Imaginative Science
The interactions of Henry Sweet’s linguistic thought and E. B. Tylor’s anthropology
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3955268 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mark Atherton (Regents Park College, Oxford, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 1-2 |
| Pages | 31-73 |
| Publication date | 2010-05-25 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Historiographia Linguistica (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0302-5160 • E-ISSN: 1569-9781 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/hl.37.1-2.02ath |
| OpenAlex | W4248891335 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 28 |
This article traces the interactions between the philologist and applied linguist Henry Sweet (1845-1912) and the anthropologist and evolutionist E. B. Tylor (1832-1917). Tylor was impressed by Sweet's uniformitarian views on phonetic synthesis and word-division: that phonetic and grammatical processes observable in the present could be used to explain grammatical formation and inflection in the past. Conversely, Sweet's views on language and its origins owe much to Tylor'sintellectualismand hisdoctrine of survivals. According to Tylor, 'primitive man' employed rational thought in his attempts to make intellectual sense of the world and its phenomena. In expressions such as 'the sun rises', vestiges of this primitive thought and animism then survive in the lexis and syntax of later, modern languages. Sweet used Tylorian material in his language textbooks, and the intellectualist theory was taken up by literary critics in the 1880s, e.g., in the Shelley Society - of which Sweet was a founding member, in order to explore the roots of poetic metaphor and figurative language as used in modern English poetry
Art · Linguistics · Literature · Philology · Poetry · Sociology · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy
James Cowles Prichard's Anthropology
Myth as primitive philosophy
Cultural Anthropology
Victorian Anthropology
A History of Archaeological Thought
Sprachtheorien der Neuzeit I. Der epistemologische Kontext neuzeitlicher Sprach- und Grammatiktheorien
Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilisation
On the limitations of linguistics applied
The Reinvention of Primitive Society
A Short History of Linguistics
A history of English language teaching
The scholarly recovery of the significance of Anglo-Saxon records in prose and verse
The amateur and the professional
J. G. Frazer
Social and Cultural Anthropology
The Birth of Applied Linguistics
The Myth and Ritual Theory
Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |