=?iso-8859-1?Q?Informaci=F3n=20bibliogr=E1fica?=: Índice y resúmen de los artículos de los volúmenes especiales de la revista Historiographia Linguistica (1997) XXIV:1/2 y XXIV:3, dedicados a la historia de la lingüística en España

[Carlos Subirats Rüggeberg]

INFOLING  Lista moderada de lingüística española
http://listserv.rediris.es/archives/infoling.html
Envío de información: INFOLING-request at listserv.rediris.es
Editor: Carlos Subirats Rüggeberg <Carlos.Subirats at uab.es>
                       Colaboradoras:
Paola Bentivoglio <pbentivo at reacciun.ve>, U. Central Venezuela
Eulalia de Bobes <ebobes at seneca.uab.es>, U. Autónoma Barcelona
Mar Cruz <mcruz at lingua.fil.ub.es>, U. Barcelona
Emma Martinell <martinell at lingua.fil.ub.es>, U. Barcelona
Rosa Ribas <Ribas at em.uni-frankfurt.de>, U. Frankfurt
____________________________________________________________

                 Información bibliográfica:
    Índice y resúmen de los artículos de los volúmenes
    especiales de la revista:
Historiographia Linguistica (1997) XXIV:1/2 y XXIV:3,
dedicados a la historia de la lingüística en España
['Historiographia Linguistica' es una revista editada por
E.F.K. Koerner y publicada por la editorial John Benjamins
de Amsterdam, Holanda]
         De: http://www.benjamins.nl/jbp/index.html]
____________________________________________________________________

 ÍNDICE de artículos de Historiographia Linguistica XXIV:1/2

    W. Keith Percival (1), Nebrija's Syntactic Theory in
its Historical Setting
    José Luis Girón Alconchel (15), La doctrina y el uso de
los futuros en las gramáticas renacentistas
    Juan M. Lope Blanch (29), Las Osservationi de Giovanni
Miranda
    Hans-J. Niederehe (41), La gramaticografía del siglo
XVIII, entre tradición y reorientación
    Margarita Lliteras (57), Sobre la formación del corpus
de autoridades en la gramática española
    María José Martínez Alcalde (73), Gramáticas y
ortografías españoles preacadémicas en el siglo
    Emilio Ridruejo (95), Los epígonos del racionalismo en
España: La aplicación al castellano de la Gramática General
de Gómez Hermosilla
    Marina Maquieira (115), La Nueva Gramática de la lengua
Castellana de Martínez de Noboa: La coherencia interna de
una doctrina
    Mauro Fernández (139), Las primeras propuestas de
'selección de norma' para el gallego: Del Padre Sarmiento a
fines del siglo XIX
    Barry L.Velleman (159), Domingo F. Sarmiento y la
función social de la lengua
    José del Valle (175), La historificación de la
lingüística histórica: Los Orígenes de Ramón Menéndez Pidal
    María Ángeles Álvares Martínez (197), Rodolfo Lenz:
Contribución gramatical y lexicográfica

                        REVIEWS (213)
    Carmen Codoñer & Juan Antonio González Iglesias (Hrg.),
Antonio de Nebrija, (Hans-J. Niederehe)
    Roger Ellis & René Tixier (eds.), The Medieval
Translator (Louis G. Kelly)
    Telmo Verdelho, As origines da grammaticografia et da
lexicografia latino-portuguesas (Carlota Rosa).

                  MISCELLANEA: REPORT (232)
    Even Hovdhaugen, 'Communicating with the Indians':
Report on a conference held at John Carter Brown Library,
Providence, R.I., October 1996


RESUMEN de los artículos de Historiographia Linguistica
XXIV:1/2 (1997)

    Nebrija’s Syntactic Theory in its Historical Setting,
W. Keith Percival
    Antonio de Nebrija (1444?–1522) inherited his syntactic
theory from a grammatical tradition which had developed in
Italy in the High Middle Ages more or less independently of
the speculative tradition of northern Europe. The
distinctive features of this system are the following: (1)
The main verb in a sentence governs not only the oblique
cases of the complements but also the
nominative case of the subject. (2) Verbs are subclassified
depending on the morphological cases of their nominal
complements. Nebrija must have assimilated this system as a
student in Italy in the 1460s.

