like ‘language’ as a scientific term is actually problematic, because it’s a social term also that is also value-laden. [16:41] So we need a different set of categories, and the ones we arrive at are based on the component parts of linguistic structure, of a modality, a grammar, and a meaning, or in traditional terms… phonology, syntax, and semantics, or whatever set of terms you want to use. [17:00] And so based on the relative allocation of those sorts of components, you can derive a classification system, so we call an omnia is a system that has all of them. [17:10] So spoken languages, sign languages, and what I call visual languages, are all omnia, but there’s also what we call semia. [17:18] Semia use, let’s say, phonology and semantics, but not necessarily a robust syntax, or a robust grammatical system. [17:31] So gestures are a semia, because they don’t use a grammar of their own. [17:36] Sign languages do, which is why they are an omnia. [17:39] And emoji do not; they don’t have a grammar, but they are meaningful, and expressive, and in the graphic form. [17:44] So those are also semia, which is why emoji have been compared to gestures, because they are structurally similar in that way. [17:52] Music are on the flip side, so music are the inverted side, so they have a modality and a grammar, but not necessarily meaning in a compositional way, and so those are what we call sequentia. [18:05] And that might also include something like the combinatorics that are involved in athletic things, like, say, martial art forms, or synchronized swimming, or these other things that are very clearly pattern-structured sequences, but are not, they don’t have some additional referent. [18:25] They are sequenced for themselves, their own sequencing, right? [18:28] It’s not like a punch in a martial art form is then a referent for some other concept. [18:35] It’s just a punch, right? [18:37] But it is combinatoric. [18:38]
JMc: OK. [18:39] So it seems, it seems that the key thing is ‘meaning’, in inverted commas, and the idea that meaning can be compositional and referential. [18:47] Is that, have I understood that correctly? [18:49]
NC: And has a combinatorial system. [18:51]
JMc: OK. [18:51]
NC: So it has to have all three.
JMc: Yeah. [18:53]
NC: For the way I use the term ‘language,’ usually, it’s the equivalent of what I would call an omnia, which is then, it has to have some modality of expression, has to have a complex combinatorial system that is capable of hierarchic embedding, center embedding, anaphoric relationships, structural ambiguities, etc., and there needs to be some sort of compositional conceptual structure or meaning that is associated with that behavior. [19:21] Semia lack the complex combinatorics. [19:26] However
Podcast episode 53: Paul Kiparsky on Pāṇini
30 de novembro de 202529 min
In this interview, Paul Kiparsky introduces us to the ancient Indian grammarian Pāṇini and the philosophical significance of his grammatical description of Sanskrit. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, Paul Kiparsky introduces us to the ancient Indian grammarian Pāṇini and the philosophical significance of his grammatical description of Sanskrit.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
Feature image: Pāṇini stamp, India (2004). Wikimedia Commons
References for Episode 53
Bloomfield, Leonard. Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis, 1917. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50797
Bloomfield, Leonard. The Menominee Language, Yale University Press, 1962.
Kiparsky, Paul. Panini as a Variationist, MIT Press, 1979.
Kiparsky, Paul. “On the architecture of Pāṇini’s grammar.” International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2007.
Kiparsky, Paul. Panini. In Elan Dresher and Harry v.d. Hulst (eds.), Handbook of the History of Phonology. Oxford University Press, 2022.
Ostler, Nicholas. Case-linking : a theory of case and verb diathesis applied to classical Sanskrit. MIT Dissertation. 1979.
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:16] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:21] Today we’re talking to Paul Kiparsky, who’s a professor at Stanford University in California, and Paul’s going to talk to us about the philosophical significance of Panini’s grammar. [00:35] Maybe you could tell us who Panini was and what his grammar was. [00:39]

PK: We actually don’t know very much about Panini at all. [00:44] We think he worked somewhere between 500 and 350 B.C. in the Northwest, what is now Pakistan, and we know his mother’s name, and that’s just about all we know about him. [01:00] [chuckles] [01:02] So we know a lot about the grammar, of course. [01:06] It’s a system of 4,000 rules, very condensed so that you can print it on 30 pages, and it’s a generative grammar of Sanskrit. [01:19] It’s about the high standard of his day that is comparable to something like Classical Arabic in the modern world, the formal level, but it was an actual spoken language, because the grammar includes lots of information about how to, for example, address a shudra, a member of the lowest caste, with what intonation and so forth, so showing that it was a language that was spoken. [01:56] It also deals selectively, not completely, with the Vedic, earlier form of the language and treats it as a kind of aberrant system. [02:08] You know, it’s not based on Vedic, it’s based on the norm of classical Sanskrit. [02:16]

JMc: So we don’t know very much about who Panini was. [02:19] Do we know that he was an actual person, or is he more a sort of legendary figure, like a character who’s invented to be the author of the grammar? [02:29]

PK: Well, there must have been someone. We know that there were many other grammarians, because Panini quotes a number of them. [02:42] I think seven or eight of them are at least mentioned, and credited with this or that observation. [02:48] They all seem to have had the same basic approach. [02:52] There’s no difference that we can detect in theory or method, but sometimes they disagree about the data, naturally, the dialectal differences and so on. [03:05] And we, I think, can suppose that it’s kind of like Homer. [03:11] He was the last one in a series of scholars, in this case, who contributed to this enormous work. [03:19] It’s nothing that one person could do in their lifetime, and so I think he was the last in the line and the greatest. [03:29]

JMc: OK. So apropos of Homer, you said that the whole grammar can be printed on about 30 pages, so was it originally meant to be written, or is it something that was memorized and only later committed to writing? [03:44]

PK: No one exactly knows, and actually there’s disputes about the extent to which writing, if at all, was used. [03:53] I personally, for whatever it’s worth, think that both were used. [03:59] That’s certainly the practice in modern Panini scholarship among the traditional pandits. [04:06] They will do all of their computation — that is, all the derivations — essentially in their head, so they can give them a word and they will recite the derivation, 20-30 rules, in order, without using any books or anything. [04:26] And they will own a few books. [04:28] For example, they will have an edition of the Mahabhashya, which is the big commentary, and maybe the Kashika and some other works of interpretation, which nobody memorizes as far as I know, but there’s also pandits who memorize the whole thing, but the ones who simply can recite it from beginning to end in a go are not the people who actually work with the text as a derivational mechanism. [05:03] The people who do work with it that way just know all the rules; they can’t necessarily recite them all in order. [05:10] And so I suspect that that’s how it’s been all the way from the start. [05:15] It’s hard to imagine fixing the order of 4,000 rules just orally. [05:23] It had to take some kind of notation to fix it, it seems to me. [05:28]

JMc: So the grammar is still used today by pandits? [05:32]

PK: Well, it’s used in attenuated form. [05:36] It’s become the basis for a lot of practical Sanskrit grammar, school grammar, and people still study it from that perspective, but as a formal grammar, it’s nothing that you could use practically. [05:54] It’s far too complex to use as a vehicle for learning Sanskrit, for example, so essentially, you already have to know the language to a certain extent, at least to be able to understand what’s going on there. [06:14]

JMc: So what is its purpose? Is it meant to be sort of normative, or is it just meant to be a thing of beauty? [06:20]

PK: Both. It’s certainly normative. [06:26] That is, I think, it was originally, and certainly continues to be, normative in that it defines the correct form of classical Sanskrit, but it was also intended to be a record of the actual speech, which was, at that point, perhaps felt as being threatened by the vernaculars. [06:52] The Prakrits had already emerged when the Aṣṭādhyāyī was composed, so the Buddha, who is roughly, very roughly, a contemporary, before Panini, was writing in a much more vernacular form of Sanskrit. [07:13] I mean, that was part of the political content of Buddhism, right? [07:18] It was more popular, but at that time, the classical Sanskrit described by Panini was clearly still in use among very educated people. [07:30]

JMc: So it was essentially, I mean, it was a conservative project, both in the sense of conserving or preserving an ancient high variety, but also in that contemporary political context of preserving ancient learning in the face of a popular religion, namely Buddhism. [07:49] Is that… Have I understood that correctly? [07:51]

PK: Yeah, I don’t know about ancient learning, about perhaps preserving the, maybe sociolinguistically preserving the Brahmin identity in some way, but much more important it is that it’s a scientific venture, that is, it goes very deeply into the structure of the language in a way that linguists can still… have always learned from, at least since the early 19th century, and still continue to learn from. [08:23]

JMc: Yeah. So the 19th century, which is the period in which modern academic linguistics in the Western world really got started. [08:32] So would you say that Panini’s grammar influenced the development of Western linguistics? [08:39]

PK: I’d say in very fundamental ways. [08:43] So if you go back to the early 19th century, the linguists like Bopp, who founded comparative Indo-European grammar, learned from him about morphology. [08:58] So, until then, people thought in terms of whole words, so in Latin grammar, you have, for example, servus ‘servant’, is cited in the nominative singular, and then you do something called inflection to it. [09:20] You change the endings, so servi, servo, servorum, etc., and these things are understood as processes that you apply to the base form, which is an actual case form, the nominative singular. [09:39] Panini introduced the idea that there was a stem, and there were some endings, and that you form the different case forms by adding to the same stem different case endings, and then maybe doing some phonology on the result of that composition, and output is then the actual word. [10:01] And the reason this was important is that it enabled Bopp to get started with comparative grammar, because it’s those things, the stems and the endings, that are reconstructible. [10:16] Actual words, you can reconstruct post hoc, but those are not the entities on which you do your comparative work. [10:25] You work with roots, you work with affixes, stems, etc., etc., and until that insight came along, there was just some kind of global idea, like you find in William Jones and so on, that “Well, this word looks like that word, and they must be related.” [10:45] And also, the other thing that was a big contribution was the idea of phonological structure, so classes of sounds, for example. [11:00] In fact, the classification of sounds was actually much better than for most of the linguistics that was to follow. [11:15] So, for example, vowels and consonants were classified together by the same feature system, so you had palatal vowels, and palatal consonants, and velar vowels, and velar consonants. [11:32] That’s the system that was abandoned by the British phoneticians. [11:37] They decided to classify vowels in one way and consonants in another way, which introduced all kinds of problems, and it was not until Jakobson that linguists reverted to a unified feature system. [11:54] And interestingly, Uralic linguistics never abandoned this idea. [12:01] I mean, they still have, in works on Uralic languages, they talk about palatal vowels, and velar vowels, and all of that, and it’s actually a very good way of dealing with vowel harmony and all of those things that are prominent in those languages. [12:16] But apart from that basic feature, even the idea of having a classification of sounds was something that basically came into linguistics at that time through Indian science. [12:34]

JMc: So, the topic that you wanted to talk about was the philosophical significance of Panini’s grammar, so what would you say the philosophical significance of Panini’s grammar is? [12:46]

PK: So, let me preface it by saying that — and this is partly a continuation of my answer to your previous question — there are many other insights that came out of Panini that anticipate the, or were instrumental in introducing these ideas into Western linguistics. [13:12] So, the idea of a modular organization of language. [13:17] So, you go to Bloomfield and his work, not only on the Native American languages like Menominee, but also his Tagalog grammar, which nobody reads, have this very interesting organization. [13:33] There’s a kind of level order system. [13:37] There’s primary endings and secondary endings, and they each have their characteristic phonology associated with them, and they work differently. [13:49] The primary endings go on roots, the secondary endings go on stems, and that’s all a very sophisticated system. [13:57] That’s straight from Panini, and Bloomfield was very well acquainted with Panini. [14:02] He actually wrote an interesting technical article on that. [14:07] There’s thematic roles and the idea of, if you like, a level of representation or a set of categories that come between semantics and the expression in the morphosyntax of grammatical relations, so case and agreement, and stuff like that, in a many-many relationship to both. [14:30] So, a thematic role can correspond to different semantic categories, and it can also correspond to different cases, for example. [14:41] So, that was introduced into modern linguistics in the ’60s. No, ’70s, I would say. [14:50] So, my student Nick Ostler at MIT wrote a dissertation that was very influential, where he had this, and that was inspired by Panini. [15:03] OK, so why am I telling you this? Because the remarkable thing is that Panini had no theory at all, and that’s the theoretically interesting thing. [15:15] All of these very sophisticated categories, conventions, devices, and so forth, which we admire, emerge from only two fundamental things. [15:28] One is, we’re going to have a complete description, and the second is, the total description has to be as simple as possible. [15:38] If you put those things together, they force you to introduce these devices to abbreviate the description. [15:48] So, these are not just handy conventions or anything like that. [15:55] They have a very serious purpose here. [15:58] If you removed any of them, the grammar would become longer. [16:01] It couldn’t fit into 30 pages anymore. [16:05] In fact, for parts of the grammar, you can actually prove this mathematically. [16:11] For example, the Shiva Sutras, which have the phonological classes, and define the phonological classes, they are, in a very particular sense, perfect. [16:23] So, that, I think, is really philosophically interesting, because it provides an answer to an issue that’s being discussed a lot, which is actually at the basis of, for example, the generative grammar project, which is, how is it possible to learn a language, and what do all languages have in common, and why? [16:46] And the answer is very different than what you get in generative grammar. [16:51] It also involves simplicity, but in a totally different way. [16:55] So, what I learned as a graduate student is that you have a rich, innate grammatical formalism, the theory of grammar, and then you have a simplicity principle, and you apply the formal system to the data and always choose the simplest description. [17:19] Well, what Panini has is, he says you don’t have anything except completeness and simplicity, and the structure emerges, right? [17:32] I mean, it seems to me that’s a very exciting answer. [17:35]

JMc: But is it stated explicitly that- [17:39]

PK: Oh, nothing is stated. [17:41] Nothing is stated. [17:42] We just have the rules. [17:43] There’s no theory. [17:45] And that’s a problem. [17:48] We don’t even have all of the principles by which those rules and their interaction is interpreted. [17:58] We don’t have those because, evidently, there must have been a break in the tradition at some point. [18:07] So, you find that even the earliest commentators, which are Katyayana, who writes a bunch of comments, and then Patanjali, who has a more discursive discussion, pro and con of different interpretations, they don’t even know, in many cases, exactly how the grammar works. [18:31] And figuring that out has been a project of modern Panini studies, and that’s been one of the things I’ve been interested in. [18:44] I actually wrote a book that’s called Pāṇini as a Variationist. [18:51] It turns out he uses three words to indicate that the rule is optional, and there’s a ton of optional rules, maybe 30% or so of the rules are actually optional. [19:03] So, you can add this suffix to express a certain meaning, or that other suffix also. [19:11] And he uses three words — vā, vibhāṣā, and anyatarasyām — and what I discovered is that vā actually means ‘preferably’, vibhāṣā means ‘marginally’, and anyatarasyām means ‘either way’, and I proved this by collating not only his own usage, but the usage of the texts and the usage of the Vedas with respect to the Vedic rules that he formulates to show that that fits exactly with what the text shows. [19:54] And so, that was, I think, the first clear proof that there was content in the grammar that the tradition didn’t know about, because there must have been this break. [20:10] So, that’s why it’s important that the grammar was written down, because it’s the only way in which it could be recovered, and the study of it taken up again after this disruption, and that led me in work that was done together with S.D. Joshi, who was a Panini scholar from Pune, where I spent some years, to question the principles by which rules interact, and so we formulated, I think, a much simpler and better understanding of how that works, and that’s been quite controversial, because there are many traditional people who don’t like that. [21:06] On the other hand, I think we have convinced a lot of people, so the discussion continues. [21:13] But anyway, that’s why this is a continuing quest, and we don’t have a finished system that we can just apply and talk about. [21:22] We have to understand first what that system is like. [21:26]

JMc: Do the traditionalists have an alternative interpretation? [21:30]

PK: Well, there is a traditional interpretation, which is… Well, within it, there are many different opinions, also minor disagreements, but there is broadly a traditional consensus, and what we offer is a new one. [21:53] And there’s actually a recent work that’s just coming out, I think it’s Oxford University Press, by Rishi Rajpopat, who has a still different view, so it’s been very controversial, and I think it’s quite interesting, but ultimately not correct. [22:15]

JMc: Empirically not correct, or? [22:17]

PK: It’s just not, it doesn’t handle the… It doesn’t give you the right results, that’s a term. [22:23] I mean, if you like that, that’s a way of saying it’s not empirically correct. [22:28] These are principles about how to decide, for example, if two rules are applicable, which one do you choose? [22:36] And because only a very small part of the grammar shows you the order in which rules are to be applied, most of them just have the rules swimming around there, and you throw in a form, a derivation, and the rules all have a whack at it, and you have to decide which one is prioritized at any point in the derivation, and we have a very simple answer to that. [23:02]

JMc: At a couple of points, you&#821
Podcast episode 52: Gereon Müller on Lanes to Language
14 de novembro de 202534 min
In this interview, Gereon Müller discusses his new book Lanes to Language, which unites the worlds of history of linguistics and cycling. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube Intro and outro: Bach …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, Gereon Müller discusses his new book Lanes to Language, which unites the worlds of history of linguistics and cycling.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
Intro and outro: Bach, Cello Suite no. 1 in G major, Prelude. Recording from Wikipedia.
References for Episode 52
Helbig, Gerhard, and Joachim Buscha. 19721. Deutsche Grammatik. Ein Handbuch für den Ausländerunterricht. Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie.
Müller, Gereon. 2025. Lanes to Language: Linguistic bike rides in and around Leipzig. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. http://home.uni-leipzig.de/muellerg/rad/lingride.pdf
Wundt, Wilhelm. 1900–1920. Völkerpsychologie. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythos und Sitte, 10 vols. Leipzig: Engelmann.
Podcast episode 51: Martin Haspelmath
31 de outubro de 202537 min
In this interview, Martin Haspelmath talks about how he got started in linguistics, the rise of large-scale areal typology in the 1990s, language description vs language comparison, and the current state of the …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, Martin Haspelmath talks about how he got started in linguistics, the rise of large-scale areal typology in the 1990s, language description vs language comparison, and the current state of the field.
Photo: Swen Reichhold/Uni Leipzig
Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 51
Dryer, M. S., et al. 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. München: Max Planck Digital Library. http://wals.info/
Haspelmath, M. 1993. A Grammar of Lezgian. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Haspelmath, M. 2010. Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies. Language, 86(3), 663-687. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lan.2010.0021
Michaelis, S. M., Maurer, P., Haspelmath, M., & Huber, M., eds. 2013. The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: MPI für evolutionäre Anthropologie. http://apics-online.info
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, [00:14] and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:22] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discussed. [00:26] Today we’re in Leipzig with Martin Haspelmath at the Max Planck Institute, [00:32] and we’re going to continue our series of oral history interviews [00:36] by asking Martin about his career in linguistics [00:40] and his contributions to typology, [00:43] and how he sees the past, present, and future of the field. [00:47] So my first question to you is, can you tell us how you got into linguistics? [00:52]

MH: Yes, so thank you for having me here. [00:58] I got interested in languages rather early on, so I was already a linguist later in high school. [01:06] I was interested in Latin and Greek, [01:10] and even in Egyptian hieroglyphs, because there was a museum of Egyptian in our town, [01:17] and I also had some interest in Polish, [01:22] because my mother spent her childhood in Poland as an ethnic German, and so I started studying Polish a little bit, rather early on. [01:32] So yeah, I was interested in languages very early, [01:36] and I was very happy that I had the chance to continue to do linguistics. [01:41]

JMc: So did you speak any Polish at home? [01:43]

MH: No, my mother didn’t speak Polish later on. [01:46] It was only in her childhood, and then the ethnic Germans had to leave Poland, [01:52] but it was an important heritage language for me, because my mother told us a lot about her Polish fatherland, as she said. [02:03] So she came to Germany in 1945 and felt a little bit as an outsider, [02:09] and, yeah, they had lived in Poland for many generations. [02:14] My grandparents even knew Russian, because they had gone to a good Russian school before 1914. [02:20] So Slavic languages are in that sense a family heritage, not that these languages were spoken. [02:27]

JMc: So how did you then transition from this general interest in languages to the actual academic study of linguistics? [02:36]

MH: I studied at the universities of Vienna and Cologne, and first I was very interested in historical linguistics, [02:44] so I was fascinated by the unification that was offered by the study of ancient Indo-European languages in historical-comparative perspective, [02:55] reconstructing sounds and morphological patterns to Proto-Indo-European. [03:03] I had gotten into that even in my later high school years, and I first thought I was going to be an Indo-Europeanist, [03:12] but then things changed. [03:15] My first two years at the University of Vienna, I was doing Indo-European linguistics, [03:21] and it was interesting, but there were very few students, and the professors were very conservative and not so cool somehow. [03:32] And there were two visiting professors from abroad [03:36] who were teaching strange things such as Russian-style syntax — it was Igor Mel’čuk — and Greenbergian universals, typology. [03:50] So I took a course from Edith Moravcsik from the University of Wisconsin, who had worked with Joseph Greenberg in the Stanford Universals Project, [03:59] and so I had known about formal syntax and Indo-European linguistics earlier, [04:06] but I really learned about typology and universals only at the university through Edith Moravcsik, and I was fascinated. [04:15]

JMc: And you made a career out of it. [04:17]

MH: Well, it took a while. [04:20] I went to the University of Cologne, because that was a place where typology was supposedly strong, [04:28] but I was a bit unsure for a while, but then I got a chance to spend two semesters as an exchange student at the University of Buffalo in the United States with Joan Bybee, [04:39] and Joan Bybee had a kind of real typology project, and she involved me in it, [04:45] and so I realized that, yeah, not only I loved it, but there were also some people who thought I could do it well. [04:53] And so Joan Bybee was a very important person who supported me later on, [04:59] and then I had a chance in 1990 to work on a European typology project with Ekkehard König, [05:08] funded by the European Science Foundation, studying European languages in typological perspective. [05:15]

JMc: So what is typology, then? [05:18]

MH: Well, comparing languages that are not necessarily related in ways that potentially lead us to universal generalizations. [05:30] Of course, if we study just European languages, then that’s not universal enough, but I felt that in the 1990s, certainly that led to a lot of new insights that hadn’t been there before. [05:44] So linguistics in earlier decades was mostly focused either on the historical study of particular languages, [05:54] or since the 1960s, in the Chomskyan paradigm, on, yes, speculative ideas about universal grammar and formalization, [06:07] and, yeah, the Chomskyan approach didn’t appeal so much to me. [06:13] And also in the 1970s and ’80s, it was not very comparative yet, [06:18] so I kind of really loved the comparison of European languages that, you know, allowed me to look at patterns in Icelandic, in Albanian, in Maltese, in Estonian, [06:35] and, you know, compare all these little languages and try to see what they have in common, and then maybe later on to broaden that to a global scope. [06:46] But in the 1990s, it was still the European pattern for me. [06:51]

JMc: So what exactly is it that you’re comparing? [06:56]

MH: Well, in the 1990s, we were comparing adverbial clauses, for example, or comparative constructions or indefinite pronouns. [07:06] So we were comparing various morphological and syntactic patterns, regardless of their historical relatedness, [07:16] and often we found that they were similar not because they were inherited, but because they had borrowed patterns from related languages. [07:27] So my dissertation was on indefinite pronouns — you know, things like ‘somebody’, ‘something’, ‘anybody’, ‘anything’. [07:38] You know, English and German are very similar. [07:41] Many words are similar, you know, ‘house’ [Haus] and ‘shoe’ [Schuh], [07:44] and other words are sort of very clearly kind of borrowed, [07:50] like Tisch and table, borrowed from Greek and Latin, and so on. [07:54] All of that was well known, but, you know, why does German have jemand, and etwas, and irgendjemand and irgendetwas? [08:03] So these patterns were not clearly historically related, they were much younger, [08:12] so I was fascinated by this, and often these younger patterns had geographical dimensions, [08:19] so languages spoken in similar areas were often similar in ways that people hadn’t looked at before. [08:28] So we were doing European areal typology, looking at similarities in geographical terms that people hadn’t seen before. [08:37] So that was really a new thing in the 1990s, and I was part of it, and I called it Standard Average European, and it became well known, but it was sort of discovered accidentally. [08:49]

JMc: But, I mean, there was areal typology and the idea of diffusion before the 1990s. [08:55]

MH: Yes, but it was not mainstream. [08:58] There was a little bit of it. [09:00] The diffusion was being studied primarily by dialectologists, so typological areal diffusion was really a new thing. [09:12] Johanna Nichols wrote her book on Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time in 1992, and before Johanna Nichols, Matthew Dryer wrote his famous article on large linguistic areas in 1989, [09:29] and our work on European areal typology in the 1990s was really part of a kind of larger real movement. [09:39] Clearly, there were earlier things. [09:41] There was the idea of an Indian, South Asian linguistic area, there was the idea of Mesoamerican linguistic area, but those were not larger movements. [09:55] They did not immediately spark larger research efforts, whereas in Europe, there were many linguists, [10:02] also related to the funding by the European Science Foundation, [10:07] and, actually, one of the outcomes of our European typology project was that when the funding came to an end in 1995, exactly 30 years ago, [10:18] the Association for Linguistic Typology was founded, coming out of this ESF funding initiative. [10:26]

JMc: So a moment ago, when we were talking about what typology is, about the ultimate aims of the field, you mentioned universals. [10:34] So do you mean sort of universals in grammar, like in language structure? [10:38] Is that the ultimate aim of typology, to discover what the possible range of languages is, [10:44] or is it to look at these mechanisms of diffusion? [10:48]

MH: Well, the universals were certainly a very important goal in Greenberg’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. [10:56] So in 1978, Greenberg had edited four volumes, universals of human language, and that coincided more or less with the Chomskyan interest in universals. [11:08] So in the ’60s and ’70s, certainly there was some universals research, and in the United States, you know, work by Matthew Dryer and Johanna Nichols, and also Joan Bybee, [11:19] and Tom Givon was an important member of that community. [11:24] They were doing sort of empirical universals research, so they had not focused so much on areal typology. [11:34] So I was interested in both of these things, [11:36] but I felt that the areal typology was this new thing that we had discovered in Europe and that we were pushing, [11:43] and this then also led me to ask whether there could be areal typology on a global scale. [11:51] So when I came to Leipzig in 1998, to the Max Planck Institute, I said, “Let’s expand this and have a world atlas of language structures.” [12:02] And I was extremely fortunate that this Max Planck Institute was founded, and there was funding. [12:11] Bernard Comrie was the director, and he thought that was an excellent idea. [12:15] He was part of this Greenbergian American typological movement, and we said, “Let’s study universals from an areal-geographical perspective, and let’s make a world atlas of language structures.” [12:30] And what we discovered with this atlas, I think, was this massive areality worldwide. [12:37] Maybe we didn’t discover new universals. [12:40] Greenberg was actually pretty good at discovering universals in the ’60s. [12:45] And we also, I think, showed that some of the later attempts at finding universals were a bit naive. [12:55] You know, things like the null subject parameter or all kinds of other ideas, [13:00] how word order correlations could be extended, for example, to phonology, you know — many of these did not… actually found confirmation. [13:12] But what we did find was that there was a lot of areality, a lot of geographical structure that needed to be taken into account. [13:21]

JMc: So do you think that areality is like a confounding factor for historical-comparative, for genealogical relationships? [13:29] Would you say that there are two kinds of relationships, sort of historical-comparative on the one side, and then there’s areal, and they’re sort of interfering with each other? Or… [13:39]

MH: Yes, absolutely. [13:40] So there are really three reasons why languages can be similar. [13:45] One, that they’re related in the genealogical sense, that they belong to a language family, [13:52] that they share features because they inherited them from a common ancestor. [13:57] Another one is that they borrowed them, or that they have similar features because other languages in the area have similar features. [14:06] So, you know, like in the Southeast Asian languages, they all have SVO order, subject-verb-object, they’re all kind of isolating, they have tone, and so on. [14:17] So that’s the areal factor. [14:19] And then the third reason for similarities is that they’re just human languages, and human languages just are like that, [14:29] are like that because there’s general universal tendencies. [14:35] And if we want to find the universal tendencies, we first have to take into account the other two potential factors. [14:45] And from the perspective of the universals, yes, we can say they’re confounding factors, [14:50] that we have to somehow, you know, using statistical methods, you know, first eliminate and then find the universal tendencies. [15:02]

JMc: You said there were several massive areas in the world that you’ve discovered through the World Atlas of Language Structures project, [15:09] so how many of them are there? [15:12]

MH: Well, we found that there’s a lot of areality in the sense that many large-scale patterns. [15:21] So earlier, as I had mentioned, people had noted that South Asian languages are rather similar [15:28] regardless of whether they belong to the Indo-European family, or the Dravidian family, or the Munda family. [15:35] They all seem to have a kind of common general pattern. [15:42] People had noticed similarities of Mesoamerican languages. [15:46] People had noticed some similarities in Australian languages and so on. [15:53] So all of these were known, [15:55] but with the World Atlas of Language Structures, published exactly 20 years ago in the summer of 2005, [16:04] we saw that the majority of our world maps showed some areal effects, [16:11] or seemed to show some areal effects — not all of them, but many of them. [16:16] And there were new areal effects, there were some confirmations of earlier patterns, but also a lot of new areal effects. [16:23] And I think we’re still only beginning to understand what these mean, because the problem is that they don’t always form isoglosses. [16:34] Sometimes they do. [16:37] So for the Caucasus, for example, all these languages have ergativity, they have ejectives, they have certain other valency patterns that are striking, [16:54] but then many other things are not shared by the Caucasian languages, [16:58] but they may be shared by languages in the Caucasus and elsewhere, [17:05] or only by some of the languages in the Caucasus and some neighbouring languages. [17:09] So there are many cross-cutting isoglosses, and I think we don’t understand it very well, [17:14] and we have to be careful not to be led to premature generalizations [17:21] by maybe cultural stereotypes. [17:24] Maybe people think, “Oh, South Asia, oh, it’s kind of a cultural area, so we only cherry-pick those features that those languages share.” [17:33] I think that has sometimes happened, [17:35] and maybe even my work on the European linguistic area was, in a way, influenced by European cultural stereotypes, so I’m a bit critical of that now. So… [17:51] I mean, certainly, the idea that Europe is a sort of, you know, common culture, you know, we have the European Union, [18:02] and at the time I thought, “Oh, it’s wonderful, European unification, and now we can show that the European languages also share more than we thought they did,” or so, [18:14] and there was a certain danger of ideological bias in that now, so I’m a bit critical of that now. [18:20]

JMc: Have you noticed sort of subareas within the European languages? [18:24]

