John E Joseph

Biographic Data

ID94142
NAMEJohn E Joseph
GIVEN NAMESJohn E
FAMILY NAMEJoseph
SIGNATUREJOSEPH J E
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Edinburgh
ORCID0000-0002-7780-8265
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS133
TOTAL CITATIONS187
AUTHOR COUNT131
EDITOR COUNT2
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1959
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX7

  • Role of Language and Place in Language Policy

    Open AccessJohn E JosephCHAPTEREncyclopedia of Applied Linguistics2026

    In no proper sense can languages be said to belong to places. They belong unquestionably to individuals, and in a more complex way to a whole people. The complexity lies in the fact that “a people” is largely defined by its language, and vice versa, in a way that is at best dialectical, and at worst circular. Even the names used to designate peoples, places, and languages are usually variants of the same word—Finns in Finland speak Finnish—except…

  • Addendum to “The distributed invention of enunciation theory”

    Open AccessJohn E JosephARTICLEHistoriographia Linguistica2026

    A significant appearance of the term enunciation in work by Vilém Mathesius (1882–1946), a founding member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, is not mentioned in Joseph (2025) , which aims to widen the received history of enunciation theory. ‘Enunciation’ is the counterpart to ‘theme’ in Mathesius’s (1929) functional sentence perspective. His equating of enunciation (replaced in the 1930s by ‘rheme’) with ‘psychological predicate’ links his use of …

  • Language, Politics, and the Nation‐State

    Open AccessJohn E JosephCHAPTEREncyclopedia of Applied Linguistics2025

    The “nation‐state” is the idea of a territory populated by a people imagined as unified ethnically and culturally, with a shared national language. From the early 19th century to the start of the 21st, the nation‐state was central to how the world was managed on an international scale; but it has been increasingly recognized that this way of thinking is fundamentally racist and oppressive, with significant consequences for language politics and p…

  • Koerner, Saussure, Chomsky: An eternal upbraiding of the ‘Great Man theory’ 1

    Open AccessJohn E JosephARTICLELanguage & History2025

    Starting with his 1971 PhD dissertation, which although centred on Saussure covered the entire history of linguistic thought, E. F. K. Koerner opposed claims that Saussure or any other single linguist ever made a complete break with what had gone before. At the time, such claims – reflecting the ‘Great Man theory of history’ – were being made about Chomskyan generativism, and the dissertation was aimed as much at proving Saussure’s continuity for…

  • Schizolinguistics, from Tuczek's Analyse einer Katatonikersprache (1921) to Wolfson's Le Schizo et les langues (1970)

    Open AccessJohn E JosephARTICLELanguage & Communication2025

    Attempts to diagnose schizophrenia have been grounded in theories concerning what linguistic deviance reveals about mental function. Tuczek's patient ‘Frau M.’ was institutionalized for using a language which mixed German and French elements. The psychiatrist Goldstein cherry-picked her utterances to support his advocacy of frontal lobotomy. Louis Wolfson was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy for his intolerance of hearing or seeing English,…

  • The distributed invention of enunciation theory

    Open AccessJohn E JosephARTICLEHistoriographia Linguistica2025Cited by: 1References: 29

    In the second half of the 20th century a linguistic approach emerged that aimed to complement the analysis of language structure: énonciation, centred on speakers and the act of speaking. Émile Benveniste has had his role raised to author of the theory, despite its developing simultaneously in work by Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan, and later Tzvetan Todorov, with each of whom he had professional and personal ties. Others who figure in its form…

  • Presentist, trajectorial and heliocentric approaches to teaching the history of linguistics

    Open AccessJohn E JosephARTICLEProceedings of the Linguistic…2024

    This paper considers options for positioning the present in relation to the past in teaching the history of linguistics. It proposes three approaches as having been demonstrably practiced (presentist, trajectorial and heliocentric), plus a fourth (antiquarian) that is less likely to be publicized. They are exemplified and explored through a look at how the history of linguistics has been taught within the history of linguistics, in particular by …