    La doctrina y el uso de los futuros en las gramaticas
renacentistas, José Luis Girón Alconchel
    Spanish grammars written through the 16th and 17th
centuries can be used and are to be used as primary sources
for the history of the Spanish language. However, when it
comes to write the history of the morphology and syntax
laid down in them, the following distinctions must be made:
the prescribed use or
standard, the described uses, and the grammarian’s own
written use. In this paper, these distinctions are applied
to the history of the analytic future and the conditional
tenses (cantar-clitic-he, cantar-clitic-hía), especially in
the attempt to explain the loss of these forms in the first
half of the 17th century. Nebrija defines the future and
conditional tenses as periphrases of infinitive + haber;
Correas defines them in the same way, but he does not
identify easily the verb haber in the -ía ending of the
conditional tense. Neither of them — nor the other
grammarians who have been studied: the Anonymous of Lovaina
of 1555 and 1559, Villalón, del Corro, Jiménez Patón,
Tejeda, Juan de Luna — codify the analytic forms in the
verbal paradigms; that means that they do not consider them
standard or prescribed usage, although they use them
themselves (written uses) and they put them down as
examples or other speakers’ uses (described uses). But the
written use lasts only until the end of the 17th century;
Tejeda and Correas use the analytic forms only in examples
(described uses). Taking into account that in the literary
language analytic forms last until about 1650, it must be
said that the language of the grammars abandons these forms
approximately a quarter of a century earlier.These forms
were bound to disappear, because of their defective nature
and their restricted distribution, and also because they
showed a word order (auxiliated + auxiliary), uncompatible
with SVO languages. Grammars of the ‘Golden Century’ allow
us to understand better their dissapearance right in the
first quarter of the 17th century, because they report the
full grammaticalization of haber as the only auxiliary verb
of the compound tenses.

    Las Osservationi de Giovanni Miranda, Juan M. Lope
Blanch
    Giovanni di Miranda’s Osservationi della Lingua
Castigliana (Venice, 1566) was the best pedagogical grammar
of Spanish of its time; and since it served as a model to
French, English, and German grammarians it was important
well beyond Italy. Because it was essentially a practical
teaching work, one finds in it few theoretical
pronouncements. Theory, however, is not totally absent from
his book, as becomes obvious in the discussion of the
concept of ‘sentence’ or of the ‘parts of speech’, but as a
whole the work deals with questions that were thought to be
essential to the learner of a language, mostly morphology
and certain peculiarities of Castilian grammar and usage.
The work is divided into four parts: I, the article, the
noun, the adjective, and the pronoun; II, the verb, whose
conjugation is dealt with exhaustively; III, the
non-inflectional parts of speech in Spanish; and IV,
spelling and pronunciation. Throughout the work the author
discusses related semantic, lexical, and phraseological
subjects, and uses proverbs, anecdotes, and very short
stories to illustrate colloquial usage of Spanish.
Miranda’s Osservationi were influenced by Giovanni Mario
Alessandri d’Urbino’s Paragone della Lingua Toscana et
Castigliana (Naples, 1560). Miranda follows the format of
the Paragone, but greatly expands on it. The Osservationi
della Lingua Castigliana can be said to be the first
effective pedagogical grammar of Spanish written for
speakers of other languages.

