Historiographia Linguistica
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (NL) |
| ISSN | 0302-5160 / 1569-9781 |
| Scopus | 145485 |
| Wikidata | Q15753024 |
| OpenAlex | S57354637 |
| MAG | 57354637 |
| Website | https://api.elsevier.com/content/serial/title/issn/0302-5160 |
| Total publications | 1.322 |
| Coverage period | 1974 - 2026 |
| Country | NL |
| Language | EN |
| Indexing | Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 1.275 |
| Impact factor | 0.06 |
| SJR | 0.107 (Q4) |
| SNIP | 0.308 |
| CiteScore | 0.4 |
| h-index | 10 |
| i10-index | 11 |
| 2-year mean citedness | 0.0455 |
| Female authorship share | 23.1% |
This journal focuses on the history of linguistics. Linguistic anthropology is a core subfield of anthropology, making the historical study of the discipline highly relevant. Therefore, it scores a 4 as an anthropology subfield venue
History · Linguistics and Language · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Classical Studies and Philology · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Diverse Scientific and Economic Studies · Gender Studies in Language · German Literature and Culture Studies · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Historical and Literary Studies
Variation dialectale dans la langue favorlang
Le favorlang était une langue austronésienne de Taïwan, ou formosane, qui est aujourd’hui éteinte. On pense qu’il s’agissait d’une forme ancienne du babuza, qui appartient au sous-groupe des plaines de l’ouest au sein des langues formosanes parlées dans la région centre-ouest de Taïwan. Au dix-septième siècle, pendant la période de colonisation hollandaise de Taïwan (1624–1662), des missionnaires hollandais entrèrent en contact avec le peuple fav…
Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, nineteenth-century English dialects, and nineteenth-century dialectology
Louis-Lucien Bonaparte is a key figure in Euskara studies and in documenting the dialectal interrelationships among Romance languages, but he was also engaged in describing and distinguishing English dialects. As with other languages, he outlined differences among English dialects by having native speakers of those dialects translate books of the Bible into them. This article examines the practice of translation as a means of recording language v…
Eugenio Coseriu and the history of Romance language studies in the 17th and 18th century
The two volumes under review bring to completion the opus magnum of the Romance scholar and general linguist Eugenio Coseriu 1 on the history of Romance linguistics (or more broadly but also more accurately: languagerelated investigations) up to the beginning of the 19th century.Based on carefully prepared materials for a series of Vorlesungen at Tübingen university, given by Coseriu between 1970 and 1976, this Geschichte der romanischen Sprachwi…
Mais qu’est-ce donc que le ʾiḫbār ? Focus et présupposition(s) en grammaire arabe
Cet article se décompose en deux parties. Dans la première partie, je traduis et analyse un texte extrait du Šarḥ al-Kāfiya du grammairien Raḍī al-dīn al-ʾAstarābāḏī (m. après 688/1289), montrant qu’il reconnaît deux types de présuppositions : syntaxiques, liées à une relative, et pragmatiques, liées à la situation d’énonciation. L’intonation étant la grande absente de la grammaire arabe, la situation d’énonciation peut s’interpréter comme un dia…
The description, documentation and revival of Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay
Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay are Australian Indigenous languages which had almost totally fallen out of use, apart from a few words, and which are now being revived. The paper details the records and analyses of the languages and the current efforts to revive them. The most important sources of information include publications from 1860 onwards, and a number of unpublished materials. There are important sources from the 19th century, more detailed …
Addendum to “The distributed invention of enunciation theory”
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 …
The category of preposición in early missionary grammars of Aymara (Bertonio 1603 and Torres Rubio 1616): Between inflection and suffixation
In this contribution, I investigate the conceptual and terminological relation between ‘prepositions’ ( preposiciones ) and a set of suffixes, mainly case markers, in Bertonio’s (1603) and Torres Rubio’s (1616) Aymara grammars. These morphemes are classified as prepositions or inflectional markers, or even both at the same time. This overlap is motivated by the typological differences between the language described, Aymara, and the metalanguage, …
Hermann Klaatsch and his linguistic research in Northwestern Australia
This paper explores the little-known documentation of the Nyulnyul language of Dampier Land, Western Australia, by the German physician, anatomist, physical anthropologist and evolutionist Hermann Klaatsch (1863–1916). During his two stays at the Beagle Bay Mission in 1905 and 1906, Klaatsch compiled wordlists amounting to almost 900 words in Nyulnyul, some arranged alphabetically on the Nyulnyul term and some according to semantic domains. Most …
A corpus-based network analysis of onomastic references in 16th- and 17th century British grammarwriting
The present study investigates who was considered authoritative in matters of language in the 16th and 17th centuries as well as how grammar authors position themselves with respect to these authorities. It evaluates whether a shift in referencing norms may already be observed from the 16th to the 17th century in these regards. As it is claimed that in England the 16th century marks the beginning of English grammar writing ( McCarthy 2020 : 19–20…
A tale of two languages: Macrobius on Greek and Latin