  • Meillet et les « langues de civilisation

    John E JosephARTICLELangages2024Cited by: 1References: 14

    Les ouvrages de Meillet sont marqués par un chauvinisme national et social que nous, ses commentateurs, tendons à excuser au motif qu'il était typique de son époque. Mais pas tous ses contemporains ont utilisé des termes tels que « langues de civilisation » et « petites langues » qui figurent tout au long de l'œuvre meilletienne. Cet article examine ses vues sur la nécessité d'une consolidation linguistique en Europe comme partie du processus de …

  • The Cambridge History of Linguistics

    Open AccessChristopher Woods, Andréas Stauder et al.BOOKCambridge History of Linguistics2023

    The establishment of language as a focus of study took place over many centuries, and reflection on its nature emerged in relation to very different social and cultural practices. Written by a team of leading scholars, this volume provides an authoritative, chronological account of the history of the study of language from ancient times to the end of the 20th century (i.e., 'recent history', when modern linguistics greatly expanded). Comprised of…

  • Cambridge History of Linguistics

    John E Joseph, Linda R Waugh et al.BOOKCambridge History of Linguistics2023

  • Créativité linguistique, interprétation et contrôle de l'esprit selon Orwell et Chomsky

    Open AccessJohn E JosephARTICLECahiers du Centre de Linguistique…2022

    Dans l'usage contemporain un dictateur est quelqu'un au pouvoir qui ne me plaît pas et qui me paraît narguer, supprimer ou ne tenir aucun compte de la volonté de son peuple. La clé de cette définition est «qui ne me plaît pas», car quelqu'un que j'apprécie et qui gouverne de la même façon n'est pas un dictateur mais un leader fort, un brave type dont on n'a pas assez, malheureusement

  • Ferdinand de Saussure: Une science du langage pour une science de l’humain

    John E JosephARTICLEJournal of Multilingual and…2022

  • Saussure’s dichotomies and the shapes of structuralist semiotics

    Open AccessJohn E JosephARTICLESign Systems Studies2022Cited by: 4References: 6

    The Cours de linguistique générale (1916), which became the master text for structuralist linguistics and semiotics, is characterized by a series of dichotomies. Some of them, e.g. langue and parole, signified and signifier, arbitrary and motivated, are very well known, others less so. This paper looks at Saussure’s semiotics in terms of these dichotomies, and considers how later critiques, such as Voloshinov’s (1929), and reformulations, particu…

  • The affective, the conceptual and the meaning of 'life' in the stylistics of Charles Bally

    Open AccessJohn E JosephARTICLELanguage & Communication2022Cited by: 3References: 3

    The work in stylistics of Charles Bally (1865-1947) attempts to analyse that subset of a language system in which meaning is not purely conceptual or intellectual, but has an affective, emotional dimension. It is not concerned with literary language, but with everyday language used in the service of 'life', a word which is central for Bally. This paper adds to the definitive study of Bally's stylistics (Taylor 1981) by bringing in material which …

  • Why Does Language Complexity Resist Measurement

    Open AccessJohn E JosephARTICLEFrontiers in Communication2021

    Insofar as linguists operate with a conception of languages as closed and self-contained systems, there should be no obstacle to comparing those systems in terms of simplicity and complexity. Even if complexity ‘trade-offs’ between sub-systems of phonology, morphology and syntax are considered, it ought to be relatively straightforward to quantify constitutive elements and rules, and assign each language system its place on a complexity scale. In…

  • The Koernerian revolution: In memoriam E. F. K. Koerner (1939-2022)

    Open AccessJohn E JosephARTICLEHistoriographia Linguistica2021References: 2

    in Hofleben (Polish: Mlewiec), some twelve miles from Thorn, West Prussia (now Toruń, Poland).His childhood was of course shaped by the war, which dramatically changed his family's circumstances, including the identity of their country.Following studies at the Universities of Göttingen and Berlin, as well as two terms at the University of Edinburgh, he received his Magister degree from the University of Gießen in 1968, with a thesis on the develo…