    La gramaticografía del siglo XVIII, entre tradición y
reorientación, Hans-Josef Niederehe
    With the transition from the so-called ‘Golden Ages’ to
the age of Enlightenment, Spain lost its political and
cultural hegemony to its northern neighbour, France. In the
field of the language studies, this change is evident
especially in the area of lexicography: the Diccionario de
la Real Academia Española (1726–1739) is soon modeled after
the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (1694). In
grammaticography, things seem to be different, at least if
one listens to those few historians of linguistics who have
payed attention to 18th-century Spanish linguistics. The
overall judgements range from ‘a total lack of good
grammar’ to a ‘complete disregard of modern [i.e., French]
theories’. However, a closer look at the grammatical
production of the time does not confirm either of these
assessments. Apart from Latin grammars in the tradition of
Nebrija kept alive by school administrations and bilingual
Spanish-French grammars clearly influenced by
contemporaneous French theories, there is a tradition of
monolingual grammaticography, starting with Benito Martínez
Gómez Gayoso’s (c.1710–1787) Gramatica de la lengua
castellana reducida a breves reglas y fácil método para la
instrucción de la juventud (1743) and Benito de San Pedro’s
(1732–1801) Arte de romance castellano, dispuesta según sus
principios generales i uso de los mejores autores (1769),
which, at least where the latter is concerned, are totally
up-to-date on contemporary European grammatical
discussions, focussed, as they were, on the teachings of
Port-Royal. As a special case in point, the often neglected
Gramática de la lengua castellana of the Spanish Royal
Academy follows along the same lines by developing even
more the logical approach to grammatical description.
Before starting to write down the grammar, the Academicians
even went so far to study dozens of grammars of other
languages, old and new, Western as well as non-Western
(notably Arabic, Hebrew, Nahuatl), in order to get a more
general linguistic framework and to follow more closely the
theories of the scholar who, in the eyes of the grammarians
of Port-Royal, was the starting point of ‘modern’
linguistics, the Spaniard Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas
(1523–1600/1601).

    Sobre la formación del corpus de autoridades en la
gramática española, Margarita Lliteras
    In the Spanish tradition, descriptive grammars based
both factually and methodologically on a corpus gleaned
from identified contemporary sources, mostly taken from
literature, do not appear until the several editions
(1831–1847) of the grammar of Vicente Salvá, and later in
that of Andrés Bello (1847). A small part of Salvá’s corpus
does come from medieval and renaissance authors, but these
are used only to illustrate diachronic change in Spanish.
Salvá’s empirical and descriptive approach, and that of
other 19th-century Spanish and Spanish American grammarians
that follow him, leads to specialization within the wider
field of grammar and, as is shown here, syntax is the area
that profits the most, both in depth and in size or
extension. There is no precedent for this
grammaticographical tradition in the Renaissance, when a
literary corpus is used only for those parts of the texts
that traditionally dealt with metrics and versification.
Renaissance grammarians derived the authority of their
texts from  the transfer of the rules of Latin grammar into
Spanish, not from the language of the literary canon.
During the 18th-century Enlightenment grammars based on a
literary corpus begin to appear, but the authors from whose
works the corpus is taken are those of a previous
(non-contemporary) period. As shown in this article, it is
in the 18th century that descriptivism results in an
increase in the importance of syntax, although that
increment in size is minor by comparison with that which
takes place during the 19th century beginning with the
works of Salvá.

    Gramáticas y ortografías españoles preacadémicas en el
siglo, María José Martínez Alcalde
    Studies on the history of Spanish grammar generally pay
less attention to the period that follows the works of
Gonzalo Correas and ends with the publication of the
grammar of the Spanish Royal Academy (roughly the period
between 1640 and 1770) than to both what precedes and what
comes after said period. Focusing specifically on the 18th
century, the importance of the publication of the first
grammar of the Royal Academy (1771) diminished interest in
authors who published works on grammar during the preceding
seven decades. That part of the 18th century that, from a
grammatical perspective, can be called ‘pre-academic’, is
usually considered uninteresting, particularly when
compared with the grammatical achievements of the 16th and
17th centuries. The most important Spanish grammarian of
this period, Benito de San Pedro’s (1723–1801) of 1769,
stands out for anticipating the adoption of rationalist
positions taken from French grammatical studies; his work
is in contrast with that of Benito Martínez Gayoso
(c.1710–1787) of 1743, which represents in the same period
a less interesting traditional approach to grammar. In this
article these two opposing approaches studied, which
parallel better studied dichotomies among other grammarians
of the Spanish tradition. On the one hand, the
circumstances that allow me to establish a relationship
between the publication of the treatises of Martínez Gayoso
and San Pedro are established. On the other hand, some of
the innovations attributed to Benito de San Pedro, such as
the classification of the so called indefinite articles,
are shown which in fact had been discussed earlier, and in
a clearer manner, by Martínez Gayoso. However, it is in a
more modest and later preacademic grammar, that of Salvador
Puig (1719–1793) of 1770, where one finds the best and the
most exhaustive treatment of this subject. This is only one
of many interesting proposals of solutions to grammatical
problems that one finds in the works of this period,
including differences in approaches to orthography, before
and even after the publication of the grammar and the
orthography of the Royal Academy.