From early on Latin grammarians were fascinated by the relationship between Latin and Greek. When they started to describe their own language, they borrowed extensively from Greek grammatical terminology, which they tended to translate into Latin. In the grammatical literature references to the structure of Greek are frequent, usually serving didactic purposes. In this paper, I deal with a treatise written by the fifth-century homme de lettres Ma…
The two senses of etymology: A concise history
This article challenges the widespread textbook claim that “etymology boasts a venerable history of its own” (Malkiel), which implies that the history of etymology predates that of linguistics. On the contrary, it is argued that etymology, defined as “the search for the relationships—formal and semantic — that link a word with another unit that historically precedes it and from which it derives” (Zamboni), is a scientific discipline with a much s…
The prehistory of generative grammar and Chomsky's debt to Emil Post
Generative linguistics has a longer prehistory than most linguists realize. The rewriting systems that Chomsky brought into linguistics as generative grammars were explicitly defined more than a century ago, as part of a project to formalize inference rules in logic, and were later applied to studying mathematical properties of certain kinds of infinite sets. Their developer was the mathematician and logician Emil Leon Post, whose work was inspir…
Linguistic description between Kleinstaaterei and the Word of God: A case study of the 1838 Lutheran mission to South Australia
This paper presents a case study of the linguistic work conducted by the German Lutheran missionaries Christian G. Teichelmann (1807-1888) and Clamor W. Schürmann (1815-1893) in producing grammars and dictionaries of Indigenous languages of South Australia, and the so-called 'Adelaide School' of linguistic description that emerged through their efforts and those of their missionary and colonial colleagues. The political circumstances through whic…
Wilhelm von Humboldt, linguist
Continu et Discontinu: Antoine Meillet's sociolinguistic theory of change between philosophy and physics
Antoine Meillet's theory of sociolinguistic change finds one of its most accomplished expressions in his article "Le développement des langues." Included in the posthumous volume Linguistique historique et linguistique générale (1936), it is often read out of its original context (cf. Swiggers 2015). In fact, Meillet wrote this essay for philosopher Jacques Chevalier's 1929 special issue on the concepts "continuous" and "discontinuous" in science…
The conjunction between coordination and subordination in missionary grammars of Aymara and Quechua
Although coordination is a basic and universal syntactic construction, the conjunction is a grammatical category or part of speech that has often been neglected in the history of linguistics. The cause can be traced to the lack of correspondence between the morphosyntactic features and the functional meanings of this category, which should rather be placed on a grammatical continuum between coordination and subordination. The difficulty of an una…
The many lives of a dictionary: An analysis of how Dutch lexicography was received and repurposed in Early Modern Japan
Dutch lexicography spread widely in Japan during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prompting Japanese scholars to develop methodologies for its reception. The two often-cited Dutch-French dictionaries by François Halma and Pieter Marin became the main link between the Sino-Japanese and European lexicographic traditions. This contribution analyses Japanese manuscripts to examine how Dutch lexicography was received and repurposed for the nee…
The distributed invention of enunciation theory
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…
The metalinguistic development of the term 'periphrasis' in the western grammatical tradition from Antiquity to the Enlightenment
In 1993, Hoffmann published a study on the historical development of the term 'periphrasis' in grammars, which originally indicated a figure of speech, used for stylistic and rhetorical purposes. To date, Hoffmann's article remains the only contribution to the question. In this paper, we further investigate the history of the morphosyntactic category of 'periphrasis', with special attention to practical grammars, which are not discussed by Hoffma…
The Dictionary of American Regional English and the idea of dialect
Though originally conceived as an American dialect dictionary, on the model of the English Dialect Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is significantly different from its predecessors, as well as theoretically and technically distinct from the dictionary the American Dialect Society thought its members would compile. DARE marks the transition from traditional dialectology to a more fluid approach to documenting and mapp…
New tools for understanding Hjelmslev
Germanic affixoids in Jacob Grimm
Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) is one of the best-known German linguists of the early nineteenth-century. His influential volume, Deutsche Grammatik (1826, part two), deals with German word-formation. That work comments on the development of derivational affixes from former words, and thus contributes to affixoid studies. Much current work on affixoids utilizes Stevens' (2005) criteria to determine whether an affixoid is on hand, and this paper thus use…
The Bocabulario de la Lengua Sangleya por las Letraz de el A.B.C . (Manila, ca. 1617): Structure, contents, function
The Bocabulario de la Lengua Sangleya por las Letraz de el A.B.C . stands out among the Spanish missionary oeuvres dedicated to the documentation of the Chinese vernacular spoken by the Sangley community in Manila around the year 1600. As opposed to other vocabularies and dictionaries of the same epoch, it contains not only single line Hokkien-Spanish entries, but many additional pieces of linguistic and cultural information including example sen…
