History of Linguistics

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

If you could invite any two linguists, past or present, to dinner, who would you invite, and what would you talk about? • Would you like to see Pa:nini set William Jones straight on what Sanskrit was really like? Or maybe he could chat with Paul Kiparsky about the Elsewhere Condition. • Would you engage Janet Pierrehumbert and Sibawey on the Arabic lexicon? (Maybe they'd both prefer to talk about algebra.) Or would you invite Adam Albright and Karl Verner to a discussion of rules and exceptions to rules? • How about a conversation between Roman Jakobson and Pat Kuhl on acquisition, aphasia, and the latest brain research? Or would you rather just listen to Jakobson tell stories about his decades-long journey from Moscow to MIT via Prague, Copenhagen, and New York, and about all the linguists he met and worked with on the way? (Was he really smuggled across the Swedish border in a coffin?) • Would you hope for grateful admiration, such as Morris Halle might have for Nikolay Trubetskoy, his mentor's mentor? Or would you be itching to see the sparks fly between Rasmus Rask and Jakob Grimm over who really discovered "Grimm's Law", or Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield over the scientific relevance of "psychological reality"? • Would you put Noam Chomsky and B. F. Skinner in the same room? Or would you not know who to invite, since you don't really know who the great linguists of the past were, what they thought and wrote about, and how they influenced what we think and write about today? Charles Hockett, in the introduction to a new edition of Bloomfield's 1933 opus, Language, had some strong words for those who "deny [their] scholarly debt" to past work: One of Bloomfield's crucial teachings was his insistence on the cumulative nature of linguistics, as of any science. We ignore the achievements of our predecessors not only to our individual detriment but also greatly to the peril or our collective scientific enterprise, and that is something no scholar has the moral right to do. If you agree with Hockett's sentiment, rather than Henry Ford's more famous "History is bunk," then you should be interested in Ling 407, History of Linguistics. In this class, we'll join the ongoing conversation as we read and discuss important work by linguists from antiquity to the present, setting these writings on the one hand in their historical and intellectual context, and on the other hand juxtaposing them across time so that they speak to each other and to us on themes of mutual concern. Course requirements will include plenty of reading, class discussion, and presentations. Written requirements will include compilation of a notebook of big ideas, historical background, and quotable quotes, as well as a final paper that imagines what a conversation between these great thinkers might really be like. The course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. For undergraduates, Ling 407 counts toward the Tier III major requirement.