    Los epígonos del racionalismo en España: La aplicación
al castellano de la Gramática General de Gómez Hermosilla,
Emilio Ridruejo
    French philosophical grammmar and grammatical
rationalism developed from the 17th-century Port Royal
Grammar, but they were not adopted by Spanish grammarians
until early in the 19th century. Of works responsible for
the introduction of French grammatical philosophy in Spain,
one of the earliest and the most important one is the
Principios de gramática general (Madrid 1835), by José
Gómez Hermosilla (1771–1837/38?). The work was very well
received; by 1841 it already was into a third edition. Even
before first appearing in print, a manuscript of the
Gramática General was used to adapt Gómez Hermosilla’s
ideas to the 1828 Castilian grammar of Jacobo Saqueniza
(anagram for Joaquín Cabezas). The most important of the
Castilian grammars influenced by the work of Gómez
Hermosilla were the one just mentioned and the one by
Antonio Martínez de Noboa, published in 1839. The
application of Hermosilla’s theories to descriptive
grammars of Castilian required adapting both the theory and
the description to achieve a reasonable fit between
universal and language specific aspects. Other adjustments
were required of the writers of descriptive grammars in
order to avoid conflicts with a long and well established
grammatical tradition. Nevertheless, grammars like those of
Saqueniza and Noboa show innovations which resulted from
their relationship with the theories of Hermosilla which
will produce a deictic interpretation of articles,
possesives and demonstratives, and will affect the theory
of verb tenses, as well as the definitions of prepositions
and conjunctions, and the classification of sentences.
Additionally, Noboa’s Castilian Gramática, whose title
makes a claim to be in accordance with grammatical
philosophy, includes the most extensive and systematic
treatment of syntax prior to the appearance of the work of
Andrés Bello (1781–1865) in 1847.

    La Nueva Gramática de la lengua Castellana de Martínez
de Noboa: La coherencia interna de una doctrina, Marina
Maquieira
    This paper examines a treatise on Spanish grammar,
i.e., a particular grammar which follows the tradition of
French philosophical grammar. Bachiller D. Antonio Martínez
de Noboa’s work, published in 1839, appears in a century
when the Spanish grammatical tradition is at its best.
Texts like Vicente Salvá’s (1786–1849) and of course Andrés
Bello’s (1781–1865) have in recent years attracted the
attention of researchers. However, Martínez de Noboa’s work
is much less known, although Gómez Asencio (1981, 1985) did
highlight its importance in his two indispensable studies
of the period between 1771 and 1847. The Nueva Gramática de
la lengua Castellana is indebted to the framework set by
José Gómez de Hermosilla (1835) and Jacobo Saqueniza
(1828), although it does include some original
observations. This paper examines the structure of the work
in question and aims to show how it is in global terms a
unified text combining different aspects, of which the most
striking is without doubt the syntactic one. With this aim
in mind certain specific examples of the analogy pertaining
to syntax have been studied. First those he himself
highlighted, e.g., the article/pronoun and verb and then
those comments on syntax which are logically pertinent,
e.g., conjunctions. Noboa himself was cited as was
Saqueniza as having been responsible for the introduction
of distinction between coordinate and subordinate
conjunctions in Spanish grammar, along with the distinction
between simple and complex clauses. On the purely syntactic
level, it was also Noboa who refined the whole notion of
verbal government. Finally, there is a brief summary of the
section dedicated to pronunciation and spelling which are
also considered by the author to be in some way related to
the other parts of the grammar. In sum, what makes this
work particularly interesting is undoubtedly the emphasis
on syntax as more studies had been carried out on
morphology than in any other area up until the 19th century
and continued after Noboa to monopolise questions
concerning grammar throughout this century.