The connection between the Thesaurus rarissimus (Marsh 111) and the Dictionnaire Chinois & François (1670), the first printed Chinese dictionary in Europe
The Dictionnaire Chinois & François appended to La Chine illustrée (1670) was the first printed Chinese-European dictionary, but its authorship and sources remain unknown. This article investigates this printed Chinese-French dictionary and argues that an anonymous manuscript dictionary (Ms Marsh 111) kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford is related to it. The connection between the printed dictionary and Marsh 111 enables us to identify more en…
Compte rendu de Priscien (2023): Grammaire Livre VIII. Le verbe 1: Caractères généraux
International audience
An Ergative Historiography
The most widely accepted definition of 'ergative' is in terms of a grammatical case, namely, the subject of a transitive verb, wherein that case is opposed to a second case, the 'absolutive' ('nominative'), which includes both the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive. Languages which have been referred to as 'ergative' or as containing 'ergative constructions' include Basque, Eskimo, most languages from the Caucasus and …
"Ergative Historiography" revisited
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Early Descriptions of Pama-Nyungan Ergativity
Ergative marking and function are generally adequately described in the grammars of the small minority of the Aboriginal Australian Pama-Nyungan languages made before 1930. Without the benefit of an inherited descriptive framework in which to place foreign ergative morphosyntax, missionary-grammarians engaged a variety of terminology and descriptive practices when explaining foreign ergative structures exhibited by this vast genetic subgroup of l…
The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing knowledge in colonial South India
Theorie Et Histoire De La Linguistique
The history of linguistics is presented as a crucial part of linguistics as a whole, in view of its contribution to the understanding of the logical and cognitive structure and evolution of the linguistic discipline itself. The basis for this view is to be found in Saussure's distinction between the 'matter' and 'object' of linguistic science: what changes through time is not merely the object of study, namely, the complex system we call 'languag…
"Herder's "Ursprung der Sprache
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Between Grammar and Rhetoric: Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Language, Linguistics and Literature
The immediate sources of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
A scholarly consensus traces the roots of the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis' to German language theory of the late 18th to early 19th century, which connects the 'inner form' of a language with the potential for cultural achievement of the nation that speaks it. This paper attempts to complexify that genealogy by exploring more immediate sources of the idea that one's native language determines individual and cultural patterns of thought. In the versio…
The Concept of Articulatory Settings: An Historical Survey
Articulatory setting' is a modern term for the component of a speaker's voice quality that derives from a habitual muscular adjustment (such as tending to keep the tongue low in the mouth). The general concept of settings, as long-term tendencies underlying the momentary segmental and suprasegmental articulations of speech, however, has been the subject of discussion in writings on phonetics since the middle of the 17th century. The article explo…
Broadway - A crucial node in American Structural Linguistics
During the Second World War, the United States Armed Forces Institute (USAFI) provided language teaching manuals and dictionaries for military and civilian use. From 1 July 1943 through 30 June 1945, this work was concentrated at an office which was located at 165 Broadway, New York City, and which was headed by a group of young, vigorous, and well trained linguists. The author provides a list of the personnel of this group and describes their ac…
A matter of consequenz: Humboldt, race and the genius of the Chinese Language
Accusations of 'racialism' against Wilhelm von Humboldt's (1767-1835) theory of language have been based in large measure on remarks in Humboldt (1836) concerning the inferiority of Chinese as an organ of thought. His other comments asserting its excellence are either marginalised or used to suggest that his account of the language is incoherent and irrational. However, when read in the context of the work in which they were originally formulated…
Concerning the Roots of Transformational Generative Grammar
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Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and the Americanist text tradition
The collection of native texts was foundational to the practice of Boasian anthropology and linguistics because it preserved for posterity the understanding of a culture by its members – not just the ethnographic facts but their integration into the lives of particular individuals. Edward Sapir went far beyond his mentor Franz Boas, however, in exploring the connection between text collections from which grammatical and ethnological information c…
Recent studies of American Linguistics
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Condillac, Mandeville, and the Origin of Language
The study of 18th-century theories on the origin of language offers interesting insights into history of linguistics. These theories are intimately linked with 17th-century inquiries into the social and intellectual nature of man, and particularly with the views of Hobbes, Locke, and the Cartesians. 18th-century thinkers analyse these problems from a genetic viewpoint. Condillac in his Essai sur Vorigine des connoissances humaines (1746) tries to…