MH: Yes, there are subareas, and people have talked about Circum-Baltic similarities, [18:30] people, of course, for a long time had talked about similarities in the Balkan languages, [18:35] but there were also other ideas, for example, similarities, Circum-Mediterranean, right? And similarities in Northern Eurasia in general. [18:50]

JMc: You’ve talked about WALS a lot, about the World Atlas of Language Structures. [18:54] Would you say that that’s your greatest contribution to the field? [18:58]

MH: Well, it’s certainly what I’m best known for, [19:03] but it’s really the Max Planck Institute’s contribution, Bernard Comrie’s contribution, because I had a unique possibility here. [19:12] We had this very generous funding. [19:15] Yeah, I enjoyed bringing all these people together, but the community existed, [19:24] so, you know, basically Greenberg created it in the 1970s with a Stanford project, [19:32] and, yeah, then we collected together all those people that were already doing typology, mostly in Europe. [19:43] Somehow it’s also interesting, historically, that the worldwide cross-linguistic research that was happening in the ’70s and ’80s in the United States [19:54] became more popular in Europe in the 1990s, and so we had people like Leon Stassen, and Anna Siewierska, and Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, and Östen Dahl, and so on, [20:07] so typology was already then, in the 1990s, when we started in 1998, [20:12] was a European thing, and I helped bring these people together, [20:16] but also Matthew Dryer and Bernard Comrie. [20:19] David Gil was also very important, and yeah, I had the most time to put it all together also, but it wasn’t really my idea. [20:35] Maybe my biggest intellectual contribution was a more philosophical one. [20:42]

JMc: Yeah, tell us about it. [laughs] [20:44]