    Las primeras propuestas de ‘selección de norma’ para el
gallego: Del Padre Sarmiento a fines del siglo XIX, Mauro
Fernández
    Linguistic sttudies of Galician began in the last third
of the 18th century with Father Martín Sarmiento
(1695–1772). Since the tradition of writing in this
language had been interrupted towards the end of the 15th
century, its later recovery required certain decisions on
what the model for ‘good Galician’ would be as well as on
the norm for the writing system. In this article, I will
explore the various destinies of the available options: (1)
the adherence to actual speech; (2) the adherence to an
archaic available norm; and (3) the approach to the
Portuguese norm, which in its extreme formulation, assumes
the adoption of this language as the high variant and the
written form of Galician. A close examination of prefaces
and introductions to grammars, dictionaries, and other
relevant texts shows a clear preference for the first
solution. ‘Good Galician’ would thus be the one spoken by
the people, in all its diversity, with some exclusions
which varied according to the author: In some cases,
important towns and urban variants were excluded; in
others, the mountainous regions and the areas bordering
with Castile; and in certain cases, the ‘people’ only meant
‘the best’ in each town. Options 2 and 3 made a timid
appearance towards the end of 19th century even though 3
gained acceptance throughout the 20th century, specially in
the last twenty years.

    Domingo F. Sarmiento y la función social de la lengua,
Barry L. Velleman
    The linguistic ideas of Domingo Faustono Sarmiento
(Argentina; 1811–1888), while never formalized in the 52
volumes of his Complete Works, nevertheless form the
ideological basis for his most important areas of concern,
the ‘progress of civilization’ and the educational
structures which provide its foundation. Past studies have
focused on the practical nature of Sarmiento’s ideas on
language, based as they are upon his conception of the
social and political realities of a definite time (mid-19th
century) and place (Santiago de Chile). The writings
surveyed in this essay are principally those of the period
1841–1843, when Sarmiento participated in a number of
‘polemics’, promoted in part by the controversy of whether
or not to break with Spanish models. Sarmiento considered
Spain to offer no adequate linguistic model, since it had
no literature of its own, and its Academy was ‘dethroned,
royal and foreign’. His orthographic recommendations of
1843, while providing only a partial and temporary
solution, demonstrate his desire for an American
orthography, needed because of pronunciation differences.
Sarmiento actually desired a different language for
America, noting that linguistic change was a symptom of
cultural advancement. He clearly saw the distinction
between the linguistic sign and the ‘scribbling’ used to
represent it; in addition, he recognized that no ‘error’
characterizes the speech of an entire nation. Sarmiento
provides a sociolinguistic analysis of seseo, proving its
universality (acceptability) in America. In his recognition
of contextual variability Sarmiento approaches modern
pragmatic views. His own language proficiency, moreover,
gives evidence of the ‘hot-house special’, or theme of
special interest with corresponding higher levels of
ability. In all, the Argentine thinker is seen in the
context of the Argentine Generation of 1937, his
Naturalistic-Romantic concept of language evolving later in
the century toward a Darwinian positivism.