Purpose and scope of Historiographia Linguistica
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Theory-Orientation Versus Data-Orientation: A recurrent theme in linguistics
Two contrasting attitudes towards the scientific study of language have been apparent from the earliest period of linguistic studies in Europe. The forms that the contrast has taken have varied from one era to another. In Greece the debate was between the claims of grammar to be a science (téchnè) and the opinion that its was no more than practical knowledge (empeiría). In the Middle Ages the scholastic speculative grammarians maintained that the…
The Historiography of Missionary Linguistics: Present state and further research opportunities
There is no need to repeat earlier complaints that the historiography of missionary linguistics was being neglected, since the situation has changed considerably sine the last decades of the past century. The first decade of the 21st century in particular has witnessed a veritable explosion of research activities. This article surveys the state of the art in the field of recent work in the historiographical subfield called 'Missionary linguistics…
Missionary linguistics in the Kimberley, Western Australia: A history of the first seventy years
This paper explores the contribution of missionary linguists to the documentation, description, and maintenance of Aboriginal languages of the Kimberley region of Western Australia from the establishment of the first enduring mission in 1890 to 1960. It is argued that the primary contribution was to language documentation. However, the descriptive contribution was not negligible, and many missionary linguists struggled intelligently with the desc…
Missionary linguistics in the Kimberley, Western Australia: A history of the first seventy years
This paper explores the contribution of missionary linguists to the documentation, description, and maintenance of Aboriginal languages of the Kimberley region of Western Australia from the establishment of the first enduring mission in 1890 to 1960. It is argued that the primary contribution was to language documentation. However, the descriptive contribution was not negligible, and many missionary linguists struggled intelligently with the desc…
Contested past: Anti-Brahmanical and Hindu nationalist reconstructions of Indian prehistory
During the British colonial regime in the 19th century Western Indologists and missionaries, with the participation of the indigenous scholars who controlled traditional systems of knowledge, formed models for the description of early religious history which was especially inspired by linguistic ideas whose central concept was the so-called 'Aryan immigration' into Northern India. This Orientalist historiography concerning events that lay back se…
How I got into linguistics, and what I got out of it
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The first quarter century of the Linguistic Society of America, 19240-1949
The Linguistic Society of America was founded in 1925 by scholars trained in traditional philological methods but more interested in building a science of linguistics than in literary studies.Language, the official journal of the new society became an organ for structural descriptions of sound systems of diverse languages. The Linguistic Institute, a summer training program, speeded diffusion of the new structuralist methods. Focus on native spee…
A brief history of American Sociolinguistics 1949-1989
American sociolinguistics was created by a set of ideas, social influences and fortunate comings-together of like-minded scholars in a fortuitous rather than carefully orchestrated manner. Very little attention has been given to the birthing of sociolinguistics and this paper recounts some of these ideas, social conditions and comings-together so that contemporary scholars can have some insights into how this field developed. It is difficult, if …
Iconicity in Saussure's Linguistic Work: And why it does not contradict the arbitrariness of the sign
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) is routinely criticized for denying the possibility of iconicity in language through his principle of the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. Yet two of his articles, one from the beginning (1877) and the other from the end (1912) of his career, propose analyses of the development of certain Latin verbs and adjectives in which iconicity plays a key role. Saussure did not dismiss iconicity, but limited its sphere o…
Ars Grammatica: A bibliographic survey. Two Essays on the Latin and Italian Subjunctive, and a Note on the Ablative Absolute . By Aldo Domenico Scaglione
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Bibliographia Saussureana, 1870–1970: An annotated, classified bibliography on the background, development and actual relevance of Ferdinand de Saussure’s general theory of language . By E. F. K. Koer…
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Ars Grammatica: A bibliographic survey. Two Essays on the Latin and Italian Subjunctive, and a Note on the Ablative Absolute . By Aldo D[omenico] Scaglione. The Classical Theory of Composition; from i…
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Language and Psychology: Historical aspects of psycholinguistics . By Arthur L. Blumenthal
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La Critique Sensualiste a L'Encontre Du "Discours Sur L'universalite De La Langue Française" D'Antoine De Rivarol: Quelques aspects des liens entre politique et théorie linguistique