MH: Since it’s a podcast not only about history, but also about the philosophy of language sciences, [20:50] I’m happy to talk about that, namely, my interest in comparing languages [20:57] led me to wonder increasingly about how language description and language comparison are in tension with each
Podcast episode 50: Gerda Haßler
14 de outubro de 202531 min
In this interview, Gerda Haßler discusses her career in Romanistik and the history of linguistics in the DDR and re-united Germany. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 50 …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, Gerda Haßler discusses her career in Romanistik and the history of linguistics in the DDR and re-united Germany.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 50
Haßler, Gerda. 1984. Sprachtheorien der Aufklärung zur Rolle der Sprache im
Erkenntnisprozeß. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
Haßler, Gerda. 1991. Der semantische Wertbegriff in Sprachtheorien vom 18. bis zum 20.
Jahrhundert. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
Haßler, Gerda. 2016. Temporalität, Aspektualität und Modalität in romanischen Sprachen.
Berlin: De Gruyter.
Haßler, Gerda, und Cordula Neis. 2009. Lexikon sprachtheoretischer Grundbegriffe des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Transcript
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:21] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:25] Today we’re talking to Gerda Haßler about her life and career in Romanistik and the history of linguistics. [00:33] As with some of our previous interviews, we’ll do this one in German. [00:39] Ja, also ich begrüße jetzt Gerda Haßler. Willkommen im Podcast. [00:43]
GH: Vielen Dank für die Einladung. [00:45]
JMc: Ja. Also ich wollte dich fragen, wie bist du zur Romanistik und Linguistik gekommen und was waren die großen Etappen deiner Karriere? [00:55]
GH: So richtig weiß ich das selber nicht, wie ich dazu gekommen bin. [01:00] Sprachen haben in meinem Leben schon immer eine große Rolle gespielt. [01:05] Ich habe auch die Dialekte in meiner Umgebung beobachtet. [01:10] In dem Ort, wo ich aufgewachsen bin, wurde ein sächsisch-thüringischer Mischdialekt gesprochen. [01:16]
JMc: OK. Wo genau war das? [01:18]
GH: In Fraureuth, das ist ein Dorf in der Nähe von Zwickau, also in Sachsen. [01:23]
JMc: Ja. [01:24]
GH: Und meine Großeltern haben Sudetendeutsch gesprochen, meine Eltern nur Hochdeutsch, mit mir, also mit den Großeltern nicht. [01:32] Und das habe ich beobachtet und das hat mich einfach interessiert. [01:35] Außerdem war das Tschechische immer im Hintergrund. [01:38] Und ich habe immer meinen Vater gebeten, mir Sätze in fremden Sprachen vorzusprechen. [01:46] Und ja, also das hat mich schon als Kind interessiert. [01:52] In der Schule hat mir der Fremdsprachenunterricht überhaupt nicht gefallen. [01:57] Aber ich konnte mich immer mit den Lehrern arrangieren und Französisch habe ich selbst gelernt, nicht in der Schule. [02:04] Ja, und ich wusste nicht so richtig, was ich studieren sollte. [02:10] Ich habe eigentlich am meisten Mathematik und Latein gemocht. [02:16] Das war aber überhaupt nicht kombinierbar zu DDR-Zeiten. [02:21] Und Lehrer wollte ich auch nicht werden, es war schwierig. [02:26] Dann wurden uns Studienführer gegeben, die die Studienmöglichkeiten in den einzelnen Universitäten zeigten. [02:36] Und in Halle stand da ein Fach Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft. [02:41] Das hat mich natürlich interessiert. [02:44] Ich habe da hingeschrieben und wurde auch gleich eingeladen zu einem Professor Ulrich Ricken. [02:51] Das wurde dann auch mein Doktorvater. [02:54] Ja, das Gespräch lief aber nicht so, wie ich mir es gedacht hatte. [02:59] Denn er sagte, diesen Studiengang Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft gibt es gar nicht mehr, weil der Professor, der ihn verantwortet hatte, also Karl Ammer, kurz vorher gestorben sei. [03:14] Ja, da wusste ich auch nicht richtig, was ich sagen sollte. [03:20] Er hat mir aber dann vorgeschlagen, mich für den Lehramtsstudiengang, [03:26] also Französisch und Russisch immatrikulieren zu lassen. [03:31] Da könnte ich auch Linguistik studieren und müsste nicht Lehrer werden. [03:35] Ich könnte dann schon Romanistik und Slavistik studieren, mit dem Schwerpunkt Linguistik. [03:44] Na ja, ich konnte nicht anders, ich habe mich darauf eingelassen. [03:48] Und das ist dann auch so gekommen. [03:52] Also nach einem Jahr eines ziemlich langweiligen Studiums [03:58] habe ich einen Sonderstudienplan bekommen und konnte studieren, wie ich mir das vorgestellt habe. [04:06] Nach drei Jahren habe ich das Studium abgeschlossen [04:10] und wurde Assistentin im Wissenschaftsbereich Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, [04:18] den Ulrich Ricken übernommen hatte kurz vorher. [04:23] Ja, es war aber nicht so, dass ich da gleich an meiner Dissertation arbeiten konnte. [04:34] Ich musste sehr viel Technisches machen. [04:38] Ich musste Bücher bestellen, abholen, Diktate aufnehmen auf Französisch, [04:45] was die Sekretärinnen natürlich nicht konnten. [04:49] Und mit dem Dissertationsthema war es so, [04:54] dass das eigentlich an einem Forschungskollektiv Sprache und Gesellschaftsbild angelagert sein sollte. [05:03] Das war zu DDR-Zeiten so. [05:06] Da musste man etwas gesellschaftlich Relevantes forschen. [05:12] Es liefen mehrere Dissertationen dazu. [05:16] Die untersuchten also Klassenbezeichnungen in literarischen Werken. [05:22] Und ich sollte zu La Bruyère eine Dissertation schreiben. [05:27] Hat mir natürlich nicht besonders gefallen. [05:33] La Bruyère ist auch sehr erforscht von Literaturwissenschaftlern. [05:38] Da hätte ich garantiert nichts Neues finden können. [05:42] Und ich habe gedacht, aber so ein bisschen kann ich das, was mich interessiert, vielleicht doch anwenden. [05:50] Ich war damals wirklich sehr strukturalistisch orientiert. [05:55] Das habe ich mir selber angelesen. [05:57] Also ich erinnere mich noch, als ich mit 20 Jahren die Ausgabe von Engler [06:06] des Cours de linguistique générale gelesen habe [06:10] und darin festgestellt habe, dass der publizierte Cours etwas ganz anderes ist. [06:17] Also ich war sehr von strukturalistischen Werken beeinflusst. [06:24] Ich habe natürlich auch Martinet, Potier, Bierwisch und andere gelesen. [06:30]
JMc: Wobei Bierwisch sich mit der generativen Grammatik schon auseinandergesetzt hatte. [06:34]
GH: Ja, ja, natürlich.
JMc: Ja. [06:37]
GH: Ich war auch ein bisschen Generativistin. [06:40] Das habe ich mir auch selbst so angeeignet. [06:44] Ja, aber Ricken kam dann nach kurzer Zeit, als er mir dieses Thema gegeben hatte [06:52] und hat gesagt, ja so ganz habe ich da wohl Ihre Interessen nicht getroffen damit [06:58] und ich könnte doch auch zur Geschichte des sprachlichen Relativitätsprinzips arbeiten. [07:05] Da war ich natürlich sofort einverstanden damit und habe auch begonnen, [07:12] habe die Dissertation eigentlich zügig geschrieben. [07:16] Es kam aber dann dazu, dass ich diesen Bereich verlassen musste, [07:25] weil ich Kritik daran geübt hatte, dass wir praktisch keine inhaltlichen Gespräche hatten, [07:33] dass wir nur über technische Sachen geredet haben. [07:37] Da war ich dann ein Jahr an der Slavistik tätig, habe also Russischunterricht gemacht, nicht mehr. [07:45] Das hat mich aber insofern gerettet, als ich Zeit hatte, meine Dissertation abzuschließen. [07:51]
JMc: Und war das Thema gesellschaftlich relevant? Also, sprachliche Relativität. [07:58]
GH: Nein, nein, nein, war nicht relevant. [08:02] Ich habe es ja nicht in dem Sinne behandelt, wie etwa der Erhard Albrecht aus Greifswald es gemacht hat. [08:09] Der hat ja immer nur gegen Weißgerber und andere argumentiert und das war alles ziemlich flach. [08:17] Ich habe ja eigentlich im 17. Jahrhundert begonnen mit Locke [08:23] und dann insbesondere das 18. Jahrhundert bearbeitet und schließlich bis Humboldt. [08:29] Also das war eigentlich völlig randständig, das war in der DDR nicht so angesehen. [08:37] War mir auch egal. [08:40] Ja, dann hatte ich eigentlich keine Chance, an einer Universität angestellt zu werden. [08:47] Ich hatte durch diese Kritik also einen Makel und sollte mich in der Schule bewerben, [08:54] wo ich eigentlich keine Chancen sah. [08:57] Ich war keine Lehrerin, [09:00] und ich habe mich an der Pädagogischen Hochschule Zwickau beworben, [09:06] wo es einen Sprachwissenschaftler gab, der die Abteilung Fremdsprachen geleitet hat, [09:14] und der war sofort überzeugt von dem, was ich vorstellte und hat eine Stelle für mich organisiert. [09:23] Dort habe ich dann auch meine Dissertation B, also die Habilschrift, begonnen. [09:32] Und ich war auch ein halbes Jahr in Moskau, wo ich viel in der Bibliothek gearbeitet habe, [09:40] auch mit bekannten Sprachwissenschaftlern Kontakt hatte, die mir auch geholfen haben. [09:48] Und ja, Ulrich Ricken wollte mich ja zurück nach Halle haben. [09:54] Es ging nicht so einfach. Auf eine Stelle konnte er mich nicht einstellen. [10:00] Er hat aber eine B-Aspirantur, also eine Aspirantur, ein Habilitationsstipendium, [10:12] über drei Jahre für mich bekommen. [10:15] Und ich bin dann auch nach Halle. [10:18] Viele haben das nicht verstanden, weshalb ich eine unbefristete Stelle an einer Hochschule aufgegeben habe [10:25] und dann für ein Stipendium nach Halle gegangen bin. [10:30] Ja, die Dissertation B war ja schon so halbfertig in Zwickau. [10:38] Nach anderthalb Jahren konnte ich sie auch einreichen. [10:42] Ich musste trotzdem noch ein Jahr auf dieser Aspirantur bleiben, [10:47] bis ich dann zur Dozentin berufen wurde. [10:51] Dozent ist heute jeder, der an einer Universität lehrt. [10:56] Damals war das so ähnlich wie heute eine W2-Stelle, [11:01] also eine Professur, noch nicht des höchsten Grades, aber man konnte selbstständig arbeiten. [11:09] Ich wurde dann auch gleich Leiterin des Wissenschaftsbereichs Romanistik. [11:16] Ich muss vielleicht noch sagen, wie ich mir die romanischen Sprachen angeeignet habe. [11:22] Eigentlich alles im Selbststudium mit Tonträgern, mit Radio und Büchern. [11:32] Ich war nie ein Kurstyp. [11:36] Das hat mich genervt, in Kursen Sprachen zu lernen. [11:41] Ja, also ich habe dann die Romanistik geleitet, [11:47] habe auch Studiengänge für Spanisch und Italienisch entwickelt. [11:54] Bis dahin war es einfach ein Lehrbereich Französisch. [11:58] Es war kein Habilitierter außer mir da. [12:02] Es gab Habilitierte, die waren aber verschwunden. [12:07] Ulrich Ricken hat die allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft geleitet [12:10] und ein Literaturwissenschaftler war in Paris am Kulturzentrum [12:17] und einer war in der Sektionsleitung. [12:20] Und also… [12:22] Die wissenschaftliche Leitung lag dann nur bei mir. [12:27] Ich habe mich dann auch von meinen Forschungsthemen her eigentlich umgestellt. [12:34] Ich wollte dazu forschen, was ich in der Lehre brauchte [12:38] und Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft war nicht unbedingt so für die Lehre geeignet. [12:45] Ich muss noch dazu sagen, das Thema meiner Dissertation B, [12:50] also der Habilitationsschrift, war ja der semantische Wertbegriff [12:55] vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. [12:58] Also wieder etwas wissenschaftshistorisches. [13:02] Damals war mir überhaupt nicht klar, dass das eigentlich für eine Karriere tödlich ist. [13:08]
JMc: [lacht] [13:09]
GH: Zwei Qualifikationsschriften. [13:13]
JMc: Ja, ich kann ein Lied davon singen. Ja. [lacht] [13:16]
GH: Mir war das völlig egal. [13:19] Es hat mich interessiert. Ich habe dazu gearbeitet. [13:23] Und in der DDR war das auch nicht so. [13:27] Also da konnte man sich das so leisten. [13:30] Und ja, ich wollte also zu etwas forschen, was ich für die Lehre gebrauchen konnte. [13:41] Und da haben mir eigentlich poststrukturalistische Themen gefallen. [13:48] Also ich habe viel zur Intertextualität damals gearbeitet, [13:53] also zu Merkmalen des Zitierens anderer Texte, [13:59] die nicht so vordergründig sind, [14:02] und auf diesem Wege bin ich dann auch zur Evidenzialität gekommen. [14:08] Evidenzialität ist ja die Markierung der Herkunft des Sprecherwissens. [14:15] Das hat mich also schon, ich möchte sagen so, am Ende der 80er-Jahre interessiert. [14:23] Dazu gekommen zu arbeiten, bin ich natürlich erst später. [14:27] Ich hatte in Halle sehr viel administrative Arbeit. [14:34] Man musste ja alles begründen, für alles Anträge stellen. [14:37] Das hat mich Tag und Nacht sozusagen beschäftigt. [14:41] Und dann kam die Wende. Das war noch mal ein Einschnitt. [14:47] Von den am Institut für Romanistik Beschäftigten in Halle ist eine einzige dort geblieben. [14:56] Die meisten wurden aus politischen Gründen entlassen. [15:02] Und diejenigen, die habilitiert waren, also nicht nur Romanisten, [15:07] sondern generell, wurden als Privatdozenten angesehen. [15:14] Also die hatten dann keine Stelle. [15:17] Das war einfach… Das Wort Dozent wurde als Kriterium genommen. [15:27] Die wurden entlassen, sobald Professoren berufen waren. [15:32] Professoren wurden sowieso meistens entlassen, [15:34] es sei denn sie waren kurz vor der Pensionierungsgrenze. [15:39] Da wurden einige übernommen, weil man ja Personal brauchte, [15:43] dass die Universität am Laufen hält. [15:47] Aber nicht aus der Romanistik. [15:48] Da gab es, wie gesagt, nur eine, [15:53] die dann sozusagen die Organisation des Instituts gemacht hat. [15:59] Also so eine Art wissenschaftliche Sekretärin. [16:02] Ja, also ich habe mich damals in Portugal beworben, [16:07] wo ich viele Kontakte hin hatte. [16:10] Da hätte ich auch hingehen können. [16:13] Ich war sozusagen schon auf dem halben Weg. [16:17] Und dann erreichte mich ein Telefonat von meinem Vater. [16:24] Der hat mir gesagt, es ist ein Brief gekommen. [16:29] Da steht drin, dass du einen Ruf nach Dresden hast. [16:34] War ich natürlich sehr froh, aber auch sehr überrascht. [16:38] Denn ich hatte mich beworben. [16:40] Ich hatte auch ein paar Publikationen hingeschickt. [16:42] Ich habe aber nicht vorgetragen. [16:45] Die haben damals das Institut neu aufgebaut [16:49] und sie haben einfach Leute, von denen sie wussten, [16:53] dass sie arbeiten können, berufen. [16:59] Das hing wahrscheinlich damit zusammen, [17:04] dass das Institut in Halle vom damaligen Präsidenten [17:09] der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, [17:12] Wolfgang Frühwald, evaluiert wurde. [17:16] Und den konnte ich irgendwie überzeugen. [17:22] Er war auch in der Berufungskommission in Dresden. [17:25] Daher stelle ich nach wie vor diese Verbindung her. [17:31] Ja, und dann bin ich nach Dresden gegangen [17:35] und in einem knappen Jahr danach kam dann der Ruf nach Potsdam. [17:41]
JMc: Und war Potsdam irgendwie besser als Dresden? [17:45]
GH: Naja, Dresden ist eine technische Universität. [17:48] Es war mir von vornherein klar, [17:51] dass die Romanistik randständig würde. [17:55] Und dann kommt hinzu, [17:58] dass in Sachsen Leute aus dem Osten nicht verbeamtet wurden. [18:03] Ich war ja noch nicht so alt, [18:06] dass ich mich hätte verbeamtet werden können. [18:10] Die hätten mich jederzeit rausschmeißen können. [18:12] Das war mir nach den Erfahrungen in Halle [18:17] auch nicht so geheuer. [18:21] An sich war das Klima in Dresden gut. [18:23] Auch der Dekan hat sich sehr dafür eingesetzt, [18:26] auch dass ich dahin komme. [18:28] Er hat es aber dann verstanden, [18:30] dass ich nach Potsdam gegangen bin. [18:33]
JMc: Und wann ist Potsdam zu einer Uni geworden? [18:35] Das war damals eine pädagogische Hochschule, oder? [18:38]
GH: 1991 ist die Universität gegründet worden. [18:43] Und es wurden eben auch neue Fächer eingerichtet. [18:45] Romanistik gab es vorher nicht. [18:48] Und da gab es eine Gründungsprofessorin. [18:52] Das war eine Literaturwissenschaftlerin. [18:55] Und ich kam dann zwei Jahre später, also 93, dazu. [18:59] Ja, da habe ich erst mal diese Forschungen eigentlich zu Sachen, [19:05] die ich in der Lehre brauchen konnte, fortgesetzt. [19:08] Ich habe damals viel Textlinguistik gemacht. [19:11] Sachen, die ich heute zum Teil kritisch sehe. [19:15] Obwohl es für die Lehre es ganz gut war. [19:18] Und ich habe erst mal so gut wie nicht [19:23] Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft gemacht, [19:25] weil ich ja begriffen habe, [19:27] dass das in Deutschland keine Zukunft hat [19:31] und dass man einen anderen Schwerpunkt haben sollte. [19:38] Ich würde meinen Zugang zur Sprachwissenschaft [19:44] nach wie vor als strukturalistisch geprägt ansehen, [19:50] aber ich habe auch viele poststrukturalistische Elemente aufgenommen, [19:55] und ich würde ihn auch als funktional betrachten. [19:58] Also ich habe zu funktionalen Kategorien gearbeitet. [20:03] Zur Aspektualität, zur Modalität. [20:07] Eben auch zur Evidenzialität. [20:09] Und ja, dazu habe ich dann auch viel publiziert. [20:15] Über Jahre fast ausschließlich. [20:20] Dann habe ich mich auch wieder [20:22] der Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft zugewandt. [20:26] Das hing einfach damit zusammen, [20:28] dass ich eingeladen wurde zu Vorträgen [20:31] und auch zu Publikationen. [20:34] Einladungen, die ich nicht ausschlagen konnte. [20:37] Und dann habe ich gedacht, [20:40] dass man eigentlich zu den Grundbegriffen [20:44] des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts [20:47] auch mal etwas Systematisches schreiben sollte. [20:51] Daraus ist dann das Lexikon sprachtheoretischer Grundbegriffe [20:56] des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts entstanden, [21:00] das ich ja gemeinsam mit Cordula Neis geschrieben habe. [21:05] Das ist kein Wörterbuch. [21:07] Manche denken, es ist ein Wörterbuch. [21:09] Es sind also monografische Artikel zu einzelnen Begriffen. [21:14] Und es ist wirklich begrifflich orientiert, [21:17] geht nicht von Bezeichnungen aus. [21:20] Cordula Neis war eine meiner ersten Doktorandinnen in Potsdam. [21:27] Sie hat sich von vornherein auch für die Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft interessiert, [21:35] hat zu der Berliner Preisfrage zum Ursprung der Sprache [21:39] ihre Dissertation geschrieben. [21:41] Das sah ich erst mal als nicht so problematisch an. [21:47] Sie hätte ja dann noch eine andere Habilschrift schreiben können. [21:53] Aber dann hat sie zwei Kinder gekriegt [21:56] und es blieb dann auch bei der Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, [22:02] hat sich also kumulativ habilitiert, [22:06] was ihr zum Glück nicht zum Schaden wurde, [22:10] denn sie hat trotzdem eine Professur bekommen. [22:13]
JMc: Ja, und eine ganz gute. [lacht] [22:16]
GH: Aber ich würde es eben niemandem raten, es so zu machen. [22:22]
JMc: [lacht] Ja, und die Einladungen, die du bekommen hast, [22:28] zu der Zeit, waren die aus dem Ausland oder aus Deutschland? [22:31]
GH: Aus dem Ausland.
JMc: OK. [22:33]
JMc: Aus Frankreich hauptsächlich? [22:34]
GH: Aus Frankreich, Spanien, aus Portugal natürlich. [22:38]
JMc: OK. [22:38]
GH: Ich habe die Beziehung zu Portugal nie wirklich aufgegeben. [22:43] Ich habe sogar noch drei, vier Jahre lang dort gelehrt. [22:47] Ich wollte mir das offen halten. [22:49] Ich habe Deutschland nicht getraut, [22:52] also ich war immer so mit einem Fuß in Portugal in den 90er-Jahren. [22:57]
JMc: Also die Kollegen in Frankreich, [23:01] also das sind hauptsächli
Podcast episode 49: Fritz Newmeyer
30 de setembro de 202531 min
In this interview, Fritz Newmeyer discusses linguistics, history of linguistics, and politics. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 49 Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1986 [1980] …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, Fritz Newmeyer discusses linguistics, history of linguistics, and politics.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 49
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1986 [1980]. Linguistic Theory in America, 2nd edition. Orlando: Academic Press.
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2022. American Linguistics in Transition: From Post-Bloomfieldian Structuralism to Generative Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:13] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:18] Today we’re continuing our series of conversations with living legends in linguistics, this time with a living legend in the history of linguistics, Fritz Newmeyer. [00:29] And I should add, actually, that Fritz has in fact made contributions to several areas of linguistics, [00:35] but given the focus of this podcast, his work in the history of linguistics is perhaps the most interesting for our audience. [00:43] So Fritz has written a number of important books on the history of American linguistics in the 20th century, the first of which is his 1980 Linguistic Theory in America, which has gone on to become the standard history of the generative school, [00:58] and the most recent of which is the 2022 American Linguistics in Transition, which examines the transition from American structuralism to generative grammar. [01:10] So to get us started, maybe we should go back to the very beginning and ask you how you got into linguistics. [01:17]
FN: Well, it’s a somewhat interesting story. [01:21] My undergraduate degree was in geology, believe it or not. [01:25] Don’t ask me why. [01:27] By my third year, I was totally uninterested in geology. [01:32] I applied to law school, didn’t really want to be a lawyer at that particular time in my life. [01:38] But my undergraduate roommate was Larry Horn, who is one of the main contributors to linguistic pragmatics. [01:47] He was a French linguistics major at the time and told me [01:51] — I had probably never even heard of linguistics; I may have seen the word somewhere — [01:56] and told me the last semester of my last year, “Why don’t you take this course?” [02:02] And the rest is history, my history, [02:07] and then Larry and I have continued to be great friends for the last, I don’t know, 60-something years, [laughs] because we’re talking about 1964, 1965. [02:18]
JMc: OK. But you clearly took to linguistics, right? [02:21] Like, clearly, the subject then clearly fascinated you. [02:25]
FN: Yes, absolutely, and I, at that point, decided I was going on to do graduate work in linguistics. [02:33] I didn’t even decide this until the very end of my last year as an undergraduate. [02:39] The only place I could go at the time was the University of Rochester, where I was an undergraduate with Larry, [02:46] but the next year, I applied to Illinois to study with Robert B. Lees, who was Chomsky’s first student. [02:57] I didn’t figure I had the marks to get into MIT, so I didn’t even try, but Lees was happy to take me in. [03:05] The department had just opened, and everybody was from MIT, all of my professors. [03:12] They were all from the first class of graduates at MIT. [03:15]
JMc: OK, so it was a sort of MIT outpost. [03:18]
FN: Yeah, the first MIT outpost. [03:21] There were many, many more…
JMc: OK. [03:23]
FN: …as time went on, but that was the first. [03:25]
JMc: MIT Manifest Destiny, maybe. [laughs] [03:27]
FN: That could very well be. [03:30]
JMc: So how did you go then from linguistics proper, if we can put it like that, to the history of linguistics? [03:38]
FN: Well, I was an ordinary linguist for at least 10 years, a syntactician mainly, [03:45] and while I think my work was competent, it certainly didn’t set people’s hearts a-thumping. [03:52] It was just basically competent. [03:55] But Robert B… This was the 1960s, and the battle between generativists and the old structuralists was still raging. [04:05] I mean, it was petering out, but Lees required that all the graduate students at Illinois read all of the main structuralist papers, mainly American, but also Jakobson, and Trubetzkoy, and Hjelmslev, and so on. [04:22] Now, most of my classmates hated that. [04:25] It was just so boring. [04:27] “We don’t do this any…” [04:28] But I loved it. [04:29] Not that I was in love with their theory, but to see what people had been doing really just 10 years ago, or 20, or 30, [04:38] and why we are taught at Illinois that this work was crap. [04:46] But at the same time, I mean, I certainly felt… [04:51] I saw all the problems with the post-Bloomfieldian work, but at the same time, it fascinated me, [04:56] and I never stopped being interested in how we got to where we are in linguistics, something that… [05:05] I mean, it’s a personal thing, I suppose, but always fascinated me and didn’t fascinate that many of my classmates and colleagues. [05:14]
JMc: So, I mean, you were writing, as you were just sort of indicating yourself, [05:18] you were writing contemporary history when you started doing the history of linguistics. [05:22]
FN: Yes. [05:23]
JMc: This is something that we’ve spoken about a little bit on the podcast already, the sort of difficulty of doing contemporary history, because you don’t have any historical distance, like, you’re there while it’s happening. [05:33] So how do you see that? [05:35] Do you see it as a problem, or… [05:38]
FN: Well, I mean, it’s both a problem and a benefit. [05:44] I’ve… [05:46] Linguistic Theory in America was both most praised and most condemned for exactly that reason, that I was writing about the present or the very near present as history. [05:56] Now, I think the benefit was that I knew all these people, even… [06:04] I mean, I even knew the old structuralists fairly well. [06:09] I mean, they were on their last legs, but I got to meet them at LSA meetings and so on. [06:14] So, I mean, I had insights. [06:17] I knew what these people were thinking and why they were doing it, and I was able to convey that, which conveyed a sense of interest and excitement. [06:28] At the same time, I was condemned for putting my own personal views, my own personal exp- [06:38] I mean, if I wrote something very negative about George Lakoff, who was very, very much alive at the time, George Lakoff would blow up. [06:47] He said, “You know, you can’t… Where does he get off writing about me? [06:52] I wasn’t thinking that. [06:53] That’s not why I did that.” [06:55] So while the reviews were mostly positive except here and there… [07:00] Historiographia Linguistica was not a positive review. [07:04] Stephen Murray, I don’t know if you ever met him, but he was kind of a close colleague of Konrad Koerner’s. [07:11]
JMc: OK. [07:12]
FN: But by and large, people were fascinated by it. [07:15] I mean, certainly it changed my life for the better, even though for the first time in 10 years [07:20] — which is… I mean, I had been out there for over 10 years — [07:25] people wanted to read what I wrote, and that was a very, very new experience for me, [07:30] because I was in a crowded field of syntacticians trying to write the definitive paper on English nominalizations or something like that, which nobody paid much attention to. [07:42] And then I wrote, it was just the right time for that book to come out, because generative grammar… [07:48] Well, 1980 was the first edition, and so people… [07:53] Generative grammar actually did have a history then, 1957 to 1980, gave me enough time to reflect on what was happening and what’s going on now. [08:05] So from a personal point of view, [08:07] even though I accept the criticism that my work was inevitably biased because, [08:14] being a practitioner in the field, I had my own ideas about the way syntax in particular should go, [08:23] nevertheless, I mean, people found it interesting, even if it was interest in the sense of, we have to condemn this personal biased view from just somebody who came out of… [08:36] Well, I’m not going to say out of nowhere, but was not one of the very leading figures of the field. [08:42] “Where does he come off?” [08:44]
JMc: Yeah. OK. [08:45] But what was your method then, writing this sort of contemporary history? [08:48] I mean, obviously, you cited people’s publications, as all historians do, [08:54] but I guess it wasn’t necessarily archival-based, like historians who are working with the past, [09:02] but they want to get some sort of contemporary perspective on the past, [09:06] will go into the archives and look at the primary documents from then, [09:10] but the primary document, or the producers of the primary documents, were living and breathing people that you associated with on a daily basis. [09:17]
FN: Exactly, and the archives were in my head. [09:20]
JMc: Yeah. [09:21]
FN: Going back… [09:22] I mean, I wasn’t in linguistics in 1957 by any means — I was 13 years old — but I had read every important paper. [09:31] I knew all the important people — some very well, some not so well, but I had met them all. [09:37] So yes, I mean, in terms of what a historiographer is supposed to do, I didn’t do it. [09:43] I think in American Linguistics in Transition, my more recent book, I did. [09:47] I mean, it’s full of archival material and interviews and things like that. [09:52] But I didn’t… [09:54] I mean, I wasn’t… At the time, I wasn’t saying this is my view of how to write history. [09:59] It just seemed like a really fun thing to do, [10:03] and I got a lot of encouragement, partly from Geoff Pullum, but also Joe Emonds, Barbara Partee, and Steve Anderson, [10:11] and Steve Anderson has worked in the history of linguistics. [10:14] They all read it very, very carefully. [10:17] I had dozens of pages of helpful criticism. [10:24] So I found from the beginning that there were people who wanted me to do this, [10:33] so whether I was violating every rule of historiography, I’m not sure, but I’m glad I did it. [10:41]
JMc: Well, I’m not sure histories are pr- you know, history’s like linguistics. [10:44] It’s not necessarily a prescriptive discipline, [10:46] like you do historiography using whatever means are available to you, [10:50] but I guess there is a guild of professional historians that like to complain that everyone thinks they can do history, but no one knows how to. [laughs] [10:58]
FN: I mean, well, you’re right. [11:00] I mean, when it came to Linguistic Theory in America, people were saying, “This is chronicling. This is not history.” [11:06]
JMc: Yeah. [11:06]
FN: And that’s fine. [11:09] I never said I am historian of linguistics. [11:11] I never went to any of the conferences. [11:13] Konrad Koerner was certainly not interested in the more recent stuff that I was writ- [11:19] I mean, he later published things that I wrote on the structuralists and so on. [11:22]
JMc: Yeah. [11:23]
FN: But the few people at the time who did history of linguistics, like Koerner or Dell Hymes… [11:32] In general… [11:36] Keith Percival, he was interested and very helpful, and he gave me some insights on the structuralists. [11:43]
JMc: OK, Percival, who wrote a scathing review of Koerner’s first book. [11:47]
FN: Yes.
JMc: Yeah. [11:48]
FN: Yes. I think one thing that made Keith such a good historiographer of linguistics is that he actually did linguistics. [11:57] I mean, he wrote a grammar of Toba Batak, I believe it was, a language of Indonesia, [12:05] and before he turned to the history of linguistics, his degree is from Yale, and he studied with the leading figures of the time, [12:13] whereas Koerner did have a degree in linguistics from Simon Fraser in Vancouver, [12:19] but they had a guy named Bursill-Hall there who taught… [12:23] You could study with him history of linguistics without studying linguistics, [12:29] and I think that’s how Koerner got his… [12:33] Koerner did, I mean, amazing things for the field of history of linguistics [12:38] — I mean, starting journals, conferences, discussions — [12:42] so my appraisal of him is definitely not all negative. [12:48]
JMc: Yeah.
FN: Not that you asked. [12:49]
JMc: Yeah. [FN laughs] [12:50] So, well, I mean, so do you think you need to be a linguist to write history of linguistics? [12:56]
FN: I think you need to know a lot about linguistics, at least. [13:01] I mean, I’ve read a fair amount in the history of science, history of physics, history of chemistry, and so on, and biology. [13:09] By and large, these people know the field inside and out. [13:13] There are a lot of people who write in the history of linguistics who don’t know linguistics inside out. [13:21] They’re possibly, let’s say, instructors in the history of French, [13:26] and they discover a medieval French grammarian who nobody’s written about before, [13:34] but they don’t know current linguistics. [13:39] Is that a problem? [13:40] I’m not sure. [13:42] I would think in order to have a well-rounded view of work that’s done in the past, you need to know what’s going on in the present, and vice versa. [13:52]
JMc: Yeah. [13:53] I guess, I mean, also the problem is what you would call linguistics. [13:57] We have an academic discipline now called linguistics, but there wasn’t necessarily anything directly comparable in the medieval period. [14:05]
FN: No.
JMc: So… Yeah. [14:06] So, I mean, maybe the problem is projecting our academic discipline of linguistics backwards in the medieval period. [14:14]
FN: No, it didn’t exist as an academic discipline, but then neither did physics. [14:18]
JMc: Yeah, sure. [14:19]
FN: It was natural philosophy. [14:22] But I take your point that people didn’t call themselves… [14:27] I mean, you could change the name from philologist to linguist or whatever, [14:32] but yeah, I mean, the principles of linguistics are much more recent. [14:38] The person they’re writing about certainly wouldn’t be expected to know the difference between langue and parole and so on, [14:45] but I think that it’s important that the person writing about the medieval French linguist have an understanding of how these investigations have changed over time and just not held in a vacuum, just not be in a vacuum. [15:02] It’s like, I mean, this is not just a criticism of history of linguistics. [15:07] I have a phonetician friend, Pat Keating, who, like many phoneticians, goes to the Acoustical Society meetings every year because there’s always something of interest, [15:18] and she says every year, year after year, some acoustic… somebody in the Acoustic Society discovers the phoneme. [15:29] “Here’s the interesting thing, you know, there’s all these sounds, but some of them can be grouped together,” and they’ve read no linguistics. [15:39] And you could say the same about sociology. [15:42] I once asked Bill Labov why so little linguistics is done in sociology departments, and he said, “They don’t want to take five minutes to learn the basic principles of linguistics.” [15:56] And there are people who write, who are in the field of history of linguistics, broadly conceived, who I don’t think know anything about modern linguistics, [16:10] and I think that is not good. [16:14]
JMc: Yeah, OK. [16:16] So what do you think the point of doing history of linguistics is, then? [16:20] What does history of linguistics have to contribute? [16:23]
FN: Well, I think the stock answer is to avoid the mistakes of the past. [16:28] I’m not sure that ever works. [16:30] But I think you can get a sense of history and direction by looking at the field, and I’m interpreting this through my own eyes. [16:38] It seems to me that every major step forward in linguistics has been achieved by saying, “We don’t have to talk about this stuff, this other stuff.” [16:51] So what was a great breakthrough in the 19th century in historical linguistics? [16:57] That you can study language change without knowing or caring much about the culture and society of the people who are speaking the language. [17:06] Regularity of sound change was kind of the culmination of that. [17:10] Then came the structuralist revolution, and people discovered that you can write a lot about the structure of language without taking that much account of how language is used. [17:23] Now, here it’s more debatable, but I think everybody agrees that, I mean, almost everybody, that we can write a grammar of a language without writing about the folktales in that language or how people relate in a hierarchy. [17:41] Structure is independent of that. [17:43] And then with the Chomskyan revolution, again, there was a further restriction that we can say a lot about the structure of language without talking about meaning, at least to get the basic aspects of structure, which at least the European structuralists did not believe. [18:03] They may have practised differently, but they certainly didn’t act like they believed that. [18:08] So, I mean, I think you can get a perspective of that, saying, “I’m not going to look at this, I’m not going to look at that,” is not necessarily a bad thing, [18:18] and that’s what, of course, generative grammarians have mostly been criticized for. [18:22] In fact, it could be a very good thing, as history has shown us. [18:25]
JMc: OK. So you think there is progress in linguistics? [18:29]
FN: Well… [chuckles] I think there’s been general progress over the last couple centuries. [18:37] If you’re going to ask me, has there been progress in the last 20 years, I would say I’m not sure. [18:45] I’d have to think about that. [18:46]
JMc: OK. [18:48]
FN: I t
Podcast episode 48: A History of Modern Linguistics
14 de setembro de 202528 min
In this interview, Randy Harris interviews James McElvenny about his recent book A History of Modern Linguistics. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 48 McElvenny, James. 2024 …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, Randy Harris interviews James McElvenny about his recent book A History of Modern Linguistics.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 48
McElvenny, James. 2024. A History of Modern Linguistics: From the beginnings to World War II. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
McElvenny, James. 2025. Entstehung und Entwicklung der modernen Linguistik: Von den Anfängen bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:28] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:32] Today we’re going to try something new, and that is that I’m going to become the interviewee, [00:38] so our interviewer today is Randy Harris, and I’ll throw over to him right away, and he can take us from here. [00:45]
RH: Thanks, James. [00:46] Just to dispel the mystery for everybody as to why we’ve switched over, it’s because we’re going to get a chance to talk about your fairly recent book, A History of Linguistics: From the Beginnings to World War II, and I’m really pleased to have the opportunity. [00:59] It’s a great book. [01:00] It’d be a great textbook because it’s a smooth, efficient read but still quite detailed for students’ needs, but also just a really interesting read for linguists in general. [01:11] I learned a lot, and I’m sure everybody would. [01:15] I also wanted to mention, before we get started, another podcast that most listeners probably know about, Ingrid Piller’s Language on the Move. [01:23] The April 10th episode back in 2024 also was about your book, and I’d recommend people go listen to that. [01:29] There’ll be some overlap obviously, but lots of new stuff as well, so… [01:34] All right, let’s get started. [01:36] We’ll start with the most obvious question: What are the beginnings, and what is it that begins? [01:42] You start with William Jones’ 1786 lecture to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, which is a familiar starting point for the history of modern linguistics, but then you set it aside fairly quickly, so why don’t you tell us what begins and when it begins? [02:00]
JMc: My book is really about the academic discipline of linguistics, and that starts when linguistics becomes institutionalized in universities. It becomes a subject with professors, students, textbooks, and so on. [02:14] This institutionalization happened in Germany in the early 19th century, when the first professorships for comparative grammar were created. [02:22] I believe Franz Bopp was the first to have this descriptor in his job title when he was called to the University of Berlin in 1821, [02:31] but as your question implies, historical-comparative linguistics has generally, in the received historiography, been cast as the first scientific linguistics. [02:43] This is a narrative you can hear even from the mid-19th century, when comparative linguistics was a young field, but it can be doubted whether comparative linguistics was really something revolutionary that swept away everything that came before. [02:58] Comparative linguistics didn’t come out of nowhere. [03:01] It had predecessors, and the approaches that came before it had their own scholarly and scientific validity. [03:09] My scepticism about the received narrative is not new, I should say. [03:13] Anna Morpurgo Davies, in her history of linguistics in the 19th century, also highlights it. And Anna Morpurgo Davies’ work was a major source for me in writing that book, and an inspiration for me in how to approach the topic. [03:29]
RH: Let’s go to the other end, then — not the end of linguistics, obviously, but the end of the book. [03:34] Why World War II? [03:37]