  • Distributional Method

    Open AccessJohn E JosephOTHERThe International Encyclopedia of…2020

    The distributional method in linguistics has its origins in the work of the anthropologist Franz Boas and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, with additional impetus from behaviorist psychology. Its aim was to shift linguistic analysis away from dependency on meaning, and to determine the structure of a language based on the distribution of its forms alone. In the 1920s it received a new formulation in articles by Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfi…

  • Language planning as nation building: Ideology, policy and implementation in the Netherlands, 1750–1850. (Advances in historical sociolinguistics, 9)

    John E JosephARTICLEJournal of Historical Sociolinguist…2020

  • Dialect, language, nation: 50 Years On

    Open AccessJohn E Joseph, Gijsbert Rutten et al.ARTICLELanguage Policy2020Cited by: 2References: 17

    Over 50 years ago, the Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen published a seminal paper entitled ‘Dialect, language and nation’ (Am Anthropol 68:922–935, 1966b), in which he expounds his four-step model of standardization, explaining the development from dialect to standard following a process of norm selection, codification, acceptance and elaboration. In this article, we start by discussing the life and work of Einar Haugen, situating him wit…

  • Lettres d'Émile Benveniste à Claude Lévi-Strauss (1948-1967)

    Open AccessJohn E Joseph, Chloé Laplantine et al.ARTICLEHistoire Épistémologie Langage2020Cited by: 1References: 4

    Ce travail présente et édite 20 lettres d'Émile Benveniste adressées à Claude Lévi-Strauss entre 1948 et 1967. Il permet de documenter l'histoire du structuralisme, du dialogue et du rapprochement de la linguistique et de l'ethnologie, par exemple dans les discussions concernant la parenté ou l'organisation sociale, ou celles accompagnant la création de la revue L'Homme

  • The agency of habitus: Bourdieu and language at the conjunction of Marxism, phenomenology and structuralism

    Open AccessJohn E JosephARTICLELanguage & Communication2020Cited by: 6References: 17

  • La norme et le naturel

    Open AccessJohn E JosephARTICLEHistoire Épistémologie Langage2019Cited by: 1References: 2

    Les études de normes langagières ont visé des caractéristiques formelles à un micro-niveau, laissant les normes de la pragmatique du discours à l’histoire de la rhétorique. Mais avant l’époque moderne, on n’observait pas de distinction nette entre le « structurel » et le « pragmatique ». Cet article examine trois normes établies de longue date, qui se situent à la jonction des deux éléments, le pragmatique et le culturel : l’injonction aristotéli…

  • Observations of thermohaline sound-speed structure induced by internal waves and spice in the summer 2015 Canada Basin marginal ice zone

    Open AccessDominic DiMaggio, John A Colosi et al.ARTICLEElementa Science of the…2018

    The Arctic seas are in a period of transition as they adjust to stimuli from anthropogenic climate change. The acoustic response to this adjustment is of fundamental interest, as acoustics provide an important means for Arctic remote sensing, communication and navigation, and there are important biological implications for marine mammals and other organisms that use sound. The Canada Basin Acoustic Propagation Experiment (CANAPE) is an effort to …

  • Language-Body Continuity in the Linguistics-Semiology-Poetics-Traductology of Henri Meschonnic

    Open AccessJohn E JosephARTICLEComparative Critical Studies2018References: 4

    Henri Meschonnic criticized structuralist linguistics for assuming that progress lay with ever-increasing specialization, and for narrowing its scope to exclude the literary. For Meschonnic, a linguistics that does not take account of the poetic – particularly of rhythm – is closing its ears to the very heartbeat of language. Rhythm is at the core of a language-body continuity which structuralists ignored because they considered it unconnected to…

  • Language, Mind and Body: A Conceptual History

    John E JosephBOOKLanguage, Mind and Body2017