No subject

[Dorothy Disterheft]

The History of Linguistics, to be published in five volumes,
aims to provide the reader with an authoritative and
comprehensive account of the attitudes to language
prevailing in different civilizations and in different periods
by examining the very varied development of linguistic
thought in the specific social, cultural and religious
contexts involved.  Issues discussed include the place of
language in education, variation and prestige, and
approaches to lexical and grammatical description.  The
authors of the individual chapters are specialists who have
analysed the primary sources and produced original
syntheses by exploring the linguistic interests and
assumptions of particular cultures in their own terms,
without seeking to reinterpret them as contributions
towards the development of contemporary western
conceptions of linguistic science.
 
History of Linguistics will be of particular interest to
students of language and linguistics. It will also appeal to
the general reader who is interested in language and the
history of ideas.
 
 
 
History of Linguistics III: Renaissance and Early Modern
Linguistics
Longman Linguistics Library
Edited by Giulio Lepschy, Professor in the Department of
Italian Studies at the University of Reading and a Fellow of
the British Academy.
 
The third volume of the History of Linguistics covers the Renaissance
and the Early Modern Period.  The chapter on the Renaissance (15th
and 16th centuries) by Mirko Tavoni, examines the study of Latin in
both the new Humanist and rationalist traditions, along with the
foundations of vernacular grammar in the study of Romance, Germanic
and Slavic (with sections by Maria Delfina Gandolfo and Silvia
Toscano).  The chapter on the Early Modern Period (17th and 18th
centuries) by Raffaele Simone, presents the study of language in its
philosophical context (Bacon, Port-Royal, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, the
Enlightenment), as well as the accumulation of data which led to the
foundation of Comparative Philology in the 19th century.
 
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288 pages
Published November 1997
 
 
 
 
History of Linguistics, Volume IV: Nineteenth-Century
Linguistics
Longman Linguistics Library
Edited by Giulio Lepschy, Professor in the Department of
Italian Studies at the University of Reading and a Fellow of
the British Academy
and Anna Morpurgo Davies, Professor of Comparative
Philology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the
British Academy
 
In Volume IV: Nineteenth-Century Linguistics,  Anna Morpurgo
Davies shows how linguistics came into its own as an independent
discipline separated from philosophical and literary studies and enjoyed
a unique intellectual and institutional success tied to the research ethos
of the new universities, until it became a model for other humanistic
subjects which aimed at 'scientific status'. The linguistics of the
nineteenth century abandons earlier theoretical discussions in favour of
a more empirical and historical approach using new methods to
compare languages and to investigate their history. The great
achievement of this period is the demonstration that languages such as
Sanskrit , Latin and English are related and derive from a parent
language which is not attested but can be reconstructed.   This book
discusses in detail the theories developed and the individual findings
obtained.   In contrast with earlier historiographical trends it denies that
the new approach originated entirely from German Romanticism, and
highlights a form of continuity with the eighteenth century, while
stressing that a deliberate break took place round the 1830s. By the end
of the century the results of comparative and historical  linguistics had
been generally accepted, but it soon became clear that a historical
approach could not by itself solve all questions that it raised. At this
point the new interest in description and theory which characterizes the
twentieth century began to gain prominence.
 
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464 pages
Published January 1998
 
 
 
For more information on these titles and other linguistics
titles, please visit our web site:
 
http://www.awl-he.com/linguistics