JMc: Yeah, so the book ends with World War II. [03:39] The reason for that is that, with World War II, the centre of gravity of linguistics, and of the whole scientific world, shifts from Europe to America. [03:48] There’s definitely continuity between pre- and post-World War II scholarship, but I think that the shift is significant enough to mark an end point. [03:58] So that’s the end of the book, but if I have the opportunity, I will continue the narrative. [04:02] My publisher does actually want a sequel, which I guess would go from World War II to the present, although I’m a bit dubious about committing to that project just yet. [04:12] There are two major problems, I think, with writing the history since World War II. [04:17] One is that there was a massive expansion in academia after World War II, even greater than the expansion that happened in the 19th century, [04:26] and as such, there’s just so many different schools and approaches in linguistics and related disciplines that would have to be dealt with in any history from this period after World War II, and it would be very difficult to decide what to include. [04:41] The problem of what to include was already one that I had in the book that I’ve just written, where I had to be very, very selective about whose work I decided to talk about. [04:53] What I wanted to do in writing the book was to provide a coherent narrative, so I tried to confine myself to the most influential figures and their ideas, [05:03] so these would be the scholars who set the tone for the field, the ones everyone talked about, whether that was to cite them favourably or to attack them. [05:13] And then the second problem with treating the history of linguistics after World War II is that it becomes contemporary history, and this is history that is still very much alive. [05:24] I mean, some of the historical figures that you’d be writing about are still alive, and many people are still actively invested in their ideas and in pursuing the research programs that they set up, so there’s no historical distance to the things that have happened since World War II, or not in the same way that there is with things before World War II. [05:46] So, for example, we can look back at things like behaviourism and early 20th-century programs of rational, social, and psychological reform, maybe even with a little condescension, and we can consider them with detachment, but things like the cognitive revolution and generative grammar are active research programs that people are working in right now. [06:10] The context of Cold War science that these programs emerged in may not exist as such right now as it did a few decades ago, but the infrastructure of research and scientific funding that we inhabit at our present moment is a direct descendant of these Cold War structures, even if it’s an increasingly starved and emaciated descendant, [06:34] so any commentary on these topics is inevitably an intervention into present-day active research, [06:42] so any narrative you construct would have a very different character to one about the history of linguistics up to World War II. [06:51]
RH: Of course. [06:52] You’d have to have some kind of stopping point. [06:54] You can’t take it right up to the current moment, to 2025, if things are changing so dynamically, with these pre-trained language models taking over the landscape and so forth. [07:06] You’d have to find some sort of pinch point to end it, and it’d just be almost arbitrary as where you’d stop it. [07:13]
JMc: Yeah, I guess so. Although, having said that, if you think about the sort of… the golden age of modern linguistic historiography [07:22] — so the sort of, the new dawn of the history of linguistics, which was probably in the 1970s, you know, with people like Konrad Koerner and Anna Morpurgo Davies and, you know, that whole gang… [07:35]
RH: Yeah. [07:35]
JMC: When they wrote their histories of linguistics, they often ended with Chomsky and the generative program, which was new. [07:43] You know, that was contemporary at the time. [07:46] So, the previous generation, or the generation of my grandparents perhaps you could call them, they weren’t afraid to write contemporary history. [07:55]
RH: True enough, and for me, as you know, The Linguistics Wars, all the folks were still alive, many of them are still alive, that I was chronicling, and I found that really exhilarating to be able to talk to them. [08:08] It is a bit more problematic to get some distance from people that you’re talking to on a regular basis, but if you talk to enough of them, you can kind of abstract the overall picture from all the individual perspectives. [08:22]
JMc: Yeah, that’s true. [08:24]
RH: So, ending with World War II is significant, not just for the implications it has for linguistics directly as a kind of stopping point you chose, [08:35] but also it’s representative of the way that you deal with the history overall in the sense that you incorporate a lot of major geopolitical events, the revolutions of 1848, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, and so forth, [08:50] so maybe you can talk a little bit, please, about what those geopolitical events were and what their impacts were on linguistics. [08:57]
JMc: Yeah, sure. In writing this book, I set out to write a social and intellectual history of linguistics, so there’s already plenty of literature tracing the minutiae of the technical developments in different sub-areas of linguistics [09:11] — and don’t get me wrong, that’s a noble pursuit — but I wanted to try to contribute something a little bit new to the field of linguistic historiography by putting it all in context. [09:21] So I make an effort in the book to signpost the main technical developments in linguistics, so things like the comparative method, sound laws, phoneme theory, and as we get closer to the present, many fundamental concepts that continue to have currency, like all the terminology and distinctions introduced by Saussure, and so on, [09:41] but my book is not intended to be an introductory textbook to linguistics, but to show how these basic ideas in the field and these basic methods emerged in their specific intellectual environment. [09:56] So among the political developments that I talk about, I highlight how the Napoleonic Wars spurred on German nationalism, which was a major motivating factor for the Grimm brothers, for example, [10:08] and around 1848, I mentioned how Schleicher’s materialism, his realism in reconstructing historical forms, and his treatment of languages as literal biological organisms, was connected to his liberal democratic politics, [10:24] so this scientistic mindset was coded in that particular social environment as pro-democracy and directed against the traditional aristocratic order, [10:37] and more recently, I look at things like behaviourism in America, which was Bloomfield’s preferred psychology, and which marketed itself as a way of improving the individual in the Progressive Era in America. [10:52]
RH: Thanks, James. You touched on this obviously just a moment ago, but let’s focus a little bit more closely on the intellectual developments rather than the geopolitical ones, [11:03] so biology, philosophy, the relationship of language to the mind, the body, society, you touch upon all of those as well in the book. [11:12] Can you elaborate now on those connections? [11:14]
JMc: Sure, so, you know, biology was, of course, a constant companion of linguistics throughout the 19th century. [11:21] As I mentioned in the book, Friedrich Schlegel coined the term “comparative grammar” on a direct analogy with comparative anatomy, [11:29] and Schleicher’s metaphysics was centred around a literal biological interpretation of the metaphor of languages as organisms, [11:37] and this inspired him to talk about the morphology of languages, a term that still has currency in linguistics today in more or less the same sense, even if the biological link is broken or at least not as apparent to us now. [11:52] Neo-Kantianism is also very important as part of the background to structuralism, [11:57] so the idea that structure imposed on substance is the key to language, human psychology, epistemology, and so on, is one that has very deep neo-Kantian roots. [12:09] And, of course, my treatment of these topics is not exhaustive, neither in terms of covering the full breadth of intellectual currents that interacted with the study of language, nor in terms of going into the full depth of each topic. [12:23] I’ve aimed to provide a concise introduction and to offer directions to the reader into the labyrinth of literature surrounding these topics. [12:32]
RH: Maybe that’s an opportunity to plug another book of yours, the one you edited, Form and Formalism in Linguistics, since that overlaps a fair amount with what you’re just talking about now. [12:42]
JMc: Yeah, yeah. People should definitely go out and read it, and that one is an open access book, so you can just download it completely legally from the publisher’s website, Language Science Press. [12:54]
RH: All right. Again, these themes are weaving in and out of your answers, but I wonder if you could just concentrate now on specific figures that contributed to the development of linguistics in this period. [13:05] Your account isn’t a great man account, but, of course, certain figures coalesce and channel intellectual developments and shape the field. [13:12] Who are the major players in this period? [13:15]
JMc: Yeah, well, as I mentioned a moment ago, I tried to focus on the big names, so the people who everyone talks about or was talking about at the time, and the figures that I picked are fairly standard, so there are names like Bopp, Jacob Grimm, Humboldt, Steinthal, Schleicher, William Dwight Whitney, the Neogrammarians as a group, Saussure, Jakobson, Bloomfield and Sapir. [13:38] But I’ve also discussed a few more peripheral figures if I thought they offered an interesting counterpoint to the mainstream discussion, so that would be people like Philipp Wegener, Michel Bréal, and people who weren’t really linguists at all, like Karl Bühler, Malinowski, and Boas. [13:56] There are, of course, any number of figures who are the favorites of some scholar today who they will have wished turned up in the book. [14:03] I mean, I even have my own pet 19th-century German linguist who does actually appear in the book, but at the periphery, and that’s Georg von der Gabelentz. [14:12] He was a specialist in Chinese and was a continuer of Humboldtian linguistics at the very end of the 19th century, at a time when it was no longer cool to be a Humboldtian, and hadn’t yet become cool again as it did in the 20th century. [14:28] And just on this notion of great man history, yeah, my thinking there is that there are figures who are undoubtedly important for the influence that they had on the field, whether that was because they were geniuses who single-handedly achieved major innovative insights, or whether it’s just because they happened to be in the right place at the right time. [14:52] But one problem with great man history is that it easily degenerates into hagiography, so everything that the great man said and wrote has to be a work of genius, so obvious inconsistencies and incoherence has to be explained away. [15:08] And when the great man said something that is not compatible with present-day values, we turn into contortionists to prove that that’s not what they really meant. [15:18] You can see this problem in the way that some people write about figures like Humboldt and Saussure, and I might just leave that there, [15:26] so on the level of casting aspersions about the hagiographic scholarship of some other historians without giving any specific examples or naming names. [15:36] So yeah, a history of the kleine Mann is perhaps a better way to do a narrative history with characters involved in events. [15:44] What was the life and work of this little figure on the periphery like, as they were buffeted by the cultural and intellectual currents of the time? [15:53] Or if they stepped out, why were they considered old-fashioned, outrageous, or a crackpot? [15:59] That is potentially a much more interesting approach, but yeah, as I said, what I did in the book myself was to follow a fairly standard roster of important figures, but as people who are representative of broader intellectual currents. [16:15]
RH: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about one of those peripheral characters then, Gabelentz, who you clearly have affection for? [16:23] What’s the basis of the affection, and what does he contribute? [16:27]
JMc: Well, I mean, affection, yeah, I wonder. [laughs] I wonder if it’s affection. [16:32] But I mean, so he’s a bit of a weirdo. [16:34] That’s something I like about him, because I think that’s something we’ve got in common, [16:37] so you know, as I said, he was a Humboldtian right at the end of the 19th century, when that was no longer cool. [16:43] He was completely out of date. In fact, one reviewer even said of him, after he died, that with Gabelentz dies a line of scholarship that goes back to Wilhelm von Humboldt, and that Gabelentz’s magnum opus, his book, Die Sprachwissenschaft, [17:00] that it seemed like a monument from a former time. [17:04] And I got interested in Gabelentz because his father, Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, was a gentleman scholar in the sort of early to mid-19th century, and collected a lot of grammars of “exotic,” in inverted commas, languages from around the world, [17:20] so of, you know, languages in the Americas, in the Pacific, in Australia, in East Asia, and so on. [17:27] And Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, the father, did typological work in his spare time along the Humboldtian model. [17:35] In particular… [17:36] So when I first came to Germany, I was in Leipzig, which was actually, back at the end of the 19th century, was the stronghold of the Neogrammarians, and the Gabelentz family comes from Altenburg, which is a little town just down the road from Leipzig. [17:52] It used to be the capital of an independent duchy, back in the period of Kleinstaaterei. [17:59] But Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, his day job was working in the government of the duchy, and he spent his spare time doing these linguistic studies. [18:08] Anyway, there were some Lutheran missionaries who were to be sent out to Australia, you know, which is where I’m from. [18:16] They were to be sent out to South Australia, and due to various political machinations going on in the Kingdom of Saxony and the various other states in Germany at that time, [18:27] they couldn’t get ordained in the Kingdo
Podcast episode 47: Geoff Pullum on Geoff Pullum
31 de agosto de 202533 min
In this interview, we talk to Geoff Pullum about his career, his contributions to linguistics, and how he sees the future of the field. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 47 …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Geoff Pullum about his career, his contributions to linguistics, and how he sees the future of the field.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 47
Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey Pullum K., eds. 2002. Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. 2018. Linguistics: Why it matters. Cambridge: Polity.
Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band – Que Sera, Sera (1967) (YouTube)
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:16] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:20] Today we’re embarking on our series of oral history interviews with living legends in linguistics, and our first living legend is Geoff Pullum, who we’re meeting here in Edinburgh. [00:33] So, Geoff, could you please briefly outline your career, so your transition from professional musician, which was your first job, as I understand it, to uni student and then academic, and then your move from the UK to America and then back to the UK? [00:53]
GP: The whole of that? [00:54]
JMc: The whole of that, yeah. [00:56]
GP: Well, first, I should make it clear that as a musician, as a piano player in a rock and roll band initially, who later moved on to Hammond organ, [01:08] I was in that job because it was really the only way I could sink below the jobs I had had up to that point. [01:18] I was a high school dropout and had no ideas at all of what I was going to do, [01:25] and playing the piano in a rock and roll band doing German residencies and German nightclubs and American air bases seemed better than sweeping floors. [01:38]
JMc: OK. Which parts of Germany were you in? [01:40]
GP: The Rhineland, mainly. [01:42]
JMc: OK. [01:43]
GP: For five years, I made my living as a professional musician, and Pete Gage and I tried to form a band that was really inspired by the performances of James Brown, a great Black American showman, band leader and so on. [02:04] But there were a lot of things we didn’t have, like a singer with that kind of vocal range and this kind of business acumen and so on. [02:14] Building a band means being sophisticated about money, technology, and networking, knowing the right people and how to deal with outright crooks and so on. [02:32] At the end of five years, I was beginning to find it a terrible way to earn a living. [02:39] The tedium is hard to get across. [02:44] You travel all day, maybe five, six hours sitting in a van up motorways that you’ve seen before. [02:52] You spend two hours hauling equipment in and setting stuff up. [02:56] You then spend one hour maybe playing the same songs you’ve played before, and then more waiting and hauling all the stuff out. [03:05] Then you sleep in a cheap hotel and get back in the van and do it again. [03:11] It’s a horrible life. [03:13] I wanted glamour and excitement. [03:15]
JMc: I mean, it doesn’t sound that much different from being a university lecturer repeating the same material [laughs] [03:20]
GP: Oh, it’s very, very different. [03:21]
JMc: OK. [03:22]
GP: And I found being a Professor of Linguistics, which I was basically within about 10 years after I quit the music business, vastly better than being a rock musician, so much better in every single way. [03:36]
JMc: But your band was relatively successful, wasn’t it? [03:39] I’ve seen a clip even from German TV of you guys performing. [03:43]
GP: As Geno Washington & the Ram Jam Band… [03:46]
JMc: Yeah, exactly. [03:47]
GP: …it was moderately successful. [03:50] That’s not quite good enough to make a lifetime career. [03:56] We were contemporary with the Rolling Stones, and I really admired them for having the tenacity, the staying power and the business acumen to just turn it into a multi-million-dollar business. [04:10] We didn’t have that. [04:12] The Ram Jam Band had broken up within three years of being founded, leaving me with absolutely nothing because I had no high school education to speak of. [04:22] I had been failing all my exams at the age of 16. [04:27] I had to start from scratch, and that was a struggle. [04:31] I would not advise anyone to follow this path. [04:38] By dint of sixth form college courses, as they’re called in Britain, I scraped together enough qualifications that I was minimally qualified to enter a university and applied to six of them, [04:53] and just one, the University of York, took a chance on me, mainly because the head of department happened to know my academic referee, a teacher called Charles Duchesne, who really is someone I owe a lot to. [05:11] He happened to know him personally and called him on the phone, and Duchesne apparently said, “Well, yes, he’s got a chequered background, and… But he is smart, take a chance.” [05:23] Robert Le Page did that and allowed me into the University of York’s Department of Language, [05:32] partly through misunderstandings, but the interview went well and I was in. [05:39] And I discovered that linguistics was fascinating and I started working at it all the time. [05:46] How I knew to apply for linguistics departments was another accident. [05:51] In the 1960s, there were no departments in Britain that gave an undergraduate major course in linguistics, [06:01] so back in 1963, ’64, ’65, I couldn’t have gone to university and studied linguistics, [06:12] but by 1968,it was possible at just two places, and one of them had admitted me, despite my dreadful academic record. [06:24] Once I was working for the first time in my life on something academic that I found rewarding and interesting, I just sort of took off. [06:36] The way I look at it is, you don’t really need to be some born genius to achieve reasonable success. [06:47] If you work all the time on it, put all your energy into it, because of your interest, you’ll do pretty well. [06:54] So I did pretty well, and ignoring the advice of people who told me, “Well, you can’t possibly continue with it. There are no jobs.” [07:03] I applied to do a PhD at Cambridge, and within one year at Cambridge, though it was a terrific year, a formative year, when I met most of the linguists of my generation that I ever knew [07:17] — it was a marvellous coming together of numerous people like Gerald Gazdar and Ewan Klein and Greville Corbett, Andrew Radford; [07:27] all sorts of people happened to be there in Cambridge, mainly because Ed Keenan had an appointment at the Research Centre at King’s College and along with Bernard Comrie was running a seminar on universal grammar, which we all attended, [07:45] so it was a terrific year at Cambridge. [07:49] But by the end of it, I had actually been offered a lectureship at University College London after a brief interview visit and giving a sample job talk. [08:00] And that paid more than being a graduate student. You didn’t need a PhD to be a lecturer in those days. [08:07]
JMc: And was the field expanding as well, like that there were actual jobs? [laughs] [08:13]
GP: Well, there was one for me, and I always tell graduate students who are worried about the job market is, [08:20] yeah, there may be hundreds of students on the market looking for academic jobs. [08:26] You don’t have to worry about them. [08:28] You’re going to be up against maybe three or four people. [08:31] You just have to give a better talk than they did on that day and you’re in. [08:39] You’ve got to have enough of a record that you can get placed on some shortlist, but in the end it narrows quite a lot. [08:46] I was offered this job at University College London by Neil Smith and his close friend Deidre Wilson and Dick Hudson, and those three people became my colleagues as I began life as a lecturer in 1974. [09:03] I didn’t particularly like living in London. [09:06] By this time, having seen all of England when I was a rock musician touring, I didn’t really like England, and there were all sorts of things happening that led me to like it even less. [09:19] The gathering storms of first trade union destruction of various industries and then the Conservative Party’s attempt to destroy the trade unions and so on, it was a usual time of terrible political conflict. [09:35] But by the end of the 1970s, it began to look like Margaret Thatcher was going to storm into power at the next election, as indeed she did, and she stormed in on a wave of racism. [09:49] The vote share of the National Front, the extreme-right party of the day, collapsed to almost nothing when Thatcher was elected because the racists had what they needed. [10:01] Now, I was married to a Black Jamaican I’d met in a club while I was a musician and we had a son, [10:08] and my son was six years old, [10:11] but as he played on the floor with a toy car one Sunday morning as his mother and I listened to a TV interview with Margaret Thatcher talking vaguely about repatriation — voluntary, of course — [10:29] my son looked up and said, “Are they going to send mummy back to Jamaica?” [10:36] He could see what she was saying was, “We’re going to get rid of the coloureds.” [10:42] I thought, this is so horrible. Somehow I’ve got to escape from this culture, from this country. [10:51] And one day, yet another pure piece of luck here, one day the phone rang and Fritz Newmeyer, well-known linguist already, who I had met in Edinburgh at a linguistics association conference and kept in friendly touch with ever since, [11:11] was on the phone from Seattle, Washington, asking if I would like the idea of being a visiting professor at the University of Washington for six months. [11:22] I said, “I’ll take it!” [11:25] You’re meant to negotiate. [11:26] I just said, “Fritz, yes, I’ll come. Get me out of here.” [11:31] And by 1980 I was a College Visiting Professor at the University of Washington. [11:38] I had published quite a bit, and that’s why I was known well enough. [11:42] During that year, a job came up at the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus, where Jorge Hankamer was beginning to form a linguistics department from almost nothing, and he advertised a post for a syntactician. [12:01] His idea was, form a cluster of people who can talk to each other and really have a specialism. [12:10] Don’t just hire one of every kind of linguist there is at first. [12:14] Build a department on some solid research and collaboration. [12:18] So although he was a syntactician, he wanted to hire another one, and he knew me already from my work and from correspondence, [12:28] so I interviewed at Santa Cruz and got the job. [12:32] So by 1981, in the summer of 1981, I was an Assistant… Associate Professor at UC Santa Cruz because my publications were now sufficient that they had given me a tenured position from the start. [12:48] Another piece of fantastic luck. [12:51] So, I think, so far the bottom line of all this is, I had numerous pieces of extraordinary luck, and I wouldn’t advise anybody to imagine that things I did were a good idea or a way that you could get into academic life. [13:13] It was just totally wacky and strange and coincidental, and I’ve been very, very lucky. [13:22] I’ve taken you from being a high school dropout in South London… [13:25]
JMc: Yeah. [13:26]
GP: To being an Associate Professor at UC Santa Cruz through a path that nobody else could follow, and I wouldn’t recommend it… [13:34]
JMc: Yeah. [13:35]
GP: And it shouldn’t really have happened, but it did. [13:38]
JMc: Yeah. [13:39]
GP: From then on, Santa Cruz turned out to be a wonderful place to build a career. [13:44] Hankamer’s project to build a new Department of Linguistics succeeded. [13:50] It was not like Pete Gage’s attempt to build the Ram Jam Band. [13:54] This became really successful. [13:56] By the time we had a PhD program and were producing graduate students with PhDs in 1991 onward, we were already ranked in the top 10 in at least one survey of linguistics departments in the USA. [14:15] UMass Amherst tended to be right at the top. [14:19] MIT was always up there. [14:22] UCLA was great, but for Santa Cruz to have got into the top 10 was just quite an amazing result. [14:29] And almost every year, another hire was made, [14:34] so one by one, we were joined by Judith Aissen, and Bill Ladusaw, and Jim Mccloskey, and Sandra Chung, and Junko Ito, Armin Mester, Jaye Padgett and so on, Donka Farkas. [14:51] All of these people had real research careers, but also a real enthusiasm for undergraduate teaching was what we had started with. [15:01] So the most unusual thing about Santa Cruz was that it was founded on enthusiastic and rigorous undergraduate teaching and built a PhD program on the top of that later. [15:15] That’s the exact opposite of what happened at places like UC San Diego, [15:21] where it started with research institutes, began with some graduate programs to give the researchers someone to teach, [15:31] and gradually built undergraduate programs below that, as it were, and turned into a fine campus, much bigger than Santa Cruz and much more successful in research. [15:44] The difficulty at Santa Cruz was trying to keep research alive on a small campus that was dominated by undergraduates and just couldn’t bring in the biggest grants. [15:58] There was no way little Santa Cruz could get a training centre like UCLA could get, or an institute for theoretical physics like Santa Barbara could get, or Nobel Prizes like Berkeley could get. [16:13]
JMc: But there are no Nobel Prizes in linguistics. [16:15]
GP: That’s right, and once Joan Maling had suggested the idea to me that I should start writing opinion columns about linguistics, [16:26] I think she suggested that in 1987, I wrote a Topic Comment column for that series on how there are no Nobel Prizes in linguistics, no trips to Stockholm for us, [16:45] but meanwhile in the other big subjects — where Santa Cruz often did reasonably well, considering how small it was — things were very different. [16:54] At Berkeley, more Nobel Prizes were awarded to the faculty than the Soviet Union achieved in its entire history, and that was just one campus of what is now a 10-campus system, [17:09] so the high-ups at the University of California used to point out that the full 10-campus University of California is unquestionably the greatest public university the world has ever seen. [17:25] And I had had the good luck to just happen to be at the smallest but also the prettiest campus of the world’s greatest public university. [17:36] It was like there wasn’t much chance of a way up from there. [17:40] I had been so fortunate that surely nothing else was going to happen. [17:45] I would just eventually die there and my ashes would be scattered on the Monterey Bay. [17:50] That’s what I thought until 2006 when, for various complicated reasons, I decided to just put in an application for a couple of chairs in Britain to see how it went. [18:06] As a result of that, I was interviewed and introduced to the University of Edinburgh and found that my then-wife, the philosopher Barbara Scholz, [18:19] was completely correct when she described Edinburgh as the most intellectually lively place she’d ever been in. [18:28] It was fantastic. The visit was so great. [18:31] When I was offered the professorship of general linguistics at Edinburgh, [18:36] I finally realised I actually am going to leave Santa Cruz, and I did, in 2007. [18:43] I moved from Santa Cruz to Edinburgh. [18:46] People say all the time, they said, “Oh, but the weather.” [18:50] Now, it’s true. [18:51] Santa Cruz has glorious climate. [18:54] The weather, to put it simply, is approximately the same as you get in heaven. [18:59] Warm sunshine, cool air from the Pacific Ocean. [19:03] It’s gorgeous. [19:05]
JMc: But you haven’t been to heaven yet, have you? [19:07] And do you think you’ll ever get there? [laughs] [19:09]
GP: I’m quite confident that it has the weather that… [19:12]
JMc: Yeah.
GP: … Santa Cruz has. [19:14]
JMc: Yeah.
GP: It just seems obvious. [19:17] Now, what they don’t tell you in the brochures about Santa Cruz is that it can be different at some times of the year. [19:25] When you see the January storms and it’s cold and wet and high winds are blowing in atmospheric rivers off the Pacific Ocean, it can get pretty awful. [19:36] And in Edinburgh that happens a lot right through the winter. [19:41] But what I found after arriving in Edinburgh was, it simply didn’t matter. [19:46] I wrapped a warmer coat around me and laughed at the weather. [19:51] I thought, yes, the weather is trying to make me go away. [19:56] But I’m not going to. [19:58] This is the best. [20:00] Because Edinburgh, I think, has the most remarkable collection of language scientists I know of in any university in the world. [20:10] I’ve never seen anything like it. [20:11] It’s hard to count because of the huge numbers of postdocs working in the Informatics Forum next door and definition of psycholinguistics and so on, [20:22] but I think it’s in the region of 60 full-time researchers who actually got some profile in the subject between the four departments that are relevant: linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and informatics. [20:40] It’s extraordinary, and there’s just always stuff going on, as you know. [20:45] So I actually found somewhere to go from Santa Cruz that was a promotion. [20:54] Once again, quite a bit of luck was involved. [20:57] By 2007, I think I was best known for the contributions I’d made between 1995 and 2002 to the making of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, which is the biggest thing in my research career, for sure. [21:14] Rodney Huddleston invited me in when he found that his big plan for such a grammar was foundering. [21:23] The team he had originally put together in Australia were just not coming up with the stuff. [21:29] It was all falling apart, [21:30] and Cambridge University Press said, “You’ve got to do something,” and suggested me as a possible collaborator, [21:38] so in 1996, for
Podcast episode 46: Philip Kraut on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
30 de abril de 202532 min
In this interview, we talk to Philip Kraut about the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, their scholarly contributions and political engagement. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Philip Kraut about the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, their scholarly contributions and political engagement.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 46
See Wikisource for scans of the Grimms’ original works:
https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Br%C3%BCder_Grimm
https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Jacob_Grimm
https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Grimm
DWB – Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (Ed.). 1965–2018. Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. Neubearbeitung. Vol. 1–9. Stuttgart: Hirzel. (www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB2/)
Beck, Heinrich, Herbert Jankuhn, Hans Kuhn, Kurt Ranke, Reinhard Wenskus, Heiko Steuer et al. (Eds.), Rosemarie Müller (editorial team) & Johannes Hoops (founder). 1973–2008. Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. Vol. 1–35. Index Vol. 1–2. 2. ed. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter. (https://www.degruyter.com/database/gao/html)
Bluhm, Lothar & Stefan Neuhaus (Eds.). Handbuch Märchen. Berlin 2023. (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66803-0)
Denecke, Ludwig. 1971. Jacob Grimm und sein Bruder Wilhelm. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Diez, Friedrich. 1836–1844. Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen. Vol. 1–3. Bonn: Weber. (https://books.google.de/books?id=5dgTAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false)
DWB. 1854–1961 – Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. Vol. 1–16 (32 Subvolumes). Leipzig: Hirzel. Quellenverzeichnis. 1971. Leipzig: Hirzel (http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/)
Friemel, Berthold; Vinzenz Hoppe, Philip Kraut, Holger Ehrhardt und Roman Alexander Barton (Eds.), im Anschluss an Wilhelm Braun und Ludwig Denecke. 2022. Briefwechsel der Brüder Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm mit Johann Martin Lappenberg, Friedrich Lisch und Georg Waitz. Stuttgart: Hirzel, Jacob Grimm’s political letter: 772, Nr. 46.
Grimm, Jacob. 1819–1840. Deutsche Grammatik. Vol. 1–4. Göttingen: Dieterich.
Grimm, Jacob. 1828. Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer. Göttingen: Dieterich.
Grimm, Jacob. 1834. Reinhart Fuchs. Berlin: Reimer.
Grimm, Jacob. 1835. Deutsche Mythologie. Göttingen: Dieterich.
Grimm, Jacob. 1838. Jacob Grimm über seine Entlassung. Basel: Schweighauser.
Grimm, Jacob. 1843. Notizheft N. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nachlass Grimm 294. (https://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB00032DCD00000000)
Grimm, Jacob; Wilhelm Grimm (Eds.). 1812. Kinder- und Hausmärchen. [Vol. 1]. Berlin: Reimer. (Several volumes and editions: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Kinder-_und_Hausm%C3%A4rchen)
Grimm, Wilhelm (Ed.). 1838. Ruolandes liet. Göttingen: Dieterich.
Grimm, Wilhelm. 1824–1825. Handschriftliches kulturgeschichtliches Lexikon in zwei Bänden. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nachlass Grimm 210. (https://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB0003411000000000)
Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1877–1913. Sämmtliche Werke. Ed. by Bernhard Suphan. Vol. 1–33. Berlin: Weidmann. (https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Johann_Gottfried_Herder)
Kraut, Philip. 2023. Die Arbeitsweise der Brüder Grimm. Stuttgart: Hirzel. (https://biblioscout.net/book/99.140005/9783777633954).
Kraut, Philip. 2023. „Nahe Fremde. Über August Wilhelm von Schlegels Vergleich altdeutscher und altindischer Literatur (Herzog Ernst, Ramayana).“ In Wirkendes Wort 73: 207–221.
Kraut, Philip. 2023. „Wilhelm Grimm kritisiert Homer. Literaturhistorische Etymologie am Beispiel der Sage von Polyphem.“ In Wirkendes Wort 73: 411–436.
Martus, Steffen. 2009. Die Brüder Grimm. Eine Biographie. Berlin: Rowohlt.
Verhandlungen der Germanisten zu Frankfurt am Main am 24., 25. und 26. September 1846. Frankfurt am Main: Sauerländer 1847.
Transcript
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:17] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:22] Today we’re going to be doing something a little different, namely we’re going to do an episode in German. [00:28] The topic today is the Grimm Brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm. [00:32] These two scholars are so intimately entwined with our modern understanding of German language and literature, not to mention the entire Germanic subfamily, as well as with the development of the modern field of Germanistik, that it’s only appropriate that we discuss them in German. [00:48] Our guest today is Philip Kraut, a researcher at the Humboldt University in Berlin, who’s an expert on the Grimms. [00:56] Ich begrüße also jetzt Philip Kraut. Willkommen im Podcast, Philip. [01:00]
PK: Hallo, vielen Dank, dass ich dabei sein darf. [01:03]
JMc: Du hast dich also viel mit den Brüdern Grimm befasst. [01:06] In deinem ersten Buch hast du die Arbeitsweise der Brüder Grimm untersucht. [01:11] Dein Buch ist 2023 bei Hirtzel erschienen, übrigens auch in Open Access. [01:17] Das heißt, dass man das Buch kostenlos und völlig legal herunterladen kann. [01:23] Den Link findet man auf der Webseite dieser Podcast-Folge. [01:27] Also zu den Fragen. Fangen wir mit den grundlegendsten Fragen an. [01:32] Wer waren die Brüder Grimm und warum reden wir heute noch von denen? [01:37]
PK: Ja, das ist natürlich eine ganz große allgemeine Frage und ganz allgemein könnte man antworten, [01:43] die Brüder Grimm gehören zu den wichtigsten Schriftstellern in deutscher Sprache. [01:49] Schriftsteller wäre jetzt erstmal ein neutraler Begriff. [01:52] Bekannt sind sie ja vor allen Dingen in Deutschland, aber auch international für ihre Märchensammlung. [01:58] Da würde man ja eher von Schriftstellerei für ein breites Publikum ausgehen. [02:03] Aber sie waren zuallererst Philologen. [02:06] Das heißt, sie waren Sprachwissenschaftler, Literaturwissenschaftler und auch auf eine Art Kulturwissenschaftler. [02:13] Obwohl nach 1800, als die Brüder Grimm angefangen haben zu arbeiten, [02:18] diese Fächer noch nicht voll ausgebildet waren im heutigen Sinn. [02:21] Das heißt, sie haben mit ihrer Arbeit, die sie, kann man sagen, ja im Privaten angefangen haben, [02:27] auch dazu beigetragen, dass solche Fächer wie die moderne Sprachwissenschaft, [02:32] die moderne Literaturwissenschaft, die Germanistik erst entstanden sind. [02:35] Zum Beispiel erst um 1810 gab es ja die Universität in Berlin mit dem ersten Lehrstuhl für deutsche Sprache und Literatur. [02:43] Den hatten die Brüder Grimm noch nicht, diesen Lehrstuhl, aber sie haben kontinuierlich so ungefähr seit 1807 publiziert. [02:51]
JMc: Und haben die beiden dann die Märchensammlung als wissenschaftliches Projekt betrachtet oder war das eher für ein allgemeines Publikum? [02:58]
PK: Beides. Das ist ja das Interessante. [03:01] Also die Märchensammlung, später auch die Sagensammlung, gehörten eigentlich zu einem allgemein größeren wissenschaftlichen Projekt, [03:08] einer Geschichte der Poesie oder auch zu einer allgemeinen Rekonstruktion eines deutschen oder europäischen Altertums. [03:17] Gleichwohl haben sie die Märchensammlung, die ja 1812 zuerst erschienen ist, auch geplant fürs breite Publikum. [03:25] Auch dass zum Beispiel Eltern diese Märchen vorlesen können. [03:29] Das kann man aus Widmung und Vorreden auch erkennen. [03:32] Also es hat diese Doppelfunktion. [03:34] Aber andere Werke der Brüder Grimm waren dezidiert wissenschaftlich und die allermeisten Publikationen waren wissenschaftlich. [03:40] Und wenn man jetzt mit Menschen spricht über die Brüder Grimm, die ja nur die Märchen kennen, diese Menschen, sind dann oftmals verwundert, dass die Brüder Grimm zuallererst Wissenschaftler waren. [03:50] Also man kennt zum Beispiel noch das Deutsche Wörterbuch, was ja auch das Grimmsche Wörterbuch heißt. [03:56] Und damit haben sie ja auch zum Beispiel die Lexikografie modernisiert. [03:59] Also zum Beispiel das Oxford English Dictionary ist auch abhängig von dem Grimmschen Wörterbuch. [04:04] Oder die Deutsche Grammatik ab 1819 von Jacob Grimm ist noch bekannt. [04:08] Aber alle anderen vielen Arbeiten sind eigentlich allein unbekannt. [04:13] Also zum Beispiel die deutsche Mythologie, also mythologische Forschungen von Jacob Grimm oder die rechtsgeschichtliche Forschung oder auch bestimmte historisch-kritische Editionen, mittelalterliche Literatur. [04:27] Das sind eher so in der Breite unbekanntere Werke, die aber ganz wichtig sind, [04:32] weil die Brüder Grimm mit diesen Werken jeweils diese Einzelfelder geprägt haben und einzelne wissenschaftliche Fächer geprägt haben, wie zum Beispiel die Rechtsgeschichte oder die germanische Altertumskunde. [04:43] Also sowas wie das Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde geht direkt auch auf Forschung und auf diese Tradition der Brüder Grimm und ihrer Mitforscher zurück. [04:56] Oder die modernen Formen von Lexikografie, würde ich auch sagen, sind ganz stark beeinflusst durch die Brüder Grimm. [05:02] Also den Einfluss merkt man überall, auch so im normalen Sprachgebrauch, [05:06] zum Beispiel im Deutschunterricht sowas wie Ablaut, Umlaut, starke Verben, [05:10] schwache Verben, die ja sogar, sowas wie Ablaut wird sogar im Englischen oder in Fremdsprachen ja auch verwendet als deutsches Wort. [05:19] Das sind alles Begriffe, die zum Beispiel Jacob Grimm, wenn nicht erfunden hat, aber auch geprägt hat und als Fachterminus eingeführt hat. [05:26] Und da merkt man wirklich einen ganz breiten Einfluss in den Geisteswissenschaften. [05:32]