    La historificación de la lingüística historica: Los
Orígenes de Ramón Menéndez Pidal, José Del Valle
    The main tenet of this article is that Spanish
philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s (1869–1968) theoretical
approach to the history of the language, as developed in
his Manual [elemental] de gramática histórica española
(first edition published in 1904) and in Orígenes del
español (first edition published in 1925), was a result not
only of a highly original interpretation of the linguistic
theories available to him and a need to improve their
explanatory power, but also from an interplay between this
theory and the ideological context in which it emerged.
This ideological context, which the author maintains is
critical for the understanding of the full implications of
Menéndez Pidal’s linguistic approach, has been assumed by
traditional historiography to be outside the scope of
linguistics. It is claimed here that the Spanish
philologist’s scholarly accomplishments, justly praised by
his disciples and hispanists in general, did not occur in a
social vacuum, but were instead well entrenched in a
specific intellectual, social, and historical context.
Menéndez Pidal lived and worked in a period in which Spain,
like other 19th-century liberal democracies, was building
its identity as a nation-state. In this period, the
construction of the Spanish nation was threatened by
centrifugal forces (e.g., the articulation of Basque,
Catalan, and Galician nationalisms) that challenged Spain’s
unitary political and cultural identity. It is precisely
against the backdrop of this socio-political landscape that
Menéndez Pidal’s use of the neogrammarian model of
convergence in the Manual, his scrupulous philological
examination of old documents in Orígenes is interpreted —
which, for him, offered proof of Castile’s destiny as the
leading force in the history of Spain, including his
integrative reworking of the phonetic law converting it
into a means by which to perceive the unity underlying
dialectal variation.

    Rodolfo Lenz: Contribución gramatical y lexicográfica,
María Ángeles Álvarez Martínez
    Rodolfo Lenz (1863–1938) is always associated with his
fellow countryman Federico Hanssen (1857–1919), as both
shared the experience of leaving Germany, late in the 19th
century, to settle in Santiago de Chile, where both taught
linguistics and philology. The influence exerted by these
two linguists was very important, as they were responsible
for the spreading of the teachings of the German school of
Philology in South America, an experience analogous and
simultaneous to that carried out by Menéndez Pidal in
Spain. Both historical linguistics and synchronic and
dialectological studies advanced in this period in Chile,
as well as in the rest of Latin America, due to a
considerable degree to the role played by Lenz and Hanssen.
This paper purports to analyze Lenz’s grammatical and
lexical contribution to Spanish, particularly through his
seminal works La oración y sus partes (1920) and
Diccionario etimológico de las voces chilenas derivadas de
lenguas indígenas americanas (1905–1910). Thus the origins
and development of Lenz’s main grammatical ideas are
tackled in connection with the first work, trying to
explain why and how this treatise came out. His
lexicographical work is also described and analyzed in
order to discuss the main problems he faced in its
compilation, problems that Lenz himself addressed in the
Introduction he wrote for this work.



  ÍNDICE de artículos de Historiographia Linguistica XXIV:3
                           (1997)

    David Prager Branner (235), Notes on the Beginnings of
Systematic Dialect Description and Comparison in Chinese
    Angelo Mazzocco (267), The Italian Connection in Juan
de Valdés’ Diálogo de la lengua
    Jon Erickson, Marion Gymnich & Ansgar Nünning (285)
Wilhelm von Humboldt, Edward Sapir, and the Constructivist
Framework
    José A. Martínez (307), El functionalismo de Rodolfo
Lenz: Una tradición de America a España
    Enrique Obediente & Francesco D’Introno (331), Andrés
Bello: Sus antecedentes en la filosofía británica y su
proyección en la lingüística moderna
    Brigitte Nerlich & David D. Clarke (349), Polysemy:
Patterns of meaning and patterns in history