It is the thesis of the paper that Urbain Domergue's (1745-1810) opposition, voiced during the years of the French Revolution, against Antoine Rivarol's (1753-1801) explanation of the Clarté française on the basis of the rationalist doctrine of 'natural' word order was not primarily motivated by Rivarol's negative attitude towards the Revolution. On the contrary, it is demonstrated that immediately after the appearance of Rivarol's Discours (1784…
Note Sur Al-Astarābādhī
Little is known about Muhammed Radi al-Din Ibn Hasan al-Astarabadhi, the famous Arab grammarian who died about 1289, and even this date depends on whether the colophons of his two major works, the Sharh al-Shafiya and the Shark al-Kafiya, offer reliable information. Indeed, for long one did not even know his name; he has generally been referred to as the 'Star of the Imams' in view of the authority ascribed to his treatises of Arabic. Although al…
A Baudouin de Courtenay Anthology: The beginnings of structural linguistics. Edited by Edward Stankiewicz
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Waltraud BumannLouis Kukenheim Ezn: Darmstadt, 27 May 1936 - Düsseldorf, 30 May 1973)(Amsterdam, 22 septembre 1905 - Leyde, 19 avril 1972)
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John Wallis (1616-1703): A Reappraisal of his Contribution to the Study of English
Three centuries after its publication, John Wallis' Grammatica Linguae An-glicanae (1653) is still worth the attention of the readers interested in the study of English. Considered within the context of its day, it appears as a significant contribution to the field, and indeed a work which constitutes a landmark in the history of the study of English. Its author, a remarkable mathematician looked upon as one of the most important precursors of Ne…
Grammar and Meaning in the Late Middle Ages. Part II
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Ist Der Strukturalismus in der Sprachwissenschaft Schon Passé
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Zur Saussure-Rezeption Bei Gustave Guillaume und in seiner Nachfolge
In this article the author elucidates the main aspects of Gustave Guillaume's (1883-1960) linguistic theory and demonstrates that, despite Guillaume's frequent references to the Cours, central portions of his system are quite distinct from Saussure's position. Apart from a number of other differences between the two, there are in particular two important components that receive special treatment, namely, G's attempt at introducing the dynamic asp…
John Wilkins' Essay (1668): Critics and continuators
One of the major achievements of Britsh linguistic scholarship before the 19th century was John Wilkins' (1609-72) Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), which attempted to construct, for scientific purposes, a language in which the elements were isomorphic with the categories of reality (as they were perceived by Wilkins). Immediately after its publication, the Essay was presented to the scientists of the newly-foun…
Henri Cordier Paris
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Modern Linguistics: Its development, methods and problems. By Manfred Bierwisch
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Modern Linguistics: Its development, methods and problems. By Manfred Bierwisch
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John Eliot of Massachusetts and the Beginnings of American Linguistics
The author puts forward the claim thatThe Indian Grammar Begun(1666) of John Eliot of Massachusetts (1604-90) constitutes the first published account of an 'exotic' language that can rightfully be called scientific (0.). The first portion of the argument treats Eliot's English-based orthography and the problems it poses in the description of a language completely different from English (1.). Eliot's use of a 'morphophonemic' transcription is pres…
Carl Lottner (1834-73)
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The Kantian Influence on Humboldt's Linguistic Thought
Humboldt's theory of language reflects Kant's influence to a far greater extent than is generally realized. In fact, Kantian cognitive and perceptual universals play a crucial role in the later formulations of Humboldt's linguistic thinking. Indeed, not only did Humboldt derive the universals of grammatical case from the Kantian categories of relation in his mature work, but he also applied Kant's schema concept in a systematic way to the fundame…
Purpose and scope of Historiographia Linguistica
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Richtungen der modernen Sprachwissenschaft I: Von Saussure bis Bloomfield (1916-1950). By Oswald Szemerényi
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The Beginnings of Morphology: Linguistic Botanizing in the 18th Century
By providing an assured basis in morphology for subsequent phonological comparison Sir William Jones's celebrated remarks about the resemblance and relationship between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin marked a turning point in the study of language. Some scholars anticipated his conclusions, but their findings appear to have remained largely unknown. At much the same time as the forms of languages were beginning to be compared, investigations were bein…
Grammar and meaning in the late Middle Ages. Part I
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Carl Svedelius (1861-1951)
Theory-Orientation Versus Data-Orientation: A recurrent theme in linguistics
Two contrasting attitudes towards the scientific study of language have been apparent from the earliest period of linguistic studies in Europe. The forms that the contrast has taken have varied from one era to another. In Greece the debate was between the claims of grammar to be a science (téchnè) and the opinion that its was no more than practical knowledge (empeiría). In the Middle Ages the scholastic speculative grammarians maintained that the…