JMc: Die ganzen geisteswissenschaftlichen Fächer zu dieser Zeit haben sich noch nicht herausgebildet, [05:38] aber haben die Brüder Grimm ihre Arbeit als ein einziges Projekt betrachtet? [05:43] Also gehörten ihrer Meinung nach ihre verschiedenen Projekte zu verschiedenen Fachgebieten? [05:49] Oder war das nur alles ein Gesamtprojekt? [05:52]
PK: Also ich glaube, fachliche Grenzen waren den Brüdern Grimm schon bewusst. [05:56] Also sie wussten ganz genau, jetzt spreche ich mit einem Historikerkollegen oder ein anderer Kollege war vielleicht dezidierter Sprachwissenschaftler wie zum Beispiel Franz Bopp oder so, [06:08] oder zum Beispiel die Juristen haben nochmal ein ganz anderes Fach bespielt. [06:14] Aber die Brüder Grimm haben trotzdem diese verschiedenen Fächer versucht zu vereinen, weil sie interessiert waren an der Rekonstruktion – [06:23] und Rekonstruktion ist ein wichtiger Begriff, nicht nur für die Sprachwissenschaft – [06:26] an der Rekonstruktion eines gemeinsamen Altertums. [06:30] Also der Vorgeschichte der europäischen oder dann später auch, hätte man gesagt, der indogermanischen Völker. [06:38] Und diese Geschichte, die Brüder Grimm waren vor allen Dingen an der Geschichte interessiert, die nicht schriftlich belegt ist, sondern bestimmte Urformen dieser Geschichte, um ihre spätere Zeugnisse zu rekonstruieren. [06:50] Und diese ganzen Fächer, die du angesprochen hast, die kommen in allen Publikationen eigentlich vor. [06:57] Also auch so ein rechtsgeschichtliches Werk wie die Rechtsaltertümer ist ganz stark abhängig von der Sprachwissenschaft zum Beispiel, [07:04] weil altnordische Überlieferung mit zitiert wird, ausgewertet wird, althochdeutsche Überlieferungen. [07:13] Das ist alles nur möglich gewesen. Oder auch meinetwegen gotische Wörter oder so. [07:18] Das ist alles nur möglich gewesen dadurch, dass Jacob Grimm grammatische Studien betrieben hat und diese Sprachen als einer der ganz wenigen auf der Welt überhaupt verstehen und lesen und interpretieren konnte. [07:30] Es ist aber nicht so, das wird auch manchmal falsch verstanden, dass Jacob Grimm zum Beispiel jetzt an der Sprachwissenschaft interessiert war, nur um sprachwissenschaftliche Phänomene zu erforschen, sondern zuallererst waren beide Brüder Grimm wirklich [07:45] an der Poesie-Geschichte, also an der Literaturgeschichte, an der Volkspoesie interessiert. [07:50] Und dann haben sie gemerkt, OK, um diese alten Quellen und Überlieferungen überhaupt zu verstehen, muss man grammatische Studien betreiben und auch die Sprachgeschichte erforschen. [07:59] Und natürlich hatte das dann einen Eigenwert, also auch die sprachhistorische Forschung. [08:05] Aber man muss die sprachhistorische Forschung immer im Zusammenhang mit so altertumskundlichen Studien sehen. [08:12] Und im Laufe des Lebens der Brüder Grimm wurden dann ja auch bestimmte Fächer institutionalisiert, da gab es dann erste Lehrstühle. [08:21] Also Jacob Grimm ist 1863 gestorben, da war dann die Germanistik schon weiter fortgeschritten, also mit mehr Lehrstühlen an mehr Universitäten als jetzt 1810 oder 1820. [08:35]
JMc: OK. Und warum hatten die beiden das Ziel, das deutsche Altertum zu rekonstruieren? [08:45]
PK: Das liegt an der allgemeinen, würde ich sagen, geistesgeschichtlichen Situation um 1800. [08:52] Also vorbereitet hatten das schon im Zeitalter der Aufklärung seit 1740, 1750 andere Forscher. [09:01] Also es gab auch eine spätbarocke oder frühaufklärerische Tradition, auch Texte aus dem deutschen Mittelalter oder aus dem germanischen Altertum zu edieren. [09:13] Und es gab so verschiedene Vorgängerfiguren wie Herder. [09:18] Herder war ein wichtiger Schriftsteller und auch, kann man sagen, mit heutiger Diktion, Kulturhistoriker, der sich auch schon für Volksliteratur und Volksüberlieferung interessiert hat. [09:32] Und man muss dazu ja auch wissen, dass Philologie vor allen Dingen Bibelphilologie bedeutete und klassische Philologie um 1800. [09:42] Aber dass jetzt die Volkssprachen überhaupt wissenschaftsfähig waren, das war ein relativ neues Phänomen, auch wenn es viele Vorgänger gab. [09:51] Aber es war der allgemeine Trend um 1800. [09:54] Und man würde jetzt vielleicht auch das Schlagwort Romantik, also sogenannte Romantik nennen. [09:59] Das ist natürlich auch ein polemischer Begriff, der dann von Heinrich Heine später verwendet wurde. [10:05] Also Heinrich Heine hat dann diese ganzen Akteure um 1800 auch als romantische Schule bezeichnet. [10:12] Und natürlich hatte das auch jetzt speziell im deutschen Sprachgebiet politische Voraussetzungen und politische Ziele. [10:21] Denn das deutsche Sprachgebiet war ja politisch zersplittert. [10:25] Die napoleonischen Kriege haben das alte Reich zerschlagen, 1806. [10:31] Und natürlich hatten diese Bestrebungen, so ein gemeinsames germanisches Altertum zu rekonstruieren, auch den politischen Hintergrund für die Gegenwart, also hinzuarbeiten zu einer politischen und kulturellen Einigung der deutschsprachigen Gebiete. [10:46]
JMc: OK. Haben die Deutschen Gelehrten zum Beispiel die Leute in Frankreich beneidet, also dass die Franzosen zum Beispiel eine Kulturgeschichte, die bis zum alten Rom zurückreicht? [11:00] Aber die Deutschen müssen das rekonstruieren? Ist das nicht belegt, also nicht schriftlich belegt? [11:05]
PK: Also beneidet würde ich nicht sagen. [11:08] Also Jacob Grimm hätte solche sozusagen Einflüsse von außen, wie ja vielleicht auch die Römer dann in Gallien waren, oder später das Christentum oder so, hätte er erst mal tendenziell als negativ betrachtet. [11:21] Und zu beneiden waren zum Beispiel ja die französischen Gelehrten oder Philologen auch nicht, weil auch ja in Paris ja auch erst sowas wie die Orientalistik sich entwickelt hat zu der Zeit. [11:35] Und das waren dann Parallelentwicklungen. [11:37] Also es gab zum Beispiel sehr gute Orientalisten in Frankreich, aber überhaupt sowas wie die Romanistik. [11:43] Soweit ich weiß, ist die Romanistik auch erst im Zuge der Entwicklung der Germanistik mit entstanden. [11:49] Das waren auch teilweise deutsche Gelehrte, die dann, also so ich glaube Friedrich Diez, die dann im Nachgang von Jacob Grimm das Gemeinsame der romanischen Sprachen erforscht haben. [12:02] Ja, das Problem war ja auch eher, dass man aus politischen Gründen auf Frankreich tendenziell herabgeblickt hat. [12:10] Napoleon und das Franzosentum und solche Schlagworte gab es da. [12:15] Ja, invasive Gefahr natürlich gesehen wurden durch die napoleonischen Kriege. [12:20]
JMc: OK. In den Büchern, in denen die Brüder Grimm versucht haben, ein breites Publikum zu erreichen, zum Beispiel in der Märchensammlung, war das nur Unterhaltungsliteratur oder soll das auch so erbauliche Literatur sein? [12:37] Soll das das deutsche Volksbewusstsein irgendwie entwickeln, oder? [12:42]
PK: Ja, das könnte man schon sagen, aber jetzt nicht ganz hart ideologisch. [12:47] Also die Brüder Grimm waren keine ganz starken Ideologen eines völkischen Denkens oder so. [12:54] Da greife ich jetzt auch auf Formulierungen von Ludwig Denecke zurück, der ein wichtiger Grimm-Forscher im 20. Jahrhundert war. [13:02] Und Ludwig Denecke schätzte die Brüder Grimm tatsächlich so ein, dass sie ein sehr freiheitliches Bewusstsein hatten und eine politische Auffassung, die auch in Nationalstaaten überstiegen hat. [13:15] Und das sieht man ja auch in der Forschung, dass die Brüder Grimm auch andere Sprachen und Kulturen und Literaturen sehr wertgeschätzt und erforscht haben, zum Beispiel die ganzen slavischen Kulturen. [13:25] Und die Märchen sollten natürlich ein Bewusstsein dafür aufbauen, [13:32] dass solche alten Geschichten, wie sie ja noch mündlich teilweise tradiert wurden oder auch schon lange in der Literatur belegt waren, dass das jetzt keine niedere Literatur war, keine mindere Kunstform, sondern dass eigentlich so ein bisschen das Märchen und Sagen so ein bisschen wie Tiere oder Pflanzen sind, die kurz vor dem Aussterben stehen. [13:55] Also es hat schon diese kulturpflegerische Komponente, dem deutschen Publikum zu zeigen, wir haben hier diesen Schatz an Volkspoesie oder Naturpoesie, also natürlich im Volk, im Mittelalter gewachsene Poesie, die auch teilweise spontan oder in der Gemeinschaft des Volkes entstanden ist. [14:13] Und diese Poesie ist übe
Podcast episode 45: Beijia Chen on Neogrammarian networks
31 de março de 202529 min
In this interview, we talk to Beijia Chen about the citation networks binding the Neogrammarians as a school. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 45 Amsterdamska, Olga. 1985 …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Beijia Chen about the citation networks binding the Neogrammarians as a school.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 45
Amsterdamska, Olga. 1985. “Institutions and Schools of Thought: The Neogrammarians.” American Journal of Sociology 91: 332–358.
Amsterdamska, Olga. 1987. Schools of thought: the development of linguistics from Bopp to Saussure. Dordrecht u.a.: Reidel.
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Beveridge, Andrew & Jie Shan. 2015. “Network of Thrones.” Math Horizons 23 (4): 18–22.
Chen, Beijia. 2020. “Der Einfluss der akademischen Interaktionen auf die Auflagen- und Wirkungsgeschichte von Hermann Pauls Prinzipien.” Historiographia LInguistica 47 (2–3): 188–230.
Crane, Diana. 1972. Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Einhauser, Eveline. 1989. Die Junggrammatiker: ein Problem für die Sprachwissenschaftsgeschichtsschreibung. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.
Fangerau, Heiner. 2009. “Der Austausch von Wissen und die rekonstruktive Visualisierung formeller und informeller Denkkollektive.” In Netzwerke: Allgemeine Theorie oder Universalmetapher in den Wissenschaften? Ein transdisziplinärer Überblick, edited by Heiner Fangerau & Thorsten Halling, 215–246. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.
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Jankowsky, Kurt R. 1972. The Neogrammarians: a re-evaluation of their place in the development of linguistic science. The Hague & Paris: Mouton.
Klausnitzer, Ralf. 2005. “Wissenschaftliche Schule.” In Stil, Schule, Disziplin, edited by Lutz Danneberg, Wolfgang Höppner & Ralf Klausnitzer, 31–64. Frankfurt am Main u. a.: Perter Lang.
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Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1976a. “Towards a Historiography of Linguistics. 19th and 20th Century Paradigms.” In History of linguistic thought and contemporary linguistics, edited by Herman Parret, 685–718. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1981. “The Neogrammarian Doctrine: Breakthrough or Extension of the Schleicherian Paradigm. A Problem in Linguistic Historiography.” Folia Linguistica Historica II (2): 157–178.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Morpurgo Davies, Anna. 1978. “Analogy, segmentation and the early Neogrammarians.” Transactions of the Philological Society 76 (1): 36–60.
Morpurgo Davies, Anna. 1986. “Karl Brugmann and late nineteenth-century linguistics.” In Studies in history of Western linguistics, edited by Theodora Bynon & Frank Robert Palmer, 150–171. Cambridge et.al.: Cambridge University Press.
Morpurgo Davies, Anna & Giulio Lepschy. 2014 [1998]. History of Linguistics. Volume IV: Nineteenth-Century Linguistics. London & New York: Routledge.
Oesterreicher, Wulf. 1977. “Paradigma und Paradigmenwechsel – Thomas S. Kuhn und die Linguistik.” Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie 3: 241–284.
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Weingart, Peter. 2003. Wissenschaftssoziologie. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.
Zawrel, Sandra. 2015. Funktion und Organisation germanistischer Fachzeitschriften in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Eine Analyse am Beispiel der Germania. Vierteiljahrsschrift für deutsche Altertumskunde (1856-1868) und der Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprache und Literatur (1874-1891). (Alles Buch. Studien der Erlanger Buchwissenschaft LV.) Buchwissenschaft / Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. ISBN 978-3-940338-39-6.
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:16] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:20]
Today we’re talking to Beijia Chen, who’s a historian of linguistics at the Free University of Berlin. [00:28] Beijia has just completed a major project on the Neogrammarians, one of the chief schools of modern linguistics, [00:35] which we’ve heard a bit about already in previous episodes of the podcast. [00:39] Beijia is going to tell us all about her research today. [00:42] So, Beijia, tell us, who were the Neogrammarians, [00:47] and how do they fit into the history of linguistics? [00:51]
BC: Hi James, thank you for having me here. [00:54] Actually, for the question “Who were the Neogrammarians?” there is no simple answer to that, [01:01] and that was exactly one key finding in my dissertation, because they just formed a highly dynamic and open network. [01:11] Well, usually the Neogrammarians are understood as a group of peer linguists who initially emerged at the University of Leipzig during the last decades of the 19th century, [01:23] and they were known for their systematic approach to sound changes, [01:28] emphasizing ideas like the regularity of sound laws without exceptions, [01:34] the neutralized role of analogy, [01:36] and the importance of spoken language and uniformitarianism in language development. [01:41]
However, the question who belonged to this group remains controversial. [01:47] Actually, my research reveals that the only consistently or universally recognized core figures were Karl Brugmann and Hermann Osthoff, [01:59] both Indo-Europeanists, originally from Leipzig University, [02:05] and editors of the periodical Morphologische Untersuchungen, [02:09] where the so-called Neogrammarian Manifesto was published. [02:14] And beyond these two scholars, [02:18] the Neogrammarians formed a highly dynamic network, [02:23] making exact categorization or labeling difficult and maybe not that meaningful. [02:30] Many linguists of that time cannot clearly or wholly be classified as either Neogrammarians or their opponents, [02:39] as their relationships were much complex and fluid. [02:43] Ultimately, my doctoral thesis doesn’t aim to provide a definite answer to the question “Who exactly were the Neogrammarians?”, [02:51] although it was the initial question that guided me during my research. [02:56] Instead, the thesis argues that labelling the members of this group can be misleading due to their dynamic relationships and shifting identities. [03:08] However, this does not imply that we should avoid saying who the Neogrammarians were — [03:15] then we could not start our research at all. [03:18] Rather, my point is that their identities should be understood dynamically, [03:24] and despite these dynamics, [03:27] the Neogrammarians still exhibited a recognizable structure as a scientific school, [03:33] with weak organizational and institutional ties, though, [03:37] but a common interest and relative greater homogeneity in sound laws without exceptions and other related theories, [03:47] and this can be observed in an analysis of the sentiment and the content of their citations in journal articles. [03:57]
How do the Neogrammarians fit into the history of linguistics? [04:01] Well, they have received much attention in the historiography of linguistics due to their long-lasting theoretical influence. [04:11] By making a critical turning point, [04:14] they helped transform linguistics from its historical-comparative roots [04:20] into a modern and empirically grounded scientific discipline, [04:25] and they directly inspired Ferdinand de Saussure as well as later developments in linguistics, [04:32] and they also made scientific contributions to the scientific organization in the linguistic field, [04:38] including the publication of journals and handbooks, [04:44] which began and flourished during the time of the Neogrammarians. [04:49]
I would say the Neogrammarians are also interesting on the meta-level of the historiographical studies. [04:56] They have been frequently analyzed using Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific revolution because of the revolutionary characters. [05:06] Scholars have debated extensively whether their work represented a paradigm shift in linguistics. [05:15] However, there remains considerable skepticism about applying Kuhn’s paradigm concept to linguistics or other disciplines in humanities, [05:27] and various attempts have been made to adapt Kuhn’s model, for example, [05:32] by introducing concepts like Zeitgeist proposed by Konrad Koerner, [05:37] or transitional phases, Übergangsphase, proposed by Eveline Einhauser. [05:45] Other historians have tried different frameworks, such as Imre Lakatos’ research program, [05:54] but these alternatives still haven’t overcome the limitations of paradigm-based approach. [06:01] So there is a dilemma, lack of a suitable alternative to Kuhn’s paradigm model. [06:08] In this context, the Neogrammarians become particularly relevant [06:14] because they promote historians to rethink how we view scientific development in linguistics, [06:22] motivating a more dynamic and flexible historiographical approach. [06:29]
JMc: What was new about the work of the Neogrammarians [06:32] that could be considered to have brought about a paradigm shift in linguistics? [06:37]
BC: The revolutionary part maybe could be seen in two aspects. [06:45] The first one is, the Neogrammarians distinguished themselves from earlier linguists [06:51] mainly through their systematic and scientific approach to language change, [06:56] and especially in terms of sound laws, [06:59] and unlike their predecessors, they insisted that sound changes were regular and exceptionless, [07:06] emphasizing empirical evidence and rigorous methods, [07:11] and they also gave greater importance to spoken language analogy as explanations for language changes, [07:19] and marking a clear shift from earlier scholars. [07:24]
In my research, there is a part on their contribution in an institutional aspect, [07:34] and like the… they also made significant contributions in regards to publication of journals and handbooks. [07:43] I conducted analysis of cited literature, [07:47] selecting works that explicitly identified themselves as handbooks in their titles, [07:54] and then I performed a quantitative analysis of their works and their authors. [07:59] For example, in 1878, the most frequently cited authoritative works [08:04] were mainly written by Schleicher and Curtius, who represented the older generation of scholars. [08:12] However, we can observe a turning point when the Neogrammarians began to take over the authority positions. [08:20] Interestingly, during this period, book series also emerged, [08:25] most of them structured within a framework of a handbook, [08:30] and the Neogrammarians had played a significant role in this development. [08:36]
And also, academic journals emerged prominently in the 19th century [08:42] and served as crucial media for scholarly exchange, [08:46] yet they really have been studied systematically, [08:49] and their formation, such as why they were founded, [08:55] what types of articles they published, and citation practice, [09:00] and the roles of editors and even publishers, has remained understudied. [09:06] Academic journals actually at that time provided an essential platform for scholarly exchange, [09:14] like something between informal blogs and formal publications nowadays, [09:20] and scholars interacted sometimes immediately with one another within one journal volume, [09:26] and editors played also a crucial role in facilitating these discussions [09:32] and sometimes participated actively themselves. [09:35] For example, Graziadio Ascoli inserted once a footnote commentary that went over four pages, [09:43] and those footnotes were also sometimes cited by the other scholars. [09:50]
The second difference in my study is adapting the network perspective, [09:55] and this approach resolves the traditional dichotomy between individuals and social structures [10:03] by emphasizing the connections between individual scholars. [10:07] My network-based approach contributes to historiographic research mainly in three ways. [10:13] Firstly, it allows an exploratory data-driven analysis without first defining who exactly belonged to this group. [10:25] Instead of first deciding who the Neogrammarians were, as previous research usually did, [10:33] I took a middle way between the data-driven and data-based. [10:38] I compiled a broad list of scholars typically identified as Neogrammarians [10:44] and examined their citation relationships with each other and with other scholars. [10:50] I did find some facts that differ from the list that I compiled at first, [10:59] like Heinrich Hübschmann, often labeled as a Neogrammarian, [11:05] was actually only loosely connected to the core figures, [11:09] and moreover his letter to Georg Curtius reveals a rather distant attitude toward the Neogrammarians. [11:16] Conversely, Alexander Brückner, rarely discussed in the context of the Neogrammarians, [11:22] actively cited the core figures and explicitly praised their methods, [11:28] demonstrating a much stronger connection. [11:32] Secondly, the network perspective allows a scalable reading of the data. [11:37] It allows distant reading, meaning analyzing the general structure of scholarly interactions, [11:45] as well as close reading, meaning exploring the citation context and other related text materials, [11:52] and this approach enabled me to combine a quantitative digital analysis, [11:58] such as measuring network density or average path length of the network, [12:05] to get an overview or some structural information of the research community, [12:11] and together with traditional qualitative analysis of text and archival manuscripts, [12:19] helping me to interpret the statistic results in a meaningful way. [12:25] Thirdly, by adopting the network approach, [12:30] I attempt to move beyond the limitations of Kuhn’s paradigm framework. [12:36] Emphasizing revolutionary shifts and unified scholarly groups [12:41] does not adequately fit the history of linguistics or other disciplines in humanities. [12:49]
JMc: How did you arrive at this approach of applying digital humanities methods [12:54] to construct a network of citations showing how the Neogrammarians hung together as a school? [13:00]
BC: I first came across the network perspective during a course on historical network analysis, [13:07] which I took while attending some general history classes at the beginning of my doctoral studies. [13:14] A particular study that made a strong impression on me [13:17] was a network analysis of characters in a series, Game of Thrones, [13:24] done by Beveridge and Shan in 2016, [13:28] and the study built a network based on character co-occurrence [13:33] and identified the whole structure of the network and the various central roles of its characters. [13:40] What initially impressed me most was the visualization. [13:45] I’m quite a visual person and interested in the interpersonal connections, [13:51] and seeing the relationships between the individuals laid out clearly was fascinating. [13:58] Of course, I quickly learned that visualization, while attractive, should be used carefully. [14:05]
JMc: OK.
BC: Yeah. [14:06] A good visualization needs to provide real insights into the data and not just look appealing. [14:12]
JMc: Why is that? [laughs] [14:15]
BC: Because sometimes we’re just fascinated with visualizations, [14:21] but sometimes actually we don’t really need visualization to get to the point that we want to make. [14:28]
JMc: Yeah, OK.
BC:</
Podcast episode 44: Ian Stewart on the Celts and historical-comparative linguistics
28 de fevereiro de 202525 min
In this interview, we talk to Ian Stewart about modern ideas surrounding the Celts and how these relate to historical-comparative linguistics. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Ian Stewart about modern ideas surrounding the Celts and how these relate to historical-comparative linguistics.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 44
Crump, Margaret, James Cowles Prichard of the Red Lodge: A Life of Science during the Age of Improvement (Nebraska, 2025).
Davies, Caryl, Adfeilion Babel: Agweddau ar Syniadaeth Ieithyddol y Ddeunawfed Ganrif (Caerdydd, 2000).
Droixhe, Daniel, La Linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire (1600-1800): rationalisme et révolutions positivistes (Geneva, 1978).
Lhuyd, Edward, Archaeologia Britannica: Vol. 1 Glossography (Oxford, 1707).
Pezron, Paul-Yves, Antiquité de la nation et de la langue des Celtes, autrement appellez Gaulois (Paris, 1703).
Pictet, Adolph, ‘Lettres à M. A.W. de Schlegel sur l’affinité des langues celtiques avec le sanscrit’, Journal asiatique 3.1 (1836), 263-90, 417-448; 3.2 (1836), 440-66.
Poppe, Erich, ‘Lag es in der Luft?: Johann Kaspar Zeuß und die Konstituierung der Keltologie’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 2 (1992), 41-56.
Prichard, James Cowles, The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations: Proved by a Comparison of their Dialects with the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic Languages (London, 1831)
Roberts, Brynley F., Edward Lhwyd: c.1660-1709, Naturalist, Antiquary, Philologist (Cardiff, 2022).
Shaw, Francis, ‘The Background to Grammatica Celtica’, Celtica 3 (1956), 1-16.
Sims-Williams, Patrick, Ancient Celtic Place-Names in Europe and Asia Minor (Oxford, 2006).
Sims-Williams, Patrick, ‘An Alternative to “Celtic from the East” and “Celtic from the West”’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 30 (2020), 511-29.
Solleveld, Floris, ‘Expanding the Comparative View: Humboldt’s Über die Kawi-Sprache and its language materials’, Historiographia Linguistica 47 (2020), 49-78.
Stewart, Ian, The Celts: A Modern History (Princeton, 2025).
Stewart, Ian, ‘After Sir William Jones: British Linguistic Scholarship and European Intellectual History’, Journal of Modern History 95 (2023), 808-846.
Stewart, Ian, ‘James Cowles Prichard and the Linguistic Foundations of Ethnology’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 46 (2023), 76-91.
Van Hal, Toon, ‘Moedertalen en taalmoeders’. Het vroegmoderne taalvergelijkende onderzoek in de Lage Landen (Brussels, 2010).
Van Hal, Toon, ‘When Quotation Marks Matter: Rhellicanus and Boxhornius on the differences between the lingua Gallica and lingua Germanica’, Historiographia Linguistica 38 (2011), 241-52.
Van Hal, Toon, ‘From Alauda to Zythus. The emergence and uses of Old-Gaulish word lists in early modern publications’, Keltische Forschungen 6 (2014), 219-77.
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:16] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:21] Today we’re talking to Ian Stewart, who’s a historian of Britain and Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries and a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. [00:32] Ian’s latest book, The Celts: A Modern History, is coming out in March 2025 with Princeton University Press. [00:42] In this book, Ian offers a path-breaking, and at the same time magisterial, account of how the modern notion of the Celtic nations took shape. [00:51] Linguistic evidence and theorizing, as Ian shows in his book, played no small part in these developments. [00:58] Ian’s also looked at the early history of historical-comparative linguistics in Britain and suggested some key revisions to the standard narrative of how this field took root there. [01:10] The stories of the modern notion of the Celts and of early historical-comparative linguistics in Britain have many points of contact, and this is what Ian will be talking to us about today. [01:21] So, Ian, who are the Celts? [01:23] What was the significance of identifying the so-called Celtic nations in the modern period? [01:30]
IS: Hi, James. [01:32] As you know, I’m a big fan of the podcast, and so it’s really exciting to be here. [01:36] Who are the Celts? [01:38] Well, that depends on who you ask and when. [01:42] It’s a question that’s been asked in many different ways over the last two and a half thousand years, at least. [01:48] To begin with, the Celts are a people who started to be mentioned in classical sources in about 500 BCE. [01:56] Herodotus, for example, refers to them as a people living somewhere in Western Europe. [02:02] In the 4th century BCE, people like Plato and Aristotle refer to them as a warlike people. [02:07] This is especially after a Celtic group sacked Rome in about 387 BCE, and then 100 years later, another group invaded the Balkans. [02:18] And so, you see, the Celts remained the steady presence as a bellicose people somewhere in Europe, but they became sort of less feared as the Romans grew in power. [02:30] Caesar’s famous Gallic Wars, obviously written in the middle of the 1st century BCE, is about the conquest of Gaul, one of whose parts is called Celtica. [02:40] And so, as we move into the first few centuries of the Common Era, references to the Celts start to become fewer, and by 500 CE, you know, they stop altogether. [02:49] So, to sum up, basically, from the classical sources, the Celts are a barbarian people who were fearsome enemies, with their own complicated social, cultural, and religious structures, who feature strongly in the literary record between about 500 BCE and 500 CE. [03:08] The details about this group, or groups, are really hazy. [03:12] They’ve been argued about in all sorts of different ways. [03:15] We don’t know, you know, how much sort of common identification among groups there was, but what we can basically say is that there were people speaking Celtic languages in most of Western and Central Europe, including Britain and Ireland, modern France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Central Europe, Southern Germany, and as far east as Anatolia. [03:38] And so even though the Celts didn’t have their own literary cultures, and even though the historical record left by classical writers is pretty imperfect, the Celts left behind all sorts of evidence — including linguistic evidence, as you alluded to — that later scholars would make use of to construct this picture that we now have. [03:56] Now, why they become important in the modern period is, basically, they become rediscovered during the Renaissance [04:04] — when the predominant approach to history was genealogical, and the origins of nations, regions, cities, dynasties, all sorts of institutions, take on huge importance in establishing legitimacy — [04:19] and so scholars devoted considerable energy in tracing the migrations and conquests of ancient peoples [04:26] in order to give their own nation, or whoever they were writing for, a prestigious pedigree. [04:32] And basically, because of what I just mentioned about their extensive presence in the classical sources, and through their close association with the Gauls especially, the Celts retained this important place in the historical imagination. [04:45] So basically, from the early modern period, it’s off to the races, and they become claimed as prestigious ancestors in all of the countries I mentioned. [04:56] And so, my book is basically about this Celticism, which is basically why people in different places around Europe, from the early modern era to the present, have answered the question, who are the Celts and the way that they did, usually in favor of their own nation. [05:12] They’re usually trying to claim the Celts as their particular special ancestor, and the wranglings over the Celts basically change… [05:23] I sort of say that they’re determined by… basically, that these pictures of national images of ancestry change as a result of scholarly imperatives, but also political imperatives. [05:35] So it’s not just that nations are invented from scratch. [05:39] You know, in the modern period, as some of the literature, some of the classical literature — you know, classical in terms of history of modern nations and nationalism — basically, nation builders work with materials at hand. [05:50] But at the same time, scholars are often nation builders, and their political commitments shape their scholarship. [05:56]
JMc: And why is genealogy the dominant model for nation building in this period? [06:02] Why is the key thing to trace your nation back to a particular set of ancestors? [06:08]
IS: Basically, I think it’s a pretty simple equation that primacy was really important, so being the first people somewhere, having had, you know, the most extensive territory or the most glorious conquest. [06:25] And so basically, pedigree meant prestige, and we have to remember that before the rise of modern scholarship, you know, before modern historical linguistics, archaeology, folklore I suppose, and things like that, you’re basically working with the classical sources, [06:43] and so if a people is mentioned extensively in the classical sources, like the Celts are, there’s a lot more you can do with that. [06:50]
JMc: So you mentioned that the Celts left behind a certain amount of linguistic evidence. [06:55] How much of a role did this linguistic evidence play in the modern project of constructing Celtic identity, and was it the main kind of evidence, or was archaeological evidence just as important, for example? [07:09]
IS: Things change over time, but I would argue that language has been the most important and consistent thread in tracing the history of the Celts over the last five centuries. [07:20] Basically, linguistics is crucial in the Celtic case for two reasons. [07:26] The first is that it’s only through linguistic scholarship that the entirety of the modern Celtic family was recognized, [07:33] so in other words, that the speakers of the two linguistic branches — so Welsh, Breton, and Cornish speakers — are related to speakers of Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx Gaelic. [07:46] And that’s realized about 1700. [07:48] And the second is that it was only through comparative linguistics that the Celtic nations were recognized to be a part of the wider Indo-European family, as opposed to an indigenous population that was pushed further west by invading Romans or Goths, etc. [08:05] And so I can unpack those two things for you. [08:08] On the first point about providing a more holistic picture of the Celts, the interesting thing is that in the early modern period, neither the Welsh nor the Irish, their dominant linguistic tradition isn’t thought to be Celtic, and they actually weren’t thought to be related to each other, and I think this is particularly striking because these are probably now seen as two of the most Celtic nations. [08:32] But basically, native Irish tradition held that the language derived from the ruins of Babel, where the best parts of all languages were cobbled together, and then taken by the Scythians, who became the Scots, to Egypt, Spain, and then Ireland. [08:46] And it’s really complicated, but the point is that it definitely wasn’t Celtic. [08:50] Meanwhile, Welsh tradition held that it derived from Hebrew. [08:54] So before the 18th century, the Celts are sort of most associated with Gaul, and therefore France, and more surprisingly, with Germany. [09:02] So Toon Van Hal has shown how French and German humanists argued over what language Gaulish really was, and which of their modern vernaculars was closest to it, and so the languages of Britain and Ireland aren’t really into the picture. [09:16] It’s more of a Continental argument until about the end of the 17th century, and in fact, no classical sources refer explicitly to the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland as Celts. [09:28] But basically, the important thing that happened was that Caesar had actually described many of the cultural links between Gaul and Britain, and one of those that he’d mentioned was language. [09:37] So as soon as scholars in the early modern period started to get their hands on Welsh vocabularies, they were able to trace links between the few Gaulish words that they had and Welsh, [09:49] and the person who provided the most crucial work was the Dutch scholar Marc van Boxhorn, who recorded that he was so pleased to receive a Welsh dictionary that he kissed it. [09:59] And if the ancient Celts spoke Gaulish, the thinking went, and, according to Caesar, the ancient Britons spoke a similar, if not the same, language as the Gauls, then because Welsh was descended from the language of the ancient Britons, it was probably Celtic too. [10:16] And it was already recognized that Breton and Cornish were related to Welsh, so they all became seen as this cohesive group with likely ties to the ancient Gauls or Celts. [10:26] This is hammered home increasingly towards the end of the 17th century, especially by a Breton monk named Paul-Yves Pezron, who got many things wrong but really succeeded in driving that point home. [10:38] But at this point… [10:39] So in the 1690s, the Brittonic languages and the Gaelic languages were still seen as unrelated. [10:46] The key move here was made by a Welsh scholar named Edward Lhuyd. [10:50] He’s a real hero in Celtic studies. [10:53] He travelled around Britain and Ireland doing fieldwork for several years at the turn of the 18th century, and he actually recorded words from speakers of these languages and drew up vocabularies. [11:06] So in late 1699, he had composed a comparative vocabulary of Welsh, Irish and English words, and there he noted that there were a number of sound correspondences, and the most famous of these is the P and C or Q distinction in Celtic. [11:23] And this is a quote from Lhuyd. [11:24] He said, “I cannot find the Irish have a word purely their own that begins with a P and yet have almost all of ours which they constantly begin with a C.” [11:36] So some of the classic examples of this distinction are pen and ceann (so pen is Welsh for “head,” and ceann is obviously Irish) or pedwar and cathair, which is the number four. [11:50] But it can also be mac, which is the Irish word for “son,” and mab, which is the Welsh word. [11:56] This is now called the P and Q Celtic distinction, and this gave rise to the terrible joke that Celticists have to mind their P’s and Q’s. [12:05] But so it was Lhuyd’s achievement to show that these two branches of language were related and could be referred to as Celtic. [12:16] And so for the second part, connecting the Celts to the Indo-European family, it was comparative philology, obviously, that did this. [12:23] And so after the Celts become established as this cohesive group, there are still lots of opinions flying around in the 18th century. [12:32] We’re still in the era before comparative and historical linguistics became a cohesive discipline with recognized principles and dogmas, really, if you like, [12:42] and actually, some people might have recognized that the Celts were a distinctive family, but they started to doubt whether it was a family that belonged to the larger Indo-European family, because the Celtic languages have some strange features. [12:57] Its vocabulary is quite different. Its grammar also seems strange. [13:02] So, most obviously, it’s a VSO grammatical system, so verb, subject, object. [13:07] It also has, and this is probably the most famous thing, a system of initial mutations where the first sound of a word changes based on its grammatical function in relation to the word before it. [13:18] This can be for grammatical purposes or just euphony. [13:22] And so some people doubted that together these features could be reconciled with the other Indo-European languages, and people like A. W. Schlegel, so no mean philologist, was someone who doubted the position of Celtic. [13:36] And just to make a long story short, in the 1830s, three works were published by the English scholar James Cowles Prichard, by the Genevan Adolph Pictet, and by the German Franz Bopp, who published work explaining these differences and showing how they fit within the European… Indo-European framework. [13:55] Prichard compared Welsh and Sanskrit, Pictet, Gaelic and Sanskrit, and Bopp showed the principles and operation behind the initial mutations, and so these three works together definitively established that the Celtic languages were Indo-European, and therefore that the Celtic race, as it was starting to be called at this time, was part of that larger Indo-European family or race. [14:17]
JMc: So one of the key figures that you mentioned just there was the Englishman James Cowles Prichard. [14:23] So what exactly was his contribution to demonstrating that the Celtic languages are part of the larger Indo-European family, and how exactly did his proof work, and what methods did he use to construct it, [14:37] and did he have any priority over any of the other scholars working at the time on the problem of Celtic as an Indo-European language? [14:46]
