The history of linguistics:
Where we came from, and how we got here.

Course Overview

Course Description

Content
The goal of this course is to help the participants gain a deeper understanding of what linguistics is, by listening carefully to what linguists in the near and far past have said about the subject. Studying the history of our discipline in this way is not only educational, and an eye-opener---it is also one of the most liberating things that one can do. Understanding that views have a life of their own, and that they came to the field at particular times and for particular reasons, allows us to think critically about whether we need, or want, to hold onto them.

I did a similar seminar three years ago, but there the focus was on the history of phonology. This year, the focus will be on language more generally, and we will place some attention on the relationship between linguists' thoughts about syntax and philosophers' thoughts about logic, and some aspects of the rise of generative grammar.

Objectives and Structure
We will be reading a lot of relatively short papers. We will discuss the papers to see what their impact is on a linguist today. Ideally (though this depends to some extent on class size), each week two of the three sections will be led by a student who has prepared a handout on the class reading.

Some generally useful materials

1. First person singular: Reminiscences by linguists working during the 1950s Link
2. Wallace Chafe's thoughts: Searching for meaning in language: a memoir Link
3. Hymes and Fought 1981 American Structuralism, reprinted from (1975) Current Trends in Linguistics 13: Historiography of Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton. This is an outstanding and thoughtful work that very much deserves to be read.

Assignments

Papers
Each student will write a paper about one of the publications we read, whose goal is to explain to modern linguists why that publication is of great interest. I will give an example of what I mean.

Presentations
Students will participate in the presentation and discussion of the readings.

Other Assignements
We'll try to set up a wiki for this course.

Course Policies & Grading

Grading

Bertrand Russell offered a wise comment that we should bear constantly in mind:

In studying a philosopher the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude...Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second...When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking..

Bertrand Russell The History of Western Philosophy

The structure of scientific revolutions

Check out this interesting webpage on Kuhn and his first book.

Reading:

Wililam Dwight Whitney: Linguistics as a science

Reading: Chapters 1, 2 and 12 of Language and the Study of Language.
You can download the whole book from books.google.com
Here is a copy of just these chapters, with yellow mark-up by me. A password is required: log on as user "historylx", and the password is the same. This holds for all readings for this course that require a password.

Some remarks of Hockett's on studying the history of linguistics (from First Person Singular, linked supra):

I am concerned with archiving because I am interested in two kinds of history of linguistics: more important is the intellectual history, which has to do with who proposed what notion when, who took it up and developed it, and so on; but also relevant is what we might call the "personality" history, which is what we have been speaking of mainly at these sessions. Archiving is the storing up and preserving of the materials from which both sorts of history (and any other kind, for that matter) can be written. I think that the rescue of records is especially important right now because of what has happened to our profession in the last two decades. I shall say nothing here, either favorable or unfavorable, about the quality of research and theory in those two decades. But I do view as genuinely tragic the success of the "eclipsing stance" of the transformational-generative school. We have currently in our ranks a large number of young people, many of them very bright, from beginning students up to and including a few full professors, who know nothing of what happened in linguistics before 1957, and who actually believe (some of them) that nothing did happen. If we lose the records, we lose all chance of recovery from that collective amnesia.

I have rather more sympathy for our disinherited youngsters than I used to have, because of a recent experience of my own. Remember that I cut my professional eye teeth on Bloomfield's book back in 1933. Bloomfield himself assumed no "eclipsing stance": the very opposite, for his respect for his predecessors was profound and he tried to inculcate the same attitude in his students. But I found Bloomfield's synthesis so satisfying (except in some minor technical details) that for a long time I simply couldn't bring myself to read much of the work of those predecessors. That was the price I paid for my largely superb induction into our discipline. Then, just a few months ago, I finally had reason to undertake a serious study of William Dwight Whitney's general writings. I knew that Bloomfield had overtly acknowledged his debt to Whitney; nevertheless, I was overwhelmed to discover the extent of that debt (and thus of our own), and amazed at the variety of topics on which Whitney's remarks, allowing for a difference of terminology and style, are as valid and profound now as a'century ago.

Should my mentors, back in the 1930s, have insisted that I work my way through Whitney? Perhaps so, and perhaps that would have made me a better scholar. On the other hand, possibly I would not yet have been mature enough to tune my twentieth-century ears to his nineteenth-century voice. Our receptivities really do change. I'm sure you won't think me facetious if I offer, as another example, the fact that when I tried Milne's Winnie the Pooh first, during my adolescence, it was unspeakably dull, but when later I picked it up to read to my own children it had become poignant magic.

So (to return to our disinherited youngest generation) I guess what we mainly need is patience. Few of us find the work of recent leading figures dazzling; but many of the kids do. It is bound to take time for their eyes to adjust so that they can see other and earlier things. Our archiving is for them and their successors, because continuity and cumulativity really are crucial in science. When they are ready to look, the record must be there for them to see.

Sapir: Linguistics as anthropology

Sapir's Language: An introduction to the study of speech is available on line, for free.

Leonard Bloomfield: Linguistics as behaviorist psychology

Edward Titchener was perhaps the leading American psychologist just before the rise of behaviorism. This is a reflective article that he delivered in 1904. The Problems of Experimental Psychology Science, new series, Vol 20 No. 519 Dec. 9, 1904, pp. 786-798.

What Watson's behaviorists were rebelling against:

Linguistics as modern logic

Linguistics as method

The rise of an American school of syntax

Linguistics as grammar induction, and simplicity as its criterion

The advent of generativism

Linguistics as cognitive psychology

Linguistics as biology

Calendar

In some cases below, I have not yet put a link but I have put a link in the list of readings above, however; you should check.

Date Topic Readings
Class 1 March 31 Introduction This syllabus
Class 2 Kuhn: What is a science? Kuhn: First three chapters
Class Kuhn: What is a scientific revolution? Kuhn: The rest of the book
April 7-11 No class Goldsmith and Laks, Battle in the Mind Fields. Chapter 1, Introduction; Chapter 27, on Kuhn.
Class 4 William Dwight Whitney Whitney: Language and the Study of Language
Class 5 Linguistics and early psychology  
Class 6 Linguistics as anthropology Sapir
Class 7 Linguistics declares independence Leonard Bloomfield
Class 8 Linguistics as behaviorist psychology The other Leonard Bloomfield
Class 9 Linguistics as logic Ajdukiewicz 1935 On syntactic coherence
Class 10   Bar-Hillel. On syntactical objects. 1950.
Class 11   Bar-Hillel. Logical syntax and semantics. 1954.
Class 12 Science as method, linguistics as science Zellig Harris. From Methods in structural linguistics
Class 13 On Zellig Harris Article by Fernando Pereira
Class 14 On Zellig Harris Article by John Goldsmith
Class 15 Syntax as logic Ajdukiewicz, K., On Syntactical Coherence
Class 16-17 Rise of an American syntax Rulon Wells: Immediate constituents. 1947.
Class 18 Richard S. Pittman. Nuclear Structures in Linguistics.
Class 19   Postal on immediate constituency grammar
Class 20 Linguistics as grammar induction, and simplicity F. W. Harwood: Axiomatic syntax. 1955.
Class 21 Ray Solomonoff
Class 22 The advent of generativism Selections from Gleason, Theories in Conflict 1988.
Class 23   Julia Falk. Turn to the history of linguistics.
Class 24 Linguistics as cognitive psychology Edward Sapir. The status of linguistics as a science.
Class 25 Chomsky, Language and Mind.
As time permits... Generative Semantics Lakoff, McCawley
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