IS: That’s a really, really interesting question, one that I’ve worked on for a long time. [14:51] I think he… [14:52] Well, he was someone that was overlooked both in Celtic studies and in the history of Celtic philology, and therefore in the history of Celticism. [15:00] He’s most recognized for having been Europe’s leading ethnologist, so kind of the first phase of anthropology. [15:08] He’s like a physical and cultural anthropologist, but really his largest concern was to ensure that the Celtic nations were — in this instance, his largest concern — was to show that they were part of the Indo-European family for two reasons. [15:23] The first one is biblical orthodoxy. [15:25] He was raised a Quaker, he converted to Anglicanism, but he still obviously adheres to the biblical account. [15:32] And the second reason is that he’s Welsh. [15:34] His mother was descended from a Welsh family, at least is what I think we know, but accounts kind of differ on this. [15:41] Some say that he could speak Welsh with his patients, where he was a physician in Bristol, but it’s clear that he could read Welsh, and he was connected to Welsh cultural circles. [15:50] But the thing that I think that’s most interesting about him in this case is that he was recognizing the sort of the full import both of the Indo-European idea, and of the possibilities for comparative philology, before the major developments in Germany, above all. [16:06] So in 1813, he said that “[i]t’s only an essential affinity in the structure and genius of languages that demonstrates a common origin. [16:15] This sort of relati
Podcast episode 43: Judy Kaplan on universals
30 de novembro de 202427 min
In this interview, we talk to Judy Kaplan about universals in American linguistics of the mid-20th century. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 43 Emmon Bach & Robert T. Harms …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Judy Kaplan about universals in American linguistics of the mid-20th century.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 43
Emmon Bach & Robert T. Harms, Universals in Linguistic Theory (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968)
Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).
Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Joseph Greenberg, “Some Universals of Grammar with Special Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements,” in Idem (ed.), Universals of Language (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1963), 73-113.
______ “The Nature and Uses of Linguistic Typologies,” IJAL 23: 68-77.
Roman Jakobson, Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze. (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1941).
Linguistic Society of America, Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation, “The Need for the Documentation of Linguistic Diversity,” June 1994. (https://old.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/lsa-stmt-documentation-linguistic-diversity.pdf)
Janet Martin-Nielsen, “A Forgotten Social Science? Creating a Place for Linguistics in the Historical Dialogue,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 47(2): 147-172.
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, [00:09] and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, [00:13] online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:16] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:20] Today, we’re talking to Judy Kaplan, who’s a historian of the human sciences and a Curatorial Fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. [00:30] One of Judy’s current projects is to investigate the notion of universals in American linguistics of the mid-20th century. [00:39] Why is it that various competing schools of American linguists in this period converged [00:44] on universals as the target of their research, despite their fundamental differences in scientific outlook? [00:50] What did they mean by “universals”, and what role did universals serve in their respective theories? [00:57] So, Judy, can you sketch the scene for us? [01:01] What was happening in American linguistics in the mid-20th century? [01:04] Who were the leading figures, and what positions did they take? [01:09]
JK: Thanks so much. [01:10] Viewed from above, we can see that the mid-20th century was a time of remarkable growth and expansion in American linguistics, [01:18] so funding went up, the first university departments were established, and the ranks generally grew. [01:25] These markers corresponded to a handful of different programs or positions. [01:30] As far as those leading figures and positions, most people concentrate on two dominant approaches to the study of language at this time: structuralism and generative grammar. [01:42] I should say that both were internally heterogeneous. [01:46] On the structuralist side, there were students of Edward Sapir in the anthropological tradition and Leonard Bloomfield on the more strictly linguistic side. [01:54] Structuralists focused on speech, a sort of self-conscious departure from 19th-century philology, on form, [02:01] on abstractions — ultimately, as the name suggests, on structure. [02:06] In terms of evidence, they were heavily invested in the study of Native American languages. [02:12] By the post-war period, the so-called neo-Bloomfieldians or distributionalists were at centre stage. [02:19] So, figures here are people like Charles Hockett, Zellig Harris, Bernard Bloch, Martin Joos, and others. [02:26] To your question, their position was basically that linguists should be looking at how linguistic forms show up in different speech environments. [02:33] They insisted on the distinction of different levels of analysis — so, phonology, morphology, syntax, these were all different levels. [02:40] And these points of emphasis pretty much bracketed meaning and the mind, which is important. [02:47] Much of the work was really mathematical in terms of its look and feel. [02:51] Emerging in a sense from this tradition, but also deeply critical of it, was Noam Chomsky and the study of transformational grammar. [02:58] This program elaborated transformational rules, and that was a term that was adapted from Harris, so you can see that there’s this kind of emergence. [03:06] So, it elaborated these transformational rules to link fundamental deep structures of language to surface manifestations, allowing linguists to turn from empirical data toward the study of grammar and the mind. [03:19] The emphasis was on theory construction, evidence of linguistic competence, and the definition of rules. [03:25] Though this program subsequently splintered into groups dedicated primarily to syntax and semantics, it did come to define a new mainstream. [03:35]
JMc: So, how do universals fit into this picture? [03:39]
JK: In a very broad sense, I think universals trace back to the supposed liberation of linguistics from philology — the question being, was linguistics going to be about language or languages? [03:49] So, if the former, then one might reasonably be on the lookout, at the end of the day, for features or phenomena that are universal in scope. [03:59] Just circling back then to the general lay of the land, it’s interesting that historians of science — so I come out of history of science — that they have tended to write about this with different points of emphasis, as opposed to linguistic historiographers or historians of linguistics, first and foremost. [04:16] Historians of science have characterized the relationship between these two approaches (the structuralist and the generative) as the contrast between behaviourism and mentalism, which was given all sorts of ideological overtones in the post-war period. [04:31] Linguists writing about their own history have wrestled with whether or not the remarkably swift emergence of transformational grammar constituted a scientific revolution in the Kuhnian sense. [04:42] It was unquestionably a remarkable turn, so participant accounts, institutional changes, interdisciplinary engagements, and citation patterns all make that really clear, [04:52] but there were also many linguists who were already trained and working in the structuralist tradition who felt that transformational grammar was not really for them. [05:01] And I might locate Joseph Greenberg somewhere in there, right? [05:05] So he was coming out of anthropology, first and foremost, he received his PhD in anthropology, and became really well-known by the 1950s for working on the genetic classification of African languages. [05:19] He was quite well regarded for that work. [05:22] He first turned to the study of African languages because he had been interested in Arabic and Semitic and had been approaching these from an anthropological standpoint, [05:31] and in 1957, he started to write about typology, and typology in connection to universals. [05:38] So Greenberg is taking a typological approach to the study of language universals, and he is leaning pretty heavily on the work of Roman Jakobson, who had introduced them in connection to the acquisition of child language. [05:52] One of the things that he says here is that it’s really important to consider implicational universals, so of the form “if X, then Y,” [05:59] and he sets out on a kind of data-gathering mission with this in mind. [06:04] And, you know, when he tees up the program — this was launched in a 1961 conference at Dobbs Ferry — [06:11] when he tees up the program, he says, you know, We have accumulated so much data at this point in time that the time is ripe to turn to the study of language universals. [06:22] Coming back to the question about how universals fit into the general topography or the landscape of post-World War II American linguistics, historians of the human sciences have shown how, in the wake of World War II [06:38] — which, you know, perpetrated unprecedented violence based on these racist and eugenic ideas that some human groups were distinct and less valuable than others — [06:47] liberal biologists and anthropologists, also psychologists, also I would add linguists here, came together to try to define a rosier and more inclusive picture of human nature. [06:59] So this was a picture that celebrated our best features as humans, our intelligence, our technological prowess, our cooperation, and also our common inheritance. [07:11] So I think that this is really important for understanding why this turned to universals in the mid-20th century. [07:17] That said, the way that Greenberg and Chomsky defined and operationalized universals research could not have been more different. [07:26] So Greenberg edged up to the study of universals defined in this typological way in a 1957 paper for the International Journal of American Linguistics. [07:36] This previewed his 1961 contribution to the Conference on Language Universals at Dobbs Ferry, “Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful events.” [07:46] This became known as the word order paper. [07:49] It’s really important and sort of set the agenda for this approach to the study of universals. [07:55] It gives a clear sense of what this research program was going to be all about. [07:59] It talked about things like sampling procedures, empirical evidence, the typology of word order of course, and it also offered some thoughts on the relationship between linguistics and other human sciences. [08:11] It was guided by the idea that the best, and you could say really the only, way to study universals was inductively. [08:19] So I mentioned before a debt that Greenberg had to Roman Jakobson, this idea of implicational universals, which appears I think in the first paragraph of that paper. [08:29] And so this, again, is this idea of “If you have this feature, you’re also going to have this feature,” or, you know, there’s going to be some other kind of constraint. [08:36] And this is just to point out maybe something that people haven’t necessarily thought about. [08:40] This is really a different way of saying what is commonly held as opposed to a statement like “All languages have Z.” [08:49] I think it’s also important to say something about the social organization of Greenberg’s research program. [08:56] As this was an effort to coordinate empirical generalizations on a massive scale, an army of researchers was needed. [09:03] They also needed to think carefully about how to manage their data, [09:06] so he was invested in the creation of some sort of cross-cultural file, he called it. [09:12] Greenberg said that coordinated efforts beyond the scope of individual researchers were going to be necessary to establish on firm grounds the actual facts concerning universals and language. [09:23]
JMc: So do you think this inductive approach of Greenberg is an example of this contrast that linguists often make between, you know, empiricism and rationalism in their approach to linguistics? [09:34] I mean, the generativists love to talk about that. [09:37]
JK: Yes, I think it’s important to differentiate between empiricism as a theory of mind and empirical research methods. [09:45] Mostly what I’ve been talking about here are empirical research methods and rationalism versus a sort of logical way of going about doing things. [09:54] So just to differentiate between the theory of mind and the methodology is important. [10:00] But yes, these do sort of map onto those basic traditions. [10:05]
JMc: Do you think it’d be fair to say that it’s part of generativist propaganda to conflate these two things and to set up this opposition? [10:13]
JK: Yeah, probably. [laughs] [10:15] I mean, I think the rationalist, in the sense of a theory of mind, description, applies to Chomsky. [10:22] It’s just that the empiricism, empirical method doesn’t necessarily apply to Greenberg. [10:28] But if you are in the generativist camp and you’re looking at what the linguists who are using empirical methods are trying to do, yeah, to sort of suggest that conflation does important work, [10:40] because it maybe consigns everyone who’s looking at actual attested language data to maybe this behaviourist tradition, which by the mid-20th century was sort of much maligned. [10:52]
JMc: How does Chomsky then fit into this picture? [10:53] So you’ve mentioned Greenberg. So did Greenberg start talking about universals and Chomsky sort of tried to catch up to him? [11:01]
JK: They both arguably were publishing on universals in 1957, [11:06] so there’s a real kind of direct coincidence here. The- [11:10]
JMc: And they both use the term “universals.” [11:12]
JK: Not exactly. So Chomsky uses it a little bit later. But the universals that Chomsky and his colleagues were interested in, [11:19] so this is on the other hand, they didn’t pertain to languages so much as they had to do with those internal aspects of linguistic theory that might be then regarded as universal [11:31] — so, for instance, the very idea that transformational rules can get you from meaning to sound via the grammar. [11:39] If these could be established, then these would call for some kind of further explanation, and this ends up being a claim about innateness, which is sort of characterized as a biological endowment. [11:51] Chomsky started talking about universals in an explicit way, to your question, in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. [11:58] Here he links linguistic universals to the idea of explanatory adequacy and draws a really bright line between formal universals, that’s what he’s going to be interested in, and substantive universals, and this is more of the Jakobson-Greenberg cast. [12:14]
JMc: Okay, so does “formal universals” mean universals pertaining to theory construction about what linguistic grammars look like, whereas substantive universals are empirical findings about the structures of actual languages? [12:30]
JK: Exactly. He says early on in that text that “the main task of linguistic theory must be to develop an account of linguistic universals”, so this is a pretty clear statement, [12:41] and he urges that this account needs to be able to stand up to the actual diversity of human languages, while at the same time also accounting for the rapidity and the uniformity of language learning in rich and explicit ways. [12:53] So here he’s gesturing again to that kind of species-level endowment. [12:59] He gives examples of reducing or absorbing, I think he uses the word “abstracting”, phonological rules in English. [13:08] So here’s a, you know, what might be considered a substantive universal in the way that you just described, to the formal universal that a transformational cycle universally links phonological rules to syntactic structure. [13:22] And then this would have the advantage of explaining away funny-looking exceptions in terms of deeper underlying regularities. [13:31] If you look at the papers that were presented at the conference that was held on universals of linguistic theory… [13:36] So I’ve been thinking about these camps in terms of two organizing conferences. [13:40] So there was the one in Dobbs Ferry in 1961, and this other conference that was held, actually weirdly, on the same day, but just a few years later. [13:50] It was held, I should say, at UT Austin. [13:53] The kinds of universals, just to give a feel again, the kinds of universals that were up for discussion were very general things like case and modality. [14:03] They were derived primarily from common-sense intuition. [14:06] So if you contrast that again with the kind of empirical way in which Greenberg was working, they were mostly offered up by native speakers and they were mostly having to do with English language usage. [14:16]
JMc: So common-sense intuition, you mean these intuitions about grammaticality judgments? [14:21]
JK: Exactly. [14:22]
JMc: So whether you can say this or not, and put a star in front of it if you can’t. [14:25]
JK: Exactly.
JMc: Yeah, OK. [14:27]
JK: Yeah, and just to give one example of that, in his contribution to the conference, Paul Kiparsky suggested that rule addition and rule simplification might be called or considered universal processes of human language. [14:39] So you can get a sense of the feel that these are very, very different approaches. [14:42]
JMc: Yeah. OK. [14:44]
JK: The introduction to the proceedings that was published from that conference mentions that it was all tape recorded, and I’ve been trying to find the tapes [laughs] because, you know, yeah, the generativists are known for having these really rowdy conferences, [14:59] and I really want to hear what was actually said, but I haven’t been able to find them. [15:02] So if anybody listening knows where to find those tapes, please let me know. [15:06]
JMc: OK. So these two conferences, Dobbs Ferry and then UT Austin, who were the participants in these conferences? [15:15] So like, what was the sort of character of them? [15:18] So was the Dobbs Ferry conference more anthropological in orientation? [15:22]
JK: Yeah, so the Dobbs Ferry conference was funded by the SSRC, so the Social Science Research Council. [15:28] It grew out of conversations that were happening during… I want to say the academic year of 1958–59 at Stanford. [15:35] And, you know, as it’s described in the notes, there’s this sense that psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists all needed to be talking about kind of universal phenomena. [15:48] So in terms of the participants at Dobbs Ferry, it was a very interdisciplinary group. [15:53] I think Greenberg says at one point that if we edge up to the universal, we’re going to go over this tipping point into psychology and anthropology. [16:02] As for UT Austin, Emmon Bach was there, Paul Kiparsky, I’m going to forget other names. [16:08] But just, you know, this was largely drawing on a pretty intimate group of actors in the transformational-generative school. [16:16]
JMc: And Greenberg’s statement about if we, you know, keep pursuing universals, we’ll end up doing psychology, is that intended as a reductive statement? [16:24]
JK
Podcast episode 42: Randy Harris on the Linguistics Wars
31 de outubro de 202430 min
In this interview, we talk to Randy Harris about the controversies surrounding the generative semantics movement in American linguistics of the 1960s and 70s. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Randy Harris about the controversies surrounding the generative semantics movement in American linguistics of the 1960s and 70s.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 42
Chomsky, N. (2015/1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax (50th Anniversary edition.). The MIT Press.
Harris, R. A. (2021/1993). The linguistics wars: Noam Chomsky, George Lakoff, and the battle over Deep Structure (2nd ed.). Oxford.
Huck, G. J., & Goldsmith, J. A. (1995). Ideology and linguistic theory: Noam Chomsky and the deep structure debates. Routledge.
Katz, J. J., & Postal, P. M. (1964). An integrated theory of linguistic descriptions. M.I.T. Press.
McCawley, J. D. (1980). Linguistic theory in America: The first quarter-century of transformational generative grammar, by Frederick J. Newmeyer (Book Review). Linguistics, 18(9), 911-930.
Newmeyer, F. J. (1986/1980). Linguistic theory in America: The first quarter-century of transformational generative grammar (2nd ed.). Academic Press.
Postal, P. M. (1972). The best theory. In S. Peters (Ed.), Goals of linguistic theory. Prentice-Hall.
Postal, P. M. (1988). Topic…Comment: Advances in linguistic rhetoric. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 6(1), 129–137.
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, [00:14] online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:17] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:21] Today we’re talking to Randy Harris, [00:24] who is Professor of both English Language and Literature and Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada. [00:32] Among other things, Randy is the author of The Linguistics Wars, [00:37] the classic account of the generative semantics controversy that engulfed generative linguistics in the 1960s and ’70s. [00:45] A second edition of Randy’s book came out in 2021, and I’ve been wanting to talk to him about it since then, [00:52] but as a history podcast, we are by definition behind the times, [00:57] so it’s only appropriate that we’re only getting to his book now. [01:01] So, Randy, can you tell us, what were the linguistics wars? [01:05] Who were the chief combatants, and what were they fighting about? [01:09]
RH: Well, first, thanks for inviting me on. I’m a big fan of the podcast. [01:13] It’s a really important and interesting podcast about the history of linguistics, [01:18] and I’m also a fan of your work, your Ogden book, Language and Meaning. [01:22] It is really, really valuable, and I’m looking forward to the new one that you’ve got coming out on the history of modern linguistics. [01:30] So, maybe the best way to start is just to talk about how I entered the project in the first place. [01:35] So, I was a PhD student, and I just discovered a field called rhetoric. [01:41] My other degrees were in literature and linguistics before I got there, [01:46] and I was casting around. I’d originally gone to do communication theory, [01:50] but it turned out that the department wasn’t as strong in that as I thought, [01:54] and they had a really good rhetorician, and he was doing something called rhetoric of science, [01:59] which is basically the study of scientific argumentation. [02:03] I started reading in that field quite a bit and studying under him, Michael Halloran, [02:08] and then when it came time to write a dissertation, I started casting around for scientific episodes. [02:14] One of the themes of rhetoric of science at that point was mostly looking at controversies, [02:19] looking at how scientific disputes get resolved or fail to get resolved through warring camps. [02:25] I read Fritz Newmeyer’s book, Linguistic Theory in America, [02:29] and one of the key chapters is about this group called the generative semanticists and Chomsky coming at odds with each other, [02:39] but I’d also read a review of the book by James McCawley, [02:42] who was one of the people associated with the linguistics wars on the generative semanticists’ side, [02:47] and it was fairly polite, but said that basically Newmeyer’s book didn’t tell the whole story. [02:53] So I thought, “Well, I’d look into this a bit,” and I wrote basically all of the major players. [02:58] So I wrote Chomsky, of course, and the major players on the generative semanticists’ side were Paul Postal, [03:06] who was a colleague of Chomsky’s just before that, George Lakoff, John Robert Ross (Haj Ross), [03:13] and Ray Jackendoff, who was aligned with Chomsky in this dispute, [03:17] but also a lot of people around the dispute [03:21] — Jerrold Katz, Jerry Fodor, Thomas Bever, Arnold Zwicky, Jay Keyser, Robert Lees, Morris Halle, Jerry Sadock, Howard Lasnik, [03:30] just everybody who had seemed to have something to say about that dispute and about the theories around them — [03:37] and I got just an overwhelming response. [03:40] Everybody wanted to talk about it. [03:43] I can’t remember the exact order in which it happened, whether it was a response to a letter that invited me to call or a phone call as a response to my initial letter to Lakoff, [03:52] but Lakoff and I were on the phone for like an hour and a half one night, [03:56] him just going through what everything was all about. [03:59] So this was 20 years after the dispute, more or less, and everybody was still wanting to talk about it. [04:06] There were still hurt feelings and incensed attitudes and so forth, [04:10] and I was coming at it from a completely different discipline and a PhD student, [04:16] not anybody really in the field, and all of them wanted to talk to me. [04:20] So it grew into a kind of oral history project. [04:22] I travelled around and interviewed them all. [04:25] I ended up with like 500-some-odd pages of transcripts of interviews. [04:29] I met Lakoff in a bar in Cambridge. I talked to Chomsky for hours in his office. [04:35] I went to the University of Chicago, and one of the sociological centre points of the generative semanticist side was the University of Chicago, [04:42] especially all of the conferences and publications out of the Chicago Linguistic Society, [04:47] and talked to McCawley and Sadock and so forth there. [04:50] So everybody wanted to talk about it. [04:52] It was a really interesting story. [04:54] What was it? I’ll give you the scientific development story first. [04:58] So Noam Chomsky and his collaborators, most prominently Paul Postal and Gerald Katz, [05:06] developed a theory coalesced in the book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965 [05:12] that had this central notion of deep structure. [05:16] The model itself was structured as a process model where you generate sentences, [05:22] and it was a sentence grammar, not an utterance grammar. [05:25] All of the proponents denied that it was a process. [05:28] They just talked about it as an abstract model of linguistic knowledge in some way, [05:32] but it was shaped as a process model in which you had a set of syntactic rules, [05:37] phrase structure rules, that generated a syntactic structure [05:41] and a bag of words, a dictionary, a lexicon, that then populated the structure. [05:48] And then what you got was the deep structure, which wasn’t what we speak with [05:55] or write with, but an underlying representation that somehow crystallized [06:00] essential aspects of how we speak, one of them being semantic. [06:05] So a paradigm case would be the passive transformation. [06:09] The phrase structure rules and lexicon give you something like [06:13] “John walked the dog,” and that might percolate through with a few adjustments [06:18] in terms of morphology and then percolate through to the surface structure, [06:22] which was a much closer representation to how we talked, [06:25] or it might go through a passive transformation and come out as [06:28] “The dog was walked by John.” [06:31] The arguments around that focused on the fact that both “John walked the dog” [06:36] and “The dog was walked by John” have essentially the same semantics, [06:40] the same role, the same walker and walkee, agent and patient. [06:45] And so the claim developed that transformations don’t change meaning, [06:51] that meaning resides in the deep structure. [06:55] That’s the 1965 Aspects case. [06:58] So several linguists — most notably Lakoff, Ross, and Postal — [07:06] started enriching the semantics of deep structure, [07:10] making it more and more semantically responsible until it effectively became, [07:15] for the generative semanticist, the semantic representation. [07:18] The Aspects model had a set of semantic interpretation rules that looked [07:23] at the deep structure and found out what the meaning was, [07:26] but the generative semanticists said that the semantic representation was deep structure, effectively. [07:31]
JMc: So what exactly is a semantic representation in this model? [07:34] Is it propositional semantics only, or does it include even details of what we would now consider pragmatics? [07:42]
RH: Well, still in the immediate aftermath of Aspects, just propositional semantics entirely, [07:49] but the argument started to coalesce around dismantling deep structure. [07:54] So one set of arguments around the verb “kill,” for instance. [07:58] “Kill” could be seen as “cause to die.” [08:01] “Cause to die” could be seen as… or “die” could be seen as “not alive,” [08:05] and so “kill” could be seen as “cause to be not alive.” [08:10] And then in the generative semanticist approach, [08:13] these were assembled into the surface structure, assembled in bits and pieces. [08:19] So things like “cause,” “not,” “alive,” were all semantic primitives, [08:25] semantic predicates in and of themselves that got assembled [08:27] into the words that we spoke with. [08:30] And if that’s the case, you can’t have a level of deep structure that inherits words. [08:36] It’s building words. [08:38]
JMc: And can I just quickly ask, what was the nature of these semantic primitives? [08:42] Are they like what Wierzbicka was talking about in the ’70s? [08:47]
RH: Yes, very close, yeah. [08:49] In fact, Wierzbicka was associated with the early generative semanticists as well. [08:53] I think she visited MIT when this stuff was starting to develop and sort of mutually influenced at that point. [09:01] But there were also some quite arcane arguments around the level of deep structure [09:06] that led to lots of vituperation. [09:08] OK, still sticking with the scientific story, Chomsky apparently thought this was wrong, [09:15] that the deep structure shouldn’t be deeper, but in fact should be shallower, [09:21] and he built some arguments around things like nominalizations. [09:24] So the Aspects theory would relate a sentence like, [09:28] “Russia destroyed Mariupol” with the noun phrase, [09:32] “Russia’s destruction of Mariupol.” [09:35] So Chomsky wanted to put this process into the lexicon. [09:39] So transformations had been used to build nominalizations out of verbs, for instance. [09:44] So his approach was to weaken transformations, [09:48] whereas the generative semanticists wanted to strengthen them, [09:52] undercut their lexical powers like the assembly into “kill” from “cause to be not alive,” [09:59] retrench the semantic interpretation rules, enrich the semantics of the surface structure. [10:04] So, wholly opposed to the generative semanticists’ move to take semantics deeper and deeper. [10:10] So at this point in, say, 1967, ’68, you’ve got two fairly distinct theories: [10:18] generative semantics (Lakoff, Ross, McCawley, Postal, also Robin Lakoff), [10:25] and interpretive semantics (Chomsky, mostly Chomsky, also Ray Jackendoff) [10:31] building a lot of arguments around semantic interpretation rules [10:34] and X-bar syntax, which was introduced at this point also to, in part, undermine transformations like the nominalization transformation, and Ray Dougherty and others. [10:45] So that’s the scientific story. [10:47] Generative semantics seemed to be taking charge, leading the field, [10:53] but then Chomsky’s retrenchments and developments ascended, [10:58] and the kind of conventional version, especially at the time, [11:01] was that Chomsky and interpretive semantics had simply won the argument, [11:06] and linguistics should favour this kind of interpretive grammar that Chomsky was advocating. [11:14] The label he was giving it at the time was “Extended Standard Theory,” [11:17] which was in a way sort of accurate, but also a kind of nifty rhetorical move, [11:23] because he rebranded the Aspects theory as the standard theory, [11:27] and generative semantics as one deviation of it, [11:30] the wrong-headed deviation of it, [11:32] and the Extended Standard Theory as a way of taking it in the right direction. [11:35] So, again, that’s just the basic scientific story. [11:38] The sociological and rhetorical story is that Ross, and especially Lakoff, were deliberately outpacing Chomsky [11:48] and trying to dominate the theory by taking it in a given direction, [11:54] and, again, that direction was perceived to be fairly popular, [11:57] fairly responsible at the time. [11:59] Chomsky apparently was allergic to Lakoff, [12:03] just really disliked him intensely. [12:06] Again, this is based on this kind of quasi-oral history project, [12:10] everybody talking about the way things flared up. [12:14] Chomsky attacked Lakoff in his class, Lakoff attacked Chomsky in his classes at Harvard, [12:21] but the real centre point of the dispute early on was in Chomsky’s classes at MIT. [12:28] Lakoff attended them, not a student. [12:30] Ross attended them, not really a student any longer either. [12:34] He was Chomsky’s student, but at that point he wasn’t signing up for courses. [12:38] Robin Lakoff attended them, who was a student at Harvard at the time. [12:43] Jackendoff and Daugherty were there. They were direct students. [12:46] It’s not unusual, by the way, for Chomsky’s classes to be attended by lots of people who aren’t his students. [12:53] His syntax classes were quite famous, and people would travel in from all over the place to take his syntax classes. [12:59] Howard Lasnik was telling me [13:01] he had kept an apartment in Cambridge, teaching in Connecticut, [13:05] kept an apartment just so he could go back and attend the lectures. [13:08] MIT would schedule Chomsky’s classes on the basis of the enrolment, so just a standard kind of classroom, [13:15] and it turned into the Black Hole of Calcutta, [13:18] with everybody lining the walls, and sort of standing room only. [13:21] And so they, after that, MIT started scheduling his courses in lecture halls and stuff. [13:25] In any case, it’s not unusual for people not directly studying under Chomsky to be there, [13:30] but the classes were reputed to be really cantankerous. [13:34] From Lakoff’s perspective, Chomsky would misrepresent the generative semanticists’ proposals [13:40] and distort them, and then he would politely stand up and oppose them, [13:44] but Chomsky would shut him down, Jackendoff would weigh in, [13:48] and they were just kind of remembered as very cantankerous, [13:51] mostly with Lakoff on one side and Chomsky on the other, [13:55] but everybody else weighing in in various ways, and it fanned out from there. [13:59] So it really took over the discipline for seven, eight, ten years or so, [14:04] affecting peer reviews and publication and hiring and conferences. [14:11] There was a famous plenary session at the LSA where Jackendoff and Lakoff [14:16] were hurling obscenities at each other, and… [14:18] So, very, very cantankerous, and took over the entire discipline of linguistics, more or less, [14:25] in North America in particular, for about ten years. [14:28]
JMc: But does that mean that all of linguistics in North America was bound up with the generative school by this stage? [14:34]
RH: No, not all, but the bulk of it, for sure, [14:38] and that, in part, is because of how popular Chomsky’s work was [14:43] from Syntactic Structures on to Aspects. [14:46] So linguistics expanded really dramatically in the ’60s and ’70s, [14:50] lots of money pouring into it, lots of departments starting up and expanding [14:55] and so forth on the basis of popularity of Chomsky’s theories. [14:58] And so, overwhelmingly, it was the generative program that was being developed in most places. [15:05] There were certainly lots of existing linguistic programs before that, [15:09] but even those ones were generally dominated by generative approaches. [15:14]
JMc: Are the linguistics wars interesting to anyone who isn’t a linguist? [15:18] I mean, apart from being an example of the rhetoric of science, is there any interest that we can draw from them? [15:25] I mean, the central actors, Chomsky and Lakoff, and especially Chomsky, are, of course, quite famous [15:30] for the roles they’ve played outside disciplinary linguistics, [15:34] so for their participation in and commentary on political discourse. [15:38] But do these arguments over deep structure have any broader repercussions? [15:43] Are they anything more than inconsequential theoretical debates within one branch of American linguistics? [15:51]
RH: Now, in some sense, no, [15:53] certainly not the debates around deep structure that started everything off. [15:58] So a typical argument around deep structure, for instance, [16:01] so, again, transformations were held not to change meaning, [16:07] and that was a position that was developed most directly by Paul Postal [16:12] and Jerrold Katz, so it was called the Katz-Postal Principle. [16:16] So there were lots of arguments around the Katz-Postal Principle about deep structure. [16:19] One of the most famous is around sentences like, “Everyone in Canada speaks two languages,” [16:26] and “Two languages are spoken by everyone in Canada.” [16:30] That looks like a transformation has changed meaning, [16:33] because it’s either that at least two languages are spoken by everybody, [16:37] versus there are two languages that are spoken by everybody. [16:41] There was an attempt to kind of save the phenomena by saying, [16:44] well, that both interpretations are latent, both meanings are latent, [16:48] and it’s only context that highlights one. [16:51] So that was the k
Podcast episode 41: Chris Knight on Chomsky, science and politics
31 de agosto de 202426 min
In this interview, we talk to Chris Knight about Chomsky, pure science and the US military-industrial complex. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 41 Radical Anthropology Group …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Chris Knight about Chomsky, pure science and the US military-industrial complex.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 41
Radical Anthropology Group. YouTube channel | Vimeo channel
Allot, Nicholas, Chris Knight and Neil Smith. 2019. The Responsibility of Intellectuals; Reflections by Noam Chomsky and Others after 50 years, with commentaries by Noam Chomsky. London: UCL Press. Open access
Chomsky, Noam. 2016. ‘Chomsky responds to Chris Knight’s book, Decoding Chomsky’ Libcom
Chomsky, Noam, and Chris Knight. 2019. ‘Chomsky’s response to Chris Knight’s chapter in the new Responsibility of Intellectuals book’. Libcom
Knight, Chris. 2016. ‘John Deutch – Chomsky’s friend in the Pentagon and the CIA’. Libcom
Knight, Chris. 2016. Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics. Newhaven: Yale University Press Google Books
Knight, Chris. 2023. ‘The Two Chomskys: The US military’s greatest enemy worked in an institution saturated with military funding. How did it shape his thought?’ Aeon
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1988. The Politics of Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:18] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:22] Today we’re joined by Chris Knight, who is a senior research fellow in anthropology at University College London and a long-standing political activist. [00:33] These two strands of his work and striving come together in the Radical Anthropology Group, which Chris co-founded. [00:41] Among the group’s activities are a regular series of talks and lectures, which can be watched online on the group’s Vimeo channel. [00:49] The link is available on the podcast page. [00:52]
In a recent update on the podcast, we promised that we’d look at the history of linguistics in the Cold War period, [00:59] with a focus on how the social and political climate of the time may have helped to shape the field of linguistics [01:06] — that is, how this climate influenced what linguists took an interest in, how they approached their subject matter, human language, [01:13] and how they marketed themselves and their work. [01:17] Chris has produced some very provocative work that explores the relationship of the research of Noam Chomsky, perhaps the key figure of linguistics in this period, [01:27] to the U.S. military-industrial complex of the Cold War. [01:31] Chris has written about this most extensively in his 2016 book Decoding Chomsky, [01:37] but also in a number of articles that are referenced on the podcast page. [01:41] The great conundrum Chris seeks to resolve in these texts is how Chomsky could reconcile the fact that his research was paid for largely by the U.S. military [01:51] with his activism in opposition to the Vietnam War and in support of other left-wing causes. [01:58] So Chris, could you outline your views for us? [02:01] What was the relationship of Chomsky’s linguistic research at MIT to the U.S. military-industrial complex, [02:09] and what effect did this have on Chomsky’s approach to studying language? [02:15]
CK: Well, Chomsky was initially employed at MIT rather than, say, a more posh place such as Harvard because, being Jewish — and, as Chomsky put it, the anti-Semitism around being as thick as soup — it was easier for him to get a job at MIT, [02:33] and his initial employment was to work on a kind of craze of the time, actually: machine translation. [02:39] Chomsky, from the outset, realized that for machine translation to work, you’d have to have computers far more powerful with far greater memory than anything that was around at the time, [02:51] and he realized that, really, you just need a vast number of sentences, and you kind of average them out and work out what the probable meaning of it is. [03:00] I say “you,” “you” being a computer here. [03:04] And he wasn’t interested at all, and what was much more exciting to him, but also very exciting to the U.S. military, [03:12] was the idea that just possibly the human mind is itself a digital computer of some sort, [03:19] and that underlying all the world’s different languages was this simple code. [03:25] So Warren Weaver had — this great fixer and founder of all sorts of things going on in U.S. military, industrial plus intellectual relationships — argued that possibly… [03:37] He actually used the analogy of the Tower of Babel, that underneath all the differences, if you delve right down to the very basis of language, you’d find a simple kind of underlying code, [03:47] which Chomsky before long called universal grammar. [03:51] And why that was exciting to the military would mean that you could just possibly ask the generals during, say, a nuclear war to kind of talk to their missiles. [04:03] I say talk, probably they meant type on a keyboard to their missiles, [04:07] but you could talk in any of the world’s languages, and the missiles would kind of get it [04:11] because installed inside the missile or inside the bomber or other form of technology would be this kind of black box containing the principles of all the world’s different languages. [04:23] So that was an extraordinarily exciting and ambitious idea, and when Chomsky was invited to work on it, he more or less said, [04:31] “Well, I’ll work on the principle. I’ll work on the science. I won’t work on any practical applications. I won’t try to operationalize what I’m doing. [04:41] Anyone else wants to do that, that’s up to them.” [04:44] But because this is intellectually exciting and thrilling, in fact, that underlying all the world’s languages is a simple universal grammar, he promised to work on that. [04:54]
JMc: But isn’t it the case that Chomsky’s approach is rather formalist and that he’s interested in the structures of languages, [05:02] not necessarily in any semantic aspects? [05:05] So even if he could describe an underlying universal grammar of all languages, it would actually not be something that could be used in practice for the purposes of communication or for instructing machines. [05:20]
CK: Well, exactly. And actually, in order to clarify this, Chomsky was very anxious to draw a very sharp distinction between language’s social use — social conversation, social communication — and language as formal structure, [05:39] and in fact, sometimes argued that possibly the very word “language” was misleading. [05:43] His interest was, if you like, grammar. [05:46] And yes, I mean, that’s absolutely right, but the point I think I would make is that there was a cost to this, [05:55] because in the end, in order to draw the sharpest possible distinction between language as use and language as grammar, [06:05] he argued that language is essentially not communicative, that essentially language is the language of thought [06:12] and that the first human on the planet ever to, if you like, [06:16] speak in his own words was talking to itself. [06:20] So in order to absolutely ensure that he kept his politics apart from his work for the military, he stripped language of everything social. [06:31] And you can sort of see why that was kind of necessary, because anything social in language is likely to be not just social, but political, [06:39] and if it’s political, it’ll be political in a context which Chomsky would have thoroughly disapproved. [06:47] So to make quite sure that he wasn’t colluding with the U.S. military on a political or social level, strip out the social from language and leave just the forms. [06:58] And so language is, if you like, the language of thought. [07:01] Language isn’t for communication. [07:03] But of course, the moment you do that, you then wonder, well, [07:06] what’s grammar for, if it isn’t to make thinking externalised and therefore accessible to others? [07:12] I mean, do we really need grammar when we’re thinking to ourselves? [07:15] Obviously, that’s a huge philosophical debate, but I think most cognitive scientists these days would say, well, no, [07:21] grammar is precisely to make sure that what’s in your head gets out to other people — in other words, make sure that it’s externalised. [07:29] And of course, language for Chomsky is I-language, internal language. It doesn’t get externalised. [07:34]
JMc: But the formalist turn that Chomsky made wasn’t necessarily original to him, was it? [07:40] I mean, you know, what is often called American structuralism that immediately preceded his work in generative grammar – in particular, the school of the Bloomfieldians – already had a very formalist approach to language, [07:53] and that was couched in behaviourist terms, which Chomsky argued against. [07:57] But the actual processes of analysis where you concentrate just on the forms of language and describe the distribution as the Bloomfieldians did, [08:06] but then Zellig Harris, Chomsky’s teacher, and Chomsky himself, you know, talking about it in transformational terms, [08:12] this focus on pure form in language, without any consideration of meaning or use, you know, was something that the Bloomfieldians were already doing. [08:23]
CK: Well, yes, no doubt about that. [08:25] And of course, Zellig Harris, in many ways Chomsky’s teacher, [08:30] his project was to make text accessible to a computer, to make texts legible, and that was the whole point of his formalism. [08:39] So there’s no doubt that different forms of formalism were around. [08:43] And of course, in my book, I explain how actually you can trace that right, right back through Jakobson, right back to the Russian formalists, Russian formalism, [08:52] including the extraordinary poet Velimir Khlebnikov. [08:56] And that whole idea of formalism is to try at all costs to kind of rescue science, and linguistic science in particular, rescue it from politics, [09:06] because if you just have pure form, you can argue that you’re doing something on the level of astronomy. [09:13] I mean, E=MC2; is not politics, it’s just pure science. [09:17] And there’s something clearly liberating and inspiring about the idea of doing pure science uncontaminated by politics. [09:26] The point I’m making is that if we go to the extreme in that direction, [09:32] you just haven’t got language. [09:35] I mean, all I’m saying is that at the end of the day, language is social, it is communicative, [09:41] and if you strip away not only the politics, [09:43] but the social dimensions, what you’ve got is some form of computation. [09:49] But I would argue, and I think most people these days would argue as well… Including people who’ve been taught by Chomsky. I mean, Steven Pinker, I can think of hardly any linguist these days who would argue that language hasn’t got some necessary and intrinsic connection with communication. [10:04] So if we take it too far, what you’ve got might be interesting, but it’s just not language. [10:10]
JMc: Has Chomsky responded at all to your account? [10:14]
CK: Yes. I mean, we’ve had a very difficult relationship over the years. [10:20] I was one of the founders of EvoLang, along with Jim Hurford, and we had a big conference in 2002 in Boston at which Chomsky made the final sort of massive contribution at the end of the whole week. [10:32] And yes, he has responded. [10:35] When my book came out, he described it as a “vulgar exercise of defamation, a web of deceit and misinformation”. [10:44] “The whole story is a wreck… complete nonsense throughout.” [10:48]
JMc: That’s a direct quote, I take it. [10:50]
CK: These are direct quotes, yes. That’s right. [10:53] And I kind of rather proudly put those comments in the front of my book, because at least it was a response from Chomsky. [11:02] He argued that the reason why he’s legitimately describing it as a wreck is because, quote, no military work was being done on campus during his time at MIT. [11:16] Which is fine, except that he also says the following: [11:19] “There was extensive military research on the MIT campus. In fact, a good deal of the nuclear missile guidance technology was developed right on the MIT campus.” [11:29] So what I’m saying is, the point I’m making about the just inescapable involvement with military technology and missile guidance technology, it’s not a point that Chris Knight makes. [11:42] It’s a point that Chomsky makes on numerous occasions. [11:45] And for some reason, I don’t know how to put this exactly, but Chomsky’s political admirers [11:51] — and of course I’m a huge admirer of his politics — [11:55] they’re always trying to find some connection between his linguistics and his politics. [12:00] They’re always trying to sort of say, Well, there must be something liberating about his linguistics and left-wing about his linguistics, in many cases. [12:07] And every time Chomsky came across activist supporters who asked him to explain that connection, he just got more and more impatient. [12:13] He just sort of shook his head. [12:14] “You’re not going to find anything politically inspiring in my linguistics. Forget it.” [12:18] And the Left just couldn’t kind of cope with this. [12:22] So how do I put this? [12:24] I mean, what I’m saying is that if you are a left-wing activist working in this military lab, [12:30] you’re going to need to draw a line between the two sides of your work. [12:38] I mean, just let me… I mean, a passage from my book, actually. [12:42] I describe how he became a friend of somebody called John Deutch, who before long was to become director of the CIA. [12:55] And Chomsky recalls, “We were actually friends and got along fine, although we disagreed on about as many things as two human beings can disagree about. [13:02] I liked him. We got along very well together. [13:03] He’s very honest, very direct. You know where you stand with him. We talked to each other. When we had disagreements, they were open, sharp, clear, honestly dealt with. I had no problem with him. I was one of the very few people on the faculty, I’m told, who was supporting his candidacy for the President of MIT.” [13:05] And so I’m just saying we need to appreciate the glaring contradiction here, because this is Chomsky’s view of the CIA. [13:31] “The CIA does what it wants. [13:33] It carries out assassinations, systematic torture, bombings, invasions, mass murder of civilians, multiple other crimes.” [13:39] In Indonesia, as Chomsky rightly points out, in 1965, the CIA organized a military coup to prevent the Communist party, described by Chomsky as the “party of the poor,” from winning a key general election. [13:53] The ensuing repression resulted in a staggering mass slaughter of perhaps half a million people. [13:58] So I mean, you know, you’re friends with a future director of the CIA, who’s a chemist involved in fuel-air explosives and other weapons of mass destruction. [14:10] You’re aware that the CIA is, from Chomsky’s point of view, a criminal organization. [14:16] You’re friends with, you have lunch with these people. [14:21] And then in the evening, you have a meeting with anarchists and revolutionaries and anti-capitalists and anti-militarists. [14:29] And I’m simply saying, can you see, you’re meeting with these people at lunchtime, in the evening, [14:34] you’re meeting with the opposite camps. [14:36] You wouldn’t want the anarchists present in your discussions with the future director of the CIA. [14:41] And when you’re at your anarchist meeting in the evening, I don’t think you’d want the director of the CIA to be publicly present in that meeting either. [14:47] You’ve just got to keep those two things apart, [14:50] and keeping them apart meant keeping apart different parts of Chomsky’s passion, Chomsky’s, if you like, his mind, his brain [14:59] — to the extent that when an interviewer said to him, “Well, there seem to be two Noam Chomskys. What do they say to each other when they meet?” [15:07] And Chomsky says there’s no connection. [15:10] There’s no connection between the two of them. [15:13] The connection is almost non-existent. [15:15] There is a kind of loose, abstract connection in the background, but practical connections are non-existent. [15:20] So he’s basically telling us that the two Noam Chomskys aren’t really on speaking terms. [15:26]
Okay, I mean, you’re in a difficult situation. [15:29] You want your job. You can do very good work in that job, but there are institutional contradictions. [15:34] And I’m not even saying that Chomsky should have not taken the job. [15:38] I mean, because by taking that job and becoming such a star figure in linguistics based in MIT, he then gained a platform from which to launch his assault on the U.S. military, beginning with the invasion of Vietnam. [15:53] So had he not had that job, he might have been like any other sort of activist on the street somewhere without that powerful voice. [16:00] By the way, I need to say how much we right now miss that voice. [16:06] It’s well known, of course, that for over a year now, Noam has been not well, and we have lost a voice of sanity in what I regard as an increasingly deranged political world. [16:21] It’s a huge loss. We would have benefited so much from Chomsky’s voice, [16:25] particularly in connection with Palestine and what’s going on today in Gaza. [16:30] I’m saying that simply to stress, I’m not even criticizing Chomsky. [16:34] I’m saying in a difficult situation, all of us have to make a living. [16:37] We all have to have a job. Whatever job we take, mostly it’ll be finan
Podcast episode 40: Interview with Nick Riemer on politics, linguistics and ideology
31 de maio de 202427 min
In this interview, we talk to Nick Riemer about how linguistic theory and political ideology can interact. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts References for Episode 40 Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On being included …
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In this interview, we talk to Nick Riemer about how linguistic theory and political ideology can interact.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
References for Episode 40
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Althusser, Louis. 2015 [1976]. Être marxiste en philosophie. Paris: PUF.
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Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:18] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:22] Today we’re joined by Nick Riemer, who’s lecturer in linguistics and English at the University of Sydney in Australia, and also associated with the Laboratory History of Linguistic Theories in Paris. [00:35] Nick has a broad range of interests in the study of language, [00:39] most notably in semantics, history and philosophy of linguistics, and the politics of linguistics. [00:45] It’s these political dimensions of linguistic scholarship that Nick is going to talk to us about today. [00:51] His current project is a monograph on the politics of linguistics since Saussure. [00:58] So Nick, what have the politics of linguistics been like since Saussure? [01:02]
NR: Thanks a lot for inviting me on the podcast, James, and obviously, there’s no single answer [01:09] to that question. In fact, many linguists since Saussure have denied that there is any [01:16] connection between linguistics and politics. It’s a surprisingly common declaration that [01:22] you come across linguists making throughout the 20th century that these two things actually [01:28] have no connection. And it’s sort of reflected, I think, in the conventional historiography of linguistics. [01:36] I mean, you can tell me whether you agree with this, but it seems to me that the way we usually [01:41] talk about linguistics and politics is by talking about how particular ideas and theories [01:46] and frameworks in linguistics might reflect external trends in society and politics. It’s [01:54] often struck me that that’s a sort of overly passive way of construing the relationship, and it ignores [02:00] the fact that linguistics doesn’t just reflect what’s going on outside. It also contributes [02:06] to it, shapes it, plays an ideological function in reinforcing or challenging it. And that’s what [02:13] I’m interested in, in the period after Saussure. And I think the… to answer, to try and answer, your question a little bit [02:22] because the connections are just so vast and manifold, I think the key is to seeing linguistics [02:27] as a social practice, to seeing it not in idealist terms as a body of doctrine or discoveries [02:36] which unfolds according to its own internal logic, and in which the theorists and the [02:43] participants are these purely disinterested truth-seekers, but to see it as something [02:50] which unfolds largely in the context of higher education, in a social context where the players [02:56] themselves are engaged in political tussles internally within the field, but where the [03:02] discipline also does arguably perform various ideological and political functions. [03:10]
JMc: But why focus on linguistics? I mean, it’s a fairly niche discipline, isn’t it, within the university landscape? [03:17]
NR: Because I had the misfortune or the folly to become a specialist in part of linguistics, [03:24] and from that got on to taking an interest in the history and the philosophy of the discipline. [03:29] So, you know, to the man with the hammer, everything looks like a nail. So I’m just, in embarking on [03:35] this project, I’m, as we all do, working on what I know and what I feel I can make some [03:40] contribution to. Obviously, you can’t separate the history of linguistics from the wider [03:45] history of the human sciences and from wider intellectual history, even though for much [03:51] of the 20th century, especially its later part, I would say there has been a certain [03:56] isolationism in the discipline. [03:59] And it’s certainly notable, I think, that linguistics in the West was, to a large and surprising [04:08] extent, immune, for instance, from the waves of social critique and political critique [04:15] that swept over the rest of the humanities and the social sciences from the 1960s. [04:19] I mean, there were versions of that that did touch linguistics, but it has been a quite [04:25] sort of technical and scientific and rather sort of isolationist discipline, and I think that [04:32] performs an ideological function in itself, actually. [04:35]
JMc: OK, but do you think that that represents linguistics as an entire discipline or just [04:39] particular schools of linguistics? [04:42] Because, I mean, you could argue that linguistics as [04:45] a field has actually served as a model science, as a model to many of the other human sciences, [04:52] especially in the 20th century, and in fact that a lot of post-structuralist theory is a reaction [04:57] to structuralism, a body of doctrines that have come out of linguistics. [05:03]
NR: Yeah, absolutely it is, and there’s no doubt that structuralism was a pilot science, as it was [05:09] often called for… and had a massive influence, and there was this sort of linguistification of [05:15] the world that happened in the wake of structural linguistics, where it looked as though for [05:21] a while everything could be treated as though it was a language which operated on structuralist principles. [05:27] I mean, I suppose Lacan is the most celebrated version of that. [05:31] But at one point in the ’60s and ’70s, it looked as though everything had a grammar. [05:37] Music had a grammar, dance had a grammar, urban planning had a grammar—everything had a grammar. [05:42] And I think that’s one of the things that makes asking questions about the politics [05:46] of our ideas about language interesting, that language is a sort of model, as you say, [05:54] for a whole lot of other symbolic and also maybe non-symbolic domains, [06:00] so it’s interesting to inquire into the underlying political assumptions that might drive research into language structure. [06:12] Because if I… Perhaps I can just elaborate on that slightly. [06:15] I mean, you know, when we talk about language and politics and language in society, I think we’re really used to looking [06:21] at the obvious things, so we’re looking, we look often at the contribution of language to, [06:26] of linguistics to colonialism. [06:28] So, you know, its use as part of expert knowledge among, [06:34] among colonizers in the, in the service of control of colonial populations. [06:39] We look at language standardization, which is about a similar dynamic within the West, [06:47] the dispossession, the linguistic dispossession of subaltern classes by particular, you know, [06:54] certified registers of national languages, which were typically not the ones that were [07:01] spoken by, you know, rural and working class populations, but which was imposed on them as part of the project of, you know, universal primary education. [07:12] Language planning, you know, the way that language planning is done to serve particular political ends. [07:17] So that’s all very interesting, and I think in linguistics in general, we do have [07:23] a reasonable understanding of that. [07:24] And it’s certainly very salient, you know, linguistics and racism, linguistics and class exploitation. [07:31] These are well understood, but what we have less of a interest in, I think, [07:35] and which I myself find really worth exploring [07:39] is the way in which our basic structural ideas about the nature of grammar might be the product of, and might also [07:47] reinforce, particular ideological settings, which play a role in, for want of a better word, [07:54] Western European or Anglo-European capitalist modernity, [07:57] and I think there are a lot of interesting things that we can say about that. [08:01]
JMc: So if I might just query the specifics of your historiographic scheme, why do you start your discussion of the modern field of linguistics [08:11] with Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics? [08:13] So, I mean, there’s, of course, a tradition of treating Saussure’s Course as the founding scripture of modern synchronic linguistics, [08:20] but there’s also plenty of historical scholarship that shows that this is largely a convenient myth, [08:26] that there’s a great deal of continuity between Saussure and what came before him—and what came immediately before him, that is—namely the Neogrammarians, [08:37] and also that a lot of what is considered Saussurean is, in fact, later interpretation that people have made in setting up [08:48] Saussure’s Course as the scripture that they base, you know, all of their ideas on. [08:54]
NR: Yeah, I mean, it’s clear that, you know, there are lots of continuities, as you say, between the [08:59] Course, which of course wasn’t from Saussure’s own pen, but which was a retrospective reconstruction [09:04] by his colleagues on the basis of lecture notes, as we all know. [09:09] There’s an obvious continuity between that and the Mémoire on the vowel system. [09:14] There are similar sort of structuralist, for want of a better term, ideas that you can see in both of them, I think. [09:21] But to the extent that any starting point for any project is arbitrary, as of course it is, [09:28] I still think there are good grounds for starting with Saussure, because [09:33] retrospectively that text was imbued with an enormous weight in the structuralist period. [09:39] You know, maybe not immediately, but, you know, in the ’50s, certainly, people looked back to, [09:45] and earlier as well, people did look back to, you know, Saussure as the sort of founding charter of [09:51] this new intellectual movement, which was by no means just Saussurian, but which did appeal to [09:58] many of the ideas in the Course in General Linguistics as the starting point for this [10:03] exciting new way of thinking about language. [10:06] And I mean, if we just look at two aspects of Saussure, [10:10] I think we can, you know, see that there is a reason to take the Course seriously as a starting point. [10:18] One is the concept of synchrony, you know, the idea that there needs to be a break with the [10:24] predominantly sort of historical mode of investigation of language, which was true of [10:31] the comparative-historical method and then of Neogrammarians, [10:36] and the other is this abstraction that Saussure, you know, really popularized, or that the Course really popularized, [10:44] which is langue, you know, the idea that there is some kind of abstract formal structure at the heart [10:53] of language which can be meaningfully studied out of connection with actual acts of language use, [11:00] actual discourse, actual linguistic interchange. [11:04] And that really set the stage, I think, in important ways for the whole formalization, for the whole abstraction that became such a feature and [11:14] hallmark of ‘linguistic science’, quote-unquote, in the subsequent decades. [11:21] And there’s really interesting things, I think, that we can say about the ideological valency of both of those things, [11:29] this divestment that Saussure accomplished of language from the historical flow, the situated [11:37] historical flow of temporal, you know, human interaction embedded in all of those things which, [11:45] you know, give human interaction its particular characteristics: you know, our gender, [11:50] our ethnic background, our particular position in whatever speech community and society we’re in. [11:56] All of these things, Saussure was seen as providing a licence to ignore, or at least to background, [12:04] and I think we can see in that, you know, a particular, a recognizable move that we see widely, I would say, in bourgeois culture, [12:16] which is just a backgrounding of social conflict and social tensions and the class character of society, [12:23] and also particularly the problems of racialization and the racialization of different linguistic subjects. [12:29] All of that is largely backgrounded by the decision to look at this thing which is called langue, and to take language out of [12:37] the social contexts that it really surely belongs in, in a significant way. [12:43] So that’s one, I think, interesting way in which what became doctrine in linguistics did contribute to this image that [12:50] liberal society, that bourgeois liberal society, has of itself in the West, which is this [12:56] fantasy of a social homogeneity, and this backgrounding of society as this dialectical, [13:03] conflict-ridden, intrinsically contradictory thing, out of which, you know, transformative social [13:09] change could arise if we
Podcast episode 39: Interview with Ingrid Piller on Life in a New Language
30 de abril de 202426 min
In this interview, we talk to Ingrid Piller about her forthcoming co-authored book Life in a New Language. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 39 Kachru, Braj B. 1985 …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Ingrid Piller about her forthcoming co-authored book Life in a New Language.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 39
Kachru, Braj B. 1985. ‘Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle’, in English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures, ed. Randolph Quirk and Henry George Widdowson, pp. 11–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Piller, Ingrid. 2023. ‘Scholarly sisterhood: Collaboration is our academic superpower’. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/scholarly-sisterhood-collaboration-is-our-academic-superpower/
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language [00:13] Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:18] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:22] Today we’re joined by Ingrid Piller, who’s Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Australia. [00:29] Ingrid has many different areas of expertise within the vast field of applied linguistics, [00:35] including in intercultural communication, language learning, multilingualism, and bilingual education. [00:42] Ingrid’s also the co-founder and one of the leading contributors to the multi-author scholarly [00:48] blog Language on the Move, which has recently branched out into a podcast, [00:54] and she’s going to talk to us today about her latest book project, a collective volume [00:59] that she’s co-edited with several colleagues from Language on the Move, about the experience [01:05] of learning a new language and making a new life in that language after migrating to another [01:10] country. [01:11] This book will appear soon with Oxford University Press under the title Life in a New Language. [01:18]
So Ingrid, to get us started, could you tell us a bit about your forthcoming book? What [01:22] is it about, and what approach does it take? [01:25]
IP: OK, well, thanks, James, for having me on the show. [01:29] So Life in a New Language, first thing I should say, it’s not a co-edited book, but a co-authored book. [01:35]
JMc: OK. [01:36]
IP: And I think that’s really special about it. [01:40] So it answers the question: what does it mean to start a new life through a new language [01:48] and what kind of settlement challenges do new migrants face? [01:53] And this is a question that myself and my students and my Language on the Move colleagues, [01:59] as you’ve said, has been a key research question for us over more than 20 years. [02:07] And in the late 2010s, a couple of us were getting together and were saying, ‘Well, look, [02:15] we’ve got a number of really interesting but separate studies, and we’ve collected all [02:21] these data, we’ve interviewed and sat with and spent time with and conducted participant [02:27] observation with so many migrants from so many different contexts over so many years. [02:35] Why don’t we actually get together and reanalyse those data?’ [02:39]
And so methodologically, it’s a real innovation in that we are actually reusing data from [02:46] existing sociolinguistic ethnographies, and so it’s a data-sharing project, and there [02:54] are six projects from which we bring together data. [03:01] So there is one that I started in the early 2000s at the University of Sydney, and that [03:11] was an ethnography with highly achieving second language learners. [03:16] So at the time, I was particularly interested in people who had learned English to such [03:22] high levels that they could pass for a native speaker, and so that was the first cohort of people who went into it. [03:31] Then another PhD, data from a PhD that focused on the experiences of European migrants to [03:38] Australia, that was done by Emily Farrell and completed in 2010. [03:46] Then three other PhDs completed here at Macquarie University, one by Vera Williams Tetteh about [03:54] the language learning and settlement experiences of African migrants to Australia, [03:59] one by Shiva Motaghi Tabari about the experiences of Iranian migrants, and she was particularly focusing [04:11] on parenting and heritage language maintenance in that context. [04:16] And then data from another sociolinguistic ethnography with female migrants and how… The focus [04:23] of the PhD was on how gender influences the migration experience. [04:29] And then the sixth project that went into it was a project that was funded by a New Staff Grant here at Macquarie University to Loy Lising [04:38] about the experiences of skilled migrants from the Philippines [04:44] who arrived here under a temporary skilled work visa and went [04:49] straight into workplaces and what their experiences were. [04:53]
And so we brought all these data together that we’d collected for separate projects. [04:58] I mean, I have to say, I was involved in all of these projects. [05:01] I either was the PhD supervisor or the researcher or the sponsor or mentor of the research. [05:08] So I was involved in all of these. Even so, they were actually… I mean, in hindsight, [05:13] they were very disparate and some of the challenges in terms of data sharing, you only notice [05:19] them like in hindsight. ‘Oh, if we’d done this more consistently or that more consistently, would have been easier.’ [05:26] But anyway, so we set ourselves the challenge of actually bringing all this data together [05:32] and reanalysing them with a new set of research questions focused on language learning experiences, [05:41] interactional practices, like how do you make friends, how do you actually find someone [05:45] to talk to? Which is a not trivial problem. Experiences of finding work; that was relevant [05:53] to everyone. Regardless of how we had originally set up the research, everyone wanted to talk [05:59] about… I mean, we have so many data about finding work and not finding work at the [06:03] level you want to find work, then experiences with making family in a new context because inevitably your family changes, right? [06:13] Some people are left behind, but even like the people with who you migrate, you know, [06:19] your relationship changes, new challenges arise like parenting, bilingual parenting, [06:24] do you pass on the heritage language, do you focus on English, experiences with racism [06:31] and experiences with belonging — how do you create belonging and a sense of connection? [06:37] And so these were the research questions we asked of these data and so overall now [06:44] we then have an analysis based on data with 130 migrants from 34 different countries [06:54] on all continents, pretty much over a period of 20 years, the earliest of these arrived [07:02] in Australia in 1970 and the last to arrive was someone who arrived in 2013. [07:12]
JMc: But in every case the country that they moved to is Australia, is that correct? [07:17]
IP: Yes, that’s correct, yeah. [07:18]
JMc: And do you think language is a key feature of the migrant experience that you’ve analysed? [07:25]
IP: Yeah, so, I mean, we’re only looking at migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, so all of them had to learn English. [07:33] So that was a key feature of their experience because, you know, when you move to a new [07:41] country where even if you’ve learned the language for a long time, you now need to do things [07:48] through that language, and so that’s the dual challenge, right? [07:52] You need to still learn the language and extend your repertoire or some people arrive with [07:57] pretty much zero English, so you learn English, but at the same time it’s not like you’re [08:03] in a classroom. [08:04] You’re in real life. [08:06] You need to achieve things, you need to be able to rent a house, to find a job, to interact with customers, to, you know, go to the supermarket, [08:18] maybe go to hospital, maybe have an emergency, but even also accomplish really trivial things. [08:25]
We start with one trivial-sounding example that has really deep repercussions for the participants. [08:36] So this is the story of a young woman from Japan who arrived in Australia when she was [08:42] in her late teens, and the idea was for her to come here to, you know, improve her English, essentially. [08:49] So she had learned a bit of English back in Japan, and when we first met her, she had been [08:56] in Australia like 10 years or so, so after the study abroad experience, she had actually [09:02] settled down, and one of the… [09:04] She had this traumatic memory of the first year of her [09:10] time in Queensland that she was only able to drink apple juice and it was like this [09:16] absurd trauma, like, ‘Oh, I could only drink…’ No, sorry, not apple juice, orange juice. [09:22] So why only orange juice? [09:24] And she goes, ‘Well, I never liked orange juice, but whenever I asked for apple juice, no one ever understood me.’ [09:31] And so we kind of reconstructed that probably apple juice would have sounded something like, in a very Japanese accent, something like ‘apuru juice’. [09:41] And you know, I mean, she didn’t utter that word randomly. [09:45] She always asked it in the context of some hospitality encounter, but no one ever understood [09:51] her and so people would shout back like, ‘What?’ [09:54] And, you know, she imitated this like loud kind of people being rude or saying this rapid-fire, ‘What do you want?’ And, you know, so… [10:03] She never got… Or just, you know, ignoring her. [10:09]
So all she could ever drink for the longest of time was orange juice, but that was sort [10:13] of the example for actually being ignored, being, you know, not given opportunities [10:22] to learn the language when you are actually there in real life. [10:26] So people are not necessarily sympathetic to adult language learners. [10:31] I think that’s the other challenge because as adults, you know, we’re supposed to be competent. [10:36] You want to… You’re not focused on your language. [10:41] That’s for little kids. [10:43] You know, I mean, we set up the world for children so that they actually learn language [10:49] at the same time that they are being socialized into whatever it is that a child needs to do. [10:56] But a child really has, you know, huge responsibilities. [11:01] And so when, as an adult, you’re kind of thrown back to that language learning situation where [11:08] you’re basically in the shoes of the little child, except you have responsibilities, you [11:15] have serious things to do, and you’re supposed to be competent to know how to order a drink [11:21] in a restaurant, right? [11:22] I mean, that’s… No one gives you any… cuts you any slack there. [11:28] And so that sort of encapsulates the story, encapsulates the challenge that all our participants [11:36] experienced, really, to regain their adult competence through a medium that they were [11:45] still learning, going along, mastering. [11:49]
JMc: And do you think you could make any generalizations from these studies [11:52] to the migrant experience sort of internationally? [11:56] Because in some ways, maybe Australia and other English-speaking countries are a special [12:00] case, because English has this status today internationally as a sort of neutral default [12:07] language that is used in international encounters. [12:10] So do you think that the experience in Australia can be generalized more broadly? [12:14]
IP: Yes and no. [12:16] So no in the sense that, as you’ve pointed out correctly, English is a very different [12:23] beast than any other language, [12:25] and hardly any of our participants really arrived with zero English. [12:32] Some had learned English for years and years and years as a foreign language, and you and [12:40] your listeners are probably familiar with kind of Kachru’s circle model of English. [12:46] And we sort of used that as a guide because it was really quite helpful in the sense [12:51] that some people come from these postcolonial societies where English has some official [12:57] status and they had all encountered some English, [13:02] but in those contexts English is strongly associated with formal education. [13:08] And so we have people, particularly from African postcolonial countries, who actually had [13:15] a lot of oral proficiency in English, had a lot of experience actually communicating [13:21] multilingually, picking up new languages as they kind of went along. [13:28] And they arrive in Australia, and all of a sudden their English no longer counts. [13:36] That high oral proficiencies that they have, they’re not recognized, so all that people [13:43] seem to see in them is either that they are low literacy, because some of them had very [13:48] disrupted education, or if they did have good levels of formal education, still they were [13:56] often treated as if their English wasn’t real or as if no one could understand them. [14:01]
So we have this example, for instance, from a participant from Kenya who actually had [14:08] all her education through the medium of English. [14:12] I mean, her English was, she had a slight kind of East African accent, but essentially [14:18] it was British English. [14:19] I mean, it was more formal than the way most Australians speak English. [14:23] And she had this experience that she was applying for a job in some customer-facing role, and [14:33] then the person who interviewed her said, ‘You know, you’re fantastically qualified, [14:38] but you know what, I can’t actually give you that job because my clients won’t understand you.’ [14:46] And there really is no way this was a problem of understanding, because, I mean, if you [14:56] hadn’t seen her, then you would have understood. [15:01] So it’s this kind of McGurk effect problem that you judge the proficiency of people also [15:08] on their embodied identity and what kind of stereotypes you may have about that embodied identity. [15:18]
So going back to these multilingual experiences, the other thing that I’ve said about this [15:24] group from the postcolonial countries where English has an official status, so they were [15:30] highly multilingual, and they were really quite used to learning new languages. [15:35] There was nothing special to them, as it often is sort of in Western contexts. [15:41] However, in Australia, all of a sudden, that didn’t work anymore, because it wasn’t this [15:47] kind of multilingual repertoire that people could build on, but it was all this monolithic [15:54] monolingual English, [15:57] and so although they had a lot of English, still the kind of English that they brought [16:05] was very different from the kind of English that was needed here, [16:10] and so that created all kinds of challenges and mismatches, particularly in terms of education, [16:17] in terms of credentialing, in terms of finding jobs. [16:21]
And the other group that we had were from countries that would conventionally call countries [16:27] in the expanding circle. [16:29] So they had learned English through the school system, like as a school subject, often over many years. [16:36] They’d done tests and tests and tests. [16:38] In fact, the testing was reinforced by Australian migration regulations [16:44] that actually in order to get a Skilled Independent visa, you need to demonstrate a particular proficiency level of English. [16:53] So these people actually, they came to Australia, they felt, ‘My English has been certified [16:58] by the Australian state, you know. I’ve got a visa on the strength, amongst other things [17:05] of course, that my English is OK. [17:07] So I have certified competent English.’ That gets you like 10 points for the visa. [17:13] And then they arrived and they had this huge shock because they felt they couldn’t understand anything. [17:20] So they didn’t have the kind of oral proficiency or communicative competence. [17:24] And some of them were saying it’s because, you know, Australian accent is so different. [17:29] It’s not Oxford English or whatever kind of British or American English they’d learned. [17:34] But it was also just really, you know, being in different communicative situations. [17:41] Like for instance, one of our participants told us the story about how she arrived in Australia and needed to get a phone. [17:49] And she had very high IELTS level, goes to get a phone, and just, ‘I didn’t understand a word [18:01] of what that salesperson was saying to me.’ [18:03] Just couldn’t get a phone, right? [18:06] And that seems like a trivial thing, [18:09] but again, you know, the kind of English that people bring is very different from what you [18:15] actually need in real life, so to speak, or in this kind of real life. [18:22] So in that sense, English or the language learning and settlement challenges are also [18:27] similar to learning another language. [18:31] Whatever kind of proficiency you bring, you will have a whole lot of adaptation challenges. [18:38] But there’s no doubt about it that for most other languages, people start at zero or [18:46] are likely to start closer to zero than they are for English. [18:50]
JMc: Yeah. [18:51] Or perhaps other postcolonial languages like perhaps French. [18:55]
IP: That’s right. [18:56]
JMc: And you’ve sort of touched on this point, but do you think it’s fair to say that migration [19:01] is not just about a person or people being transplanted from one land to another, but [19:07] is a formative process that affects the identity not only of the person who’s migrated to the [19:14] new country, but of the society that they move into? [19:18] So are there any generalizations that we can make about that, [19:21] about how migration and identity and language interact with each other? [19:27]
IP: Yeah, look, absolutely. [19:29] So that’s what we try to say in the title. [19:32] You start a new life, right? [19:34] Migration, in many ways, is a break with your former life. [19:40] It’s a break with the daily habits you had. [19:43] It’s a break with the career you might have built. [19:49] It’s a break with your family and friends, your social circles, because they will be away. [19:58] I mean, even if nowadays where we have all these virtual contacts and social media, which [20:03] weren’t avai
Podcast episode 38: Interview with Dan Everett on C.S. Peirce and Peircean linguistics
31 de março de 202423 min
In this interview, we talk to Dan Everett about the life and work of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and Everett’s application of Peirce’s ideas to create a Peircean linguistics …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Dan Everett about the life and work of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and Everett’s application of Peirce’s ideas to create a Peircean linguistics.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 38
Cole, David. 2023. “The Chinese Room Argument”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), eds. Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/chinese-room/
Everett, Daniel L. 2012. Language: The Cultural Tool. New York: Pantheon Books.
Everett, Daniel L. 2017. How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention. New York: Liveright.
Everett, Daniel L. 2023. ‘Underspecified temporal semantics in Pirahã: Compositional transparency and semiotic inference’, in Understanding Human Time, ed. Kasia M. Jaszczolt, pp. 276–318. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, [00:15] online at hiphilangsci.net. There you can find links and references to [00:19] all the literature we discuss. Today we’re joined by Dan Everett. Dan is Professor [00:25] of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley College in Massachusetts. His background is in field [00:31] linguistics and linguistic theory, and he’s of course best known for his work with the [00:37] Pirahã in the Brazilian Amazon. The conclusions he’s drawn about the structure of the Pirahã [00:43] language have significant consequences for much of mainstream linguistic theory, especially [00:49] for generative grammar in the Chomskyan tradition. These consequences have been debated extensively. [00:56]
At the moment, Dan is researching most keenly the life and work of the American philosopher [01:01] Charles Sanders Peirce. This project is not unrelated to his work on Pirahã and his previous [01:08] contributions to linguistic theory. These various threads are now coming together in Dan’s proposal [01:15] for a Peircean linguistics, and this is what he’s going to talk to us about today.
So to set the [01:22] scene for us, can you tell us, who was C.S. Peirce? What were his intellectual contributions, [01:29] and why are they important?
DE: I’m actually writing a biography of Charles Sanders Peirce for [01:35] Princeton University Press, and I’ve been interested in Peirce now for about six years [01:42] seriously, and before that I did cite him quite a bit in my How Language Began from 2017 and [01:51] also in my Language: The Cultural Tool from 2012, but I got seriously interested in Peirce [01:59] some years later. The first time I heard about Peirce, and then I’ll get to who he is, was [02:05] actually from Chomsky, who called him his favorite philosopher and talked about the [02:10] Peircean concept of abduction, which is the formalization of hypothesis formation. [02:16]
Charles Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Benjamin and Sarah Peirce in 1839. [02:26] Benjamin was for 50 years professor of mathematics at Harvard and was considered the leading [02:33] mathematician in the United States and the person who put U.S. science on a nearly equal footing [02:41] with the European science of mid-19th century, and he was a very interesting person in his own [02:47] right, founder of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement [02:53] of Science, co-founder.
Charles was raised in Harvard Yard. When he was a boy, they lived [03:02] actually in Harvard Yard, and his friends and his father’s friends were some of the leading [03:07] intellectuals of the United States, and later as Peirce grew, his own friends became leading [03:15] intellectuals and friends of people such as Thomas Huxley and others.
But Charles initially became [03:23] interested in logic and chemistry, and for most of his life… The only degree that he actually ever held [03:33] was in chemistry. He held a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from [03:41] Harvard, and he was then hired as an astronomer and as a geophysicist with what was then called [03:51] the U.S. Coastal Survey, which is now NOAA. They actually launched a ship called C.S. Peirce. [03:59] So he got mainly interested in logic, but he was also one of the greatest polymaths in history. He [04:07] was the first person in the United States to do experimental psychology. He was the inventor of [04:15] propositional and first-order logic with quantifiers, nearly simultaneously with Frege. [04:20] They didn’t know about each other’s work. Peirce is also known as the inventor of American pragmatism, [04:26] or just pragmatism. That’s a philosophical school of America that is often associated with [04:30] William James. He is the inventor of semiotics, and there’s evidence that Saussure actually [04:38] was able to consult some of Peirce’s work on semiotics before he came out with his own work [04:44] on semiotics, which was very different and designed for a very different purpose. [04:51]
So in mathematics, Peirce took his father’s place as the number one mathematician in the United [04:57] States, and there are many articles on mathematics. So he was a phenomenal polymath. He was one of the [05:03] leading Egyptologists in the world, and he was… In his notebooks I have copied, there are analyses of [05:12] Tagalog syntax, and he was very interested in languages. He published about 127 articles on [05:21] linguistics or linguistic themes, including the first-ever phonetic study of Shakespearean [05:27] pronunciation. His father had produced the first formal study of phonetics in the United States, [05:33] or one of the first.
So he was this astounding person, but when he died, [05:40] he never held an academic post except for four years at Johns Hopkins. He was one of the first [05:46] professors hired at the new University of Johns Hopkins, but Peirce was a very egocentric person. [05:54] He thought he was smarter than everybody else. He probably was. He didn’t like to take orders. [05:59] So he lost his job at Johns Hopkins. Also from the fact that he liked to drink, and he was seen [06:06] coming out of a hotel with a woman who was not his wife, and that really got the trustees of [06:11] Johns Hopkins upset. He eventually married her. But he was fired. He was eventually fired from [06:17] his job at the U.S. Coastal Service after 31 years, and this was in the day before pensions, [06:22] before retirement plans.
So he was left penniless when he was roughly 60 years old, 62 years old. [06:31] He was left penniless and survived through the contributions of William James, who led a great [06:39] effort to round up people from Alexander Graham Bell to Andrew Carnegie to contribute monthly [06:46] to Peirce. But it was very pov… It was a poverty-level contribution, but it kept him from death, I mean, [06:53] and starvation.
Peirce, according to his diaries, was usually up at 7:30 in the morning and worked [06:59] till about midnight or 1 AM every day, seven days a week, and his neighbors said that the light [07:05] was always on in his study, and poverty did not keep him from working a tremendous amount. [07:11]
His papers originally were not well organized after his death. They were picked up and sold [07:17] for a very small price to Harvard, and Harvard took them and tried to organize them, but because [07:23] of his reputation for immorality, in part, Harvard wouldn’t allow access to those papers, [07:30] and so it was very hard to do work on Peirce. And one of the chairmen of the Harvard philosophy [07:36] department who had the control over the papers was Willard Van Orman Quine, who would not let [07:41] anyone see them. So it wasn’t until the work of Max Fisch and Paul Weiss and others that the [07:52] papers began to become organized and that we began to get access to them. Max Fisch worked for [07:59] 50 years on a Peirce biography that he never started, but he took over 70,000 notes on Peirce [08:08] and did a huge amount of historical research, and I have all of those on my computer now. [08:12] I made an effort to get to where they’re located in Indiana and copy them. So Peirce, in my opinion, [08:19] offers an exciting alternative to current views of linguistics, which, in my opinion, even if one [08:29] does not ultimately decide that they want to work within a Peircean linguistics, I think they will [08:36] find his ideas extremely interesting and relevant, even if they continue to work in the same model. [08:43]
JMc: So can I just ask you there, obviously he worked in pretty much every field of intellectual [08:49] endeavor, but you say he was the inventor of modern semiotics?
DE: Yes, Peirce was the inventor [08:56] of semiotics. He certainly wasn’t the first person to talk about the semeion and signs. [09:01] That goes back… You know, there’s great work on that by Sextus Empiricus, there’s work by [09:08] John Locke, and many others worked on signs, but Peirce was the first one to develop a formal [09:14] theory of semiotics. He actually saw logic as a branch of semiotics. And the big difference [09:20] between Peircean semiotics and other semiotics, such as Saussure’s, is that whereas Saussure’s, [09:27] for example, was dyadic — there was a form-meaning composite, which is what most linguists are used to; [09:36] you have a word “dog,” its form is d-o-g in English, and it means “canine,” “domesticated canine” — [09:44] but for Peirce, there were three components to any sign. There was the sign itself (the physical [09:51] form, which he called the representamen), there was the object of the sign (which was very crucial, [09:57] so “tree” has an object, this thing in nature), and there’s also the interpretant. Every sign [10:03] has to be interpreted by another sign. We can’t think without signs; we can’t talk without signs; [10:09] every sign needs another sign. So if I paraphrase what a tree is, I would still be using other [10:17] signs to interpret that sign. So in this sense, also for Peirce, semiotics is recursive. One sign [10:24] is interpreted by another sign, which is interpreted by another sign, so it’s signs all the way down. [10:29]
So that makes Peirce’s signs very different, and he developed a very elaborate system of signs. [10:35] The three most common signs for people who aren’t specialists in semiotics are the icon, [10:41] the index, and the symbol. And like many terms, those are very good terms. I mean, [10:48] people use them in various ways, not always the way Peirce used them, and there’s debate on how [10:55] Peirce used them, but there’s also a very strong consensus on how Peirce used these signs. [11:02] And, you know, an icon is something which has a correspondence that a speaker perceives [11:10] between the sign and the object. So a photograph is not just that it’s an image of [11:18] the object, but it corresponds. So in any photograph, no matter how vague, if I choose to see it as a [11:24] photograph of myself, I can point out the correspondences. A diagram is a correspondence; [11:30] a tree diagram in syntactic analysis is an icon. An index is something which is physically, [11:38] a sign which is physically connected to its object, such as smoke and fire and footprints, [11:43] and the person who made the footprints. And a symbol is something which is conventionally [11:49] determined, by and large. I’m simplifying in all of these, but it’s a simplified conventionality. [11:57] This has a lot of interest for linguistics and for neuroscience and for the evolution of language, [12:05] and I’ve talked about some of these, and I do plan to explore these in much more detail. [12:11] So the second book that I’m working on relevant to Peirce is Peircean Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Pragmatist Thought, which you will see a similarity with [12:22] Cartesian Linguistics in the title. And in that volume, I plan to sort of, in part, [12:29] go through Cartesian linguistics and show the course how this would work, how this would be [12:33] in Peircean linguistics, and then outline some ideas. So Peirce, it’s difficult to think of [12:40] ways in which he couldn’t influence any part of linguistics, and I want to explore those. [12:46]
JMc: So your plan is basically to take Peircean semiotic theory and turn that into the basis [12:54] of linguistics? Is that the central idea of your Peircean linguistics? [12:57]
DE: No, not necessarily. Semiotics will be a major pillar of that, but more than anything else, [13:04] I mean, the semiotics is very important, but also Peircean inference is very important, because [13:10] one of the fundamental differences… I mean, when Russell and Whitehead wrote Principia Mathematica, they used Peirce’s logic, not Frege’s, but they mainly talked about Frege, [13:21] which was kind of funny, but they used Peirce’s logic, which had been slightly adapted by Peano. [13:28] Peirce introduced universal and existential quantifiers, but Peano just used slightly [13:33] different symbols for those, but that’s the system that Whitehead and Russell used, [13:38] and his inference is very important, whereas Frege introduced compositionality, you know, [13:44] the idea that the meaning of a sentence is the meaning of the parts and the way they were put [13:50] together, which has been by far one of the most influential ideas in modern linguistics. [13:57] Peirce did not propose that type of approach to meaning, and he developed an inferential [14:04] approach, which he formalized in his existential graphs. So, a large part of it will be to show [14:10] how existential graphs can handle not only sentences and propositions, but discourses, [14:17] and I think that counts as a serious advantage.
It also doesn’t require… This is one thing that [14:26] got me interested, in part. It doesn’t require syntactic recursion to get semantic recursion. [14:33] In other words, it’s not Montegovian. It doesn’t follow Richard Montague’s method [14:38] or Frege’s method, and I know that will be heresy to many, and certainly it doesn’t [14:45] imply any disrespect for those works that I think it’s worth exploring an alternative, [14:52] just to see that there is an alternative. I don’t think many linguists consider an alternative to [14:56] compositionality.
So, these are things I want to bring out in the theory, and the first thing I’ve [15:02] ever published sort of in an informal way about this is a chapter in the book Understanding Human Time, where I argue that in Pirahã, also in English, you can’t really understand temporal [15:16] interpretations if you don’t look at inference. And I mean inference across the elements of the [15:23] sentence, outside the sentence in the discourse, and in the context, the cultural-ecological [15:29] context. I give a lot of examples from English in that paper, and from Pirahã, and maybe other [15:36] languages in which I argue that inference is crucial.
JMc: Just on the question of semantics and [15:43] meaning, one of the things that you’ve written about Peirce is, and this is a quote: [15:48] “[F]rom a Peircean perspective, language is a tool […] to transfer information from one mind […] to another [15:54] through the facilitation of inference via an open-ended system of symbols. Language by this [16:00] view is a subtype of communication system. All communication is the transfer of information via [16:07] signs […]” But do you think that this account is faithful to Peirce’s conception of semiotics? [16:14] Because this idea of the transfer of information is a bit narrow, isn’t it? You know, this question [16:19] of exactly what the nature of meaning might be is one of the central questions of much of [16:23] semiotic scholarship. Meaning is often taken to be something much more than just definite [16:29] and determinate information that’s transferred from one mind to another. [16:32]
DE: Well, I absolutely agree with that, but I do think it’s compatible with Peirce. I think that we have [16:39] been influenced in many ways, extremely positively so, by the notion of information that is found [16:46] in computer science that comes out of Claude Shannon’s work. And in that view of information, [16:52] information is primarily based on the form of the message, and it doesn’t really get into meaning. [16:59] It looks at what does the form provide that we didn’t have before, but it doesn’t really get [17:04] into meaning. This is why I think John Searle’s Chinese room argument, which many people hate [17:11] but I like, is still valid, because what Searle tried to show in his Chinese room experiment is [17:17] that a computer using forms only is, in fact, exchanging information with the outside world [17:26] — there’s no question about that — but it’s not a meaning-based information. The interpretant [17:33] is missing. So, in a dyadic semiotics, such as a Saussurean semiotics, the computer is [17:40] performing just fine at a semiotic level. You stick in something from Chinese to the computer [17:47] and it spits out something in English, even though it doesn’t understand it.
But Searle had not read [17:53] much Peirce, and I was sharing an office with Searle, actually, at the time, right after he [17:59] came up with the Chinese room experiment in Brazil. We were in an office together for about [18:03] four months, and as we talked about it, he certainly never mentioned Peirce. He also said [18:08] that he was surprised there wasn’t an easy answer to that. He figured the computer scientists would [18:12] have an easy answer, but they don’t. But from a Peircean perspective, the interpretant is missing. [18:19] And so this is what makes Peircean information very different from Shannon information, and that is [18:26] that meaning really is part of information, and Peirce defines the growth of information as the [18:32] growth of symbols. Increasing the connotation and the denotation together is growth of symbols, [18:39] and so Peirce talks about meaning in a sophisticated way quite extensively. [18:45] So when I talk about information, I’m talking about information that is based on interpretant [18:52] meaning, how we deal with this, how we infer, and so it’s a much richer concept, perhaps not as [19:01] useful to some people as Shannon’s, but from a linguistic perspective, I see it as a much [19:05] richer concept than information in the Shannon model of info
Podcast episode 37: Interview with Michael Lynch on conversation analysis and ethnomethodology
29 de fevereiro de 202427 min
In this interview, we talk to Michael Lynch about the history of conversation analysis and its connections to ethnomethodology. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 37 Button …
Notas do episódio
In this interview, we talk to Michael Lynch about the history of conversation analysis and its connections to ethnomethodology.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
References for Episode 37
Button, Graham, Michael Lynch and Wes Sharrock (2022) Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Constructive Analysis: On Formal Structures of Practical Action. London and New York: Routledge.
Fitzgerald, Richard (2024) “Drafting A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation,” Human Studies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09700-7
Garfinkel, Harold (2022) Studies of Work in the Sciences, M. Lynch, ed. London & New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003172611 (open access)
Lynch, Michael (1993) Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lynch, Michael and Oskar Lindwall, eds. (2024) Instructed and Instructive Actions: The Situated Production, Reproduction, and Subversion of Social Order. London and New York: Routledge.
Lynch, Michael and Douglas Macbeth (2016) “Introduction: The epistemics of Epistemics,” Discourse Studies 18(5): 493–499. See also the articles in the special issue.
Sacks, Harvey (1992) Lectures on Conversation, Vols. 1 & 2, Gail Jefferson, ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sacks, Harvey (1970) Aspects of Sequential Organization in Conversation. Unpublished manuscript, U.C. Irvine.
Sacks, Harvey, Emmanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson (1974) “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation”, Language 50(4), Part 1: 696–735. Available online
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language [00:14] Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. There you can find links and references to [00:20] all the literature we discuss. Today we’re joined by Michael Lynch, who’s Professor Emeritus [00:26] of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He’s going to talk to us about [00:32] conversation analysis and its links to ethnomethodology.
It’s probably fair to say that conversation [00:40] analysis, or CA, is a well-established subfield of linguistics today, which is concerned with [00:47] studying how interaction is achieved between speakers in an oral exchange. On a technical [00:54] level, conversation analysts typically proceed by making an audio or video recording of an [00:59] interaction and then transcribing it in a heavily marked up notation that conveys elements [01:06] of intonation, overlapping speech, gaze, and so on. Using these transcripts as empirical [01:12] evidence, the analysts then put forward theories about how the back-and-forth of conversation [01:18] is structured.
The seminal publication introducing conversation analysis was a 1974 article in [01:26] Language with the title, “A Simplest Systematics for the Analysis of Turn-Taking for Conversation”, [01:33] co-authored by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. These three are widely considered [01:41] the founding figures of CA. But crucially, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson had not been trained in [01:48] traditional linguistics programs. They were sociologists by academic upbringing. Moreover, [01:54] they were adherents of ethnomethodology, an approach to sociology pioneered by Harold Garfinkel. [02:02]
So the question arises as to how conversation analysis fits into linguistics and this broader [02:09] disciplinary constellation. Mike, can you illuminate this question a bit for us? [02:14] Where did conversation analysis come from, and how is it placed today? [02:19]
ML: OK, well, thank you, James, for the opportunity to speak to your podcast. To start, I’d like to [02:26] add that what you said about Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson also applies to me. I’m not trained as a [02:34] linguist, traditional or otherwise. My background is in sociology, but also like them, [02:39] I spent a lot of my career, particularly the last 25 years at Cornell, in interdisciplinary programs [02:46] of which sociology was a part. But my take on sociology through the field of ethnomethodology [02:53] is not normal sociology, as many people would tell you. I don’t want to go into that right now.
But [02:59] you asked about the background of Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson and where CA came from. I know less [03:06] about Schegloff’s and Jefferson’s background a little bit, but I know more about Sacks, [03:12] partly because I’ve been spending the last year and a half reading and rereading the two-volume [03:19] set of his lectures. A little bit about Schegloff. He wrote an MA thesis on the history of literary [03:26] criticism before pursuing a PhD in sociology at Berkeley at the same time that Sacks did. [03:32] Jefferson had an education and practical experience in dance choreography before she attended Sacks’s [03:40] lectures and switched into a PhD program with him at UC Irvine, and her father was a famous [03:48] radio psychiatrist.
Sacks had a law degree from Yale in 1958 and after that decided, [03:55] to the disappointment of his parents, not to pursue a law career. He was in the MIT, Cambridge, Harvard [04:05] area when he decided he wanted to go back to sociology and political science. He had studied [04:13] sociology as an undergraduate and he met Garfinkel and I believe also Goffman, who were on sabbatical [04:20] taking seminars from Talcott Parsons, a famous sociologist and Garfinkel’s mentor. And from there [04:29] he really hit it off with Garfinkel. Garfinkel encouraged him to go to the West Coast [04:34] and he pursued his PhD in sociology at Berkeley, where he did, for a time at least, work with [04:40] Goffman, although Goffman did not sign his PhD. And he stayed in touch with Garfinkel, was part [04:47] of groups that met, kind of forming the basis of ethnomethodology, which, to put a short gloss on [04:55] it, is the study of everyday actions as they are performed, at least preferentially in the case [05:03] of CA, using recordings of interaction naturally occurring (so-called) as a material for study. [05:12]
Sacks also was very widely read. I really recommend reading his lectures or at least some of them [05:19] because there – you can still get them online. They’re out of print, I believe. It makes clear [05:26] that he’s drawing from the history of oral languages, the cultures of ancient Greece and [05:33] Rome, the studies of Judeo and biblical culture and language. He also was apprised, to what depth [05:44] I don’t know, of ordinary language philosophy, Austin, Searle to some extent, but mainly Austin [05:51] and Wittgenstein as well. He didn’t mention it much in his writings or in his lectures, [05:58] but his sensibilities were definitely shaped by that background. And he also brings in themes [06:04] from law, which is not really obvious, but when you read the lectures and some of his unpublished [06:09] writings, you find that he has kind of a legal orientation to the organization, the rules, [06:17] the norms, procedures of ordinary conversation. There’s a bit of a legal background into what [06:23] he’s saying.
Now, you mentioned the 1974 paper on simplest systematics and turn-taking by [06:30] Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson. It’s often taken to be the beginning of conversation, [06:34] but his lectures, starting when he was a graduate student and living in Los Angeles and teaching [06:40] at UCLA, they start in 1964, so 10 years before that, and even the earlier lectures exhibit [06:49] themes about language, about many other things that show up in part in the turn-taking paper, [06:56] although compared to the ground he covers in the lectures, which of course are much more extensive, [07:03] he’s much broader, much more varied in his interests and his analyses than that paper [07:09] gives access to. So one of the things to keep in mind is that paper is treated as a foundation, [07:15] but when you go back to Sacks’s lectures, you see that there’s a lot missing from it, [07:20] and a kind of a restricted way of going about the study of conversation that it represents. [07:26]
JMc: You say that the 1974 paper is a bit restricted in terms of the ideas that Sacks had already [07:34] developed in his earlier lectures. Could you elaborate a bit and say in what ways it was [07:39] restricted, and do you think it’s because the paper appeared in Language and was being repackaged [07:45] for linguists? And if that’s the case, then what is the relationship or what was the relationship of [07:52] conversation analysis as Sacks conceived of it to other schools of linguistics at the time? [07:59]
ML: It was edited by a linguist at UCLA named William Bright [see Fitzgerald (2024)], and he did an unusual job of [08:09] doing the sole review and advice on the paper, mainly working with Schegloff, who was originally [08:17] not listed on a very early draft of the paper by Sacks and Jefferson. And then he was listed third, [08:25] and then second after his work with Bright, I guess. It was written in a different style than [08:33] some of Sacks’s earlier work, which also was very difficult to fathom, and lectures, [08:38] which are not so difficult to fathom, although very thought-provoking.
The main topic of that [08:44] paper is turn-taking issues, that is one person speaking, coming to an end, another person, [08:52] or multiple persons, then vying for next turn, and so on and so forth. And that indeed is a [09:01] major theme in Sacks’s work and in Schegloff’s work, Jefferson’s, but there’s also a broader [09:08] conception of sequential analysis that’s in the lectures and also in unpublished manuscripts [09:15] that went through several drafts that Sacks wrote and which is yet to be published, but [09:22] presents, again, a somewhat different cast of the sequential analysis than you get in [09:29] this more exclusive interest in turn-taking and turn-transition [09:35] and the beginnings of turns in the 1974 paper. So there’s also lots of other themes about [09:44] phenomena that tie together utterances, not just at the beginnings and ends, but which [09:51] show topical continuity and coherence in a very interesting way in Sacks’s lectures. [09:59]
Sacks, in occasional remarks in his lectures and in a couple of papers where he talked about [10:05] understanding and organization of talk in a way that he sharply distinguished from [10:11] the orientation of linguistics, and the simplest aspect of this distinction that he emphasized was [10:18] that linguists treat the sentence as the basic unit and structural constituents of sentences [10:24] as embedded in sentences and as individually organized, cognitively or even neurologically, [10:34] to the extent that they could do that. He looks at sentences, parts of sentences, utterances, [10:41] in connection with those of other participants in conversation. And in some cases, you can get [10:48] a very different sense of not only the form, but also the meaning. He generally treats meaning [10:54] sideways in the sense that he doesn’t talk about it directly. He talks about in connection to [11:01] practices and structures of conversation, that you get a different sense of what’s being said [11:07] than when you take a sentence in isolation. Maybe linguists have caught on to this, but [11:14] at that time, and I think predominantly now, that orientation was distinctive of what Sacks and his [11:23] company were doing. [11:25]
JMc: I mean, in the mid-20th century in America, there were also schools of linguistic [11:31] anthropology, sort of ethnography of speaking, and so on, that looked at discourse and the use [11:38] of language in a particular cultural context. Do you think that Sacks would have felt that they [11:42] were still stuck with the sort of formal conception of a sentence as the basic unit of language? [11:48]
ML: He did know and addressed work by, you know, Gumperz and Hymes, and he actually participated [11:56] in a book they co-edited, and he knew of people in sociolinguistics, and Goffman himself was his [12:08] main contact at Berkeley when he was a student, and Schegloff was a student there too. [12:12] And there were differences. It seemed like a superficial difference, but for Sacks, [12:19] it’s very important, and I think there’s much to say about the difference, that his method of [12:27] working was usually, but not always, but usually he would try to record what he called naturally [12:36] occurring, or Garfinkel called, naturally organized everyday actions. So, bugging a phone or [12:45] recording – one of his favourite examples was some recordings he made behind a one-way mirror [12:53] of a group therapy session involving these mildly delinquent kids in Los Angeles at some point in [13:01] the probably early ’60s. And he goes to these tapes again and again, hears the same sequences, [13:07] discusses them again and again, often with a somewhat different framing in his lectures, [13:14] and finds in those recorded conversations, as he put it, things you would never imagine, [13:22] right, that people would say, and organizations of talk that you just don’t remember when, [13:28] you know, you think of a conversation you might have, or when you imagine an ideal typical [13:34] conversation.
And you find in Goffman and in social psychology, and in even some of the [13:44] more linguistically inclined sociolinguists, that they either still work on things like speech acts, [13:52] which are largely the actions of one person. They see the person as the organizational basis of, [14:00] and the person’s psychology or cognition, as the organizational basis of the structure of talk, [14:07] where moving the frame to sequences, and not just pairs of utterances, but more extended [14:15] connections and ties between one’s own and others’ utterances in an ongoing stream. [14:22] It’s not a stream of consciousness. It’s a stream of talk, which we’re recording, at least [14:28] Sacks, but it could be adequate to capture, not necessarily complete, but adequate for starting [14:34] a starting point.
It gives you a very different insight. It’s not just that, you know, he’s being [14:38] empiricist, always wanting stuff recorded from the ground. He also used newspaper articles and [14:46] snippets from the Bible and all sorts of stuff. But his main resource was recorded conversation [14:52] that he could play again and again and again. And another aspect of it was he could, [14:56] with transcript, which he didn’t treat as the primary ground, the recording was the primary [15:02] ground as, you know, an adequate record of what people were doing. Assuming they spoke a language [15:09] you spoke and you had enough insight into who they were, what they were talking about and so forth, [15:14] that you could find recognizable structures that required no special skill, no special [15:24] knowledge to recognize and to try to stay with that rather than try to override it with [15:29] an overly technical understanding. That those materials he saw to be a source of insight, [15:36] not just material from which to derive inductive inferences. [15:41]
JMc: So what does structure mean to an ethnomethodologist, and specifically to Sacks? [15:49]
ML: That’s a very good question. Sacks had a love for machine metaphors. He talks about machinery [15:57] of conversation, the turn-taking machine. Occasionally in his lectures, he acknowledges [16:05] that when he’s talking about machinery, he’s talking about rules, or you could even say [16:09] maxims, or, you know, regularities, even, that occur, but he just loved to talk about machinery. [16:18] And he also loved to invest agency in the machinery, rather than in people’s intentions, [16:27] motives, cognitive organization, right? So it was kind of a gestalt shift from the speaker [16:37] to the speaking in concert with others as the, not ultimate origin necessarily, but as [16:45] an organizational basis for what people are doing, saying, orienting to, and so forth. [16:51] It’s not that he emptied the person. Gail Jefferson once made a joke about, [16:58] “Sacks was somebody who treated people in the same way that you would treat algae.” [17:04] He has a line in his lectures that is really funny where he says he’s got nothing against [17:10] anthropomorphizing humans any more than when physicists anthropomorphize their data. [17:17] He’s got nothing against it, but nothing particularly in favour of it. So there’s this [17:23] kind of strange indifference that he expresses, but it leads to a very unique insight. [17:31]
JMc: But at the end of the day, Sacks still talks in terms of rules, maxims, or structures and so on, [17:39] because isn’t it a sort of, would it be reasonable to say that one of the core ideas of [17:45] ethnomethodology is that the ethnomethodologist seeks to discover organization sort of from the [17:51] perspective of the participants in a particular situation? [17:56]
ML: Yes, and I think that Sacks held to that. And the perspective of the participants didn’t require [18:05] some sort of magical trip of mind reading. But in his case, not necessarily Garfinkel’s, [18:13] in his case, he used the overt recording materials, the surface, [18:22] as the organization that the members were paying attention to insofar as they would hear what the [18:31] other is saying and react often without hesitation in a way that showed an understanding, or in some [18:39] cases a misunderstanding, of what the other said, and that would be then dealt with downstream in [18:45] the conversation. And so he was treating the surface materials, which sounds very shallow, [18:51] but in this he had some backing by the likes of Wittgenstein. And the skepticism about having [19:01] to always delve into interpretation, reading between the lines and that kind of thing, was [19:08] not his procedure. And he had a deep basis for that in both Wittgenstein, Garfinkel, and to some [19:18] extent Goffman.
And so there is this orientation in the analysis to, “What are the parties doing?” [19:27] And it’s very important to know that the term “conversation analysis,” which Sacks didn’t use, [19:34] actually, at least not in his lectures, he talked about the analysis of conversation, [19:41] and he and many of his colleagues for a whil

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