                        REVIEWS (387)
    Michael Elmentaler, Logisch-semantische Studien in der
Grammatik des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts (Kjell-Åke Forsgren)
    Ulrike Haß-Zumkehr, Daniel Sanders: Aufgeklärte
Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Jürgen Storost)
    Even Hovdhaugen (ed.), ... and the Word Was God:
Missionary linguistics and missionary grammar (Cristina
Altman)
    Geoffrey J. Huck & John A. Goldsmith, Ideology and
Linguistic Theory (Frits Stuurman)
    Frederick J. Newmeyer, Generative Linguistics: A
historical perspective(Mike Dillinger)
    Manfred Ringmacher, Organismus der Sprachidee: H.
Steinthals Weg von Humboldt zu Humboldt (Donatella Di
Cesare)
    George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Volksgeist as Method and
Ethic: Essays on Boasian ethnography and the German
anthropological tradition (Regna Darnell)
    Kees Versteegh, The Explanation of Linguistic Causes:
Az-Zaggagi’s theory of grammar (Ernest N. McCarus)

                   MISCELLANEA: DOCUMENTS
    E.F.K. Koerner (ed.): Hans-Josef Niederehe — List of
Publications, 1966-1997 (429)
    Editor’s End-of-the-Year Piece (454)


RESUMEN de los artículos de Historiographia Linguistica
XXIV:3 (1997)

    Notes on the Beginnings of Systematic Dialect
Description and Comparison in Chinese, David Prager Branner
    When 19th-century Westerners first began applying
modern methods to Chinese linguistics, they were heavily
influenced by Chinese phonological traditions. This
influence is apparent in a number of their methodological
decisions. For instance, they do not seem to have resolved
their difficulties distinguishing plain from aspirated
obstruent until they copied Chinese sources. Their work in
comparative dialectology was almost always dominated by the
Chinese rime-table tradition. Even the systems of universal
orthography they developed for Chinese incorporated
traditional Chinese tonal symbols. Yet these Western
sinologists seem to have made little attempt to communicate
their own work to Chinese scholars in a formal way; though
they were influenced by Chinese ideas, they published their
work in the main for other Westerners, with the result that
their new synthesis did not directly influence native
Chinese linguistics.

    The Italian Connection in Juan de Valdés’ Diálogo de la
Lengua, Angelo Mazzocco
    The article reassesses the connection between Juan de
Valdés’ (c.1495–1541) Diálogo de la lengua (1535) and the
Italian Renaissance by demonstrating that Valdés was
thoroughly familiar with the Italian literature on language
and the concept of its possible rebirth. It is shown that
the Italian humanist Pietro Bembo’s (1470–1547) argument,
as laid down in his seminal work Prose della volgar lingua
(1525), that great writers contribute significantly to the
normalization and enrichment of a language constitutes the
frame of Valdés’ work from which flow the author’s oncerns
about culture and linguistic theory. Valdés’ appropriation
of and reaction to the Italian literature on language
reflect the views prevalent in the intellectual circles of
Europe at the time.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, Edward Sapir, and the
Constructivist Framework, Jon Erickson & Marion Gymnich —
Ansgar Nünning
    Striking similarities between Edward Sapir’s views on
language and those of Wilhelm von Humboldt have long been
apparent. Because of the avoidance of documentation in his
writings, however, it has proved to be impossible to
demonstrate the extent of Sapir’s direct familiarity with
the works of Humboldt and his commitment to a Humboldtian
language philosophy. Rather than pursuing the question of
how Sapir might have been influenced by Humboldt, the
present article explores the Sapirian philosophical
framework for the treatment of both language and culture in
comparison with that found in the works of Humboldt. It is
shown that even without direct evidence of the influence of
the works of Humboldt on Sapir it is possible to see in
Sapir’s writings on language, cultural anthropology, and
even aesthetics a commitment to a general constructivist
philosophical framework remarkably similar to that found in
Humboldt.

    El funcionalismo de Rodolofo Lenz: Una tradición de
América a España, José A. Martínez
    This paper deals with the contributions to Hispanic
Linguistics by the German-Chilean linguist Rodolfo Lenz
(1863–1935), some of whose proposals —often attributed to
other scholars — may be seen as an alternative to the ideas
of the prestigious Andrés Bello (1781–1865). The paper
first reviews those aspects of his work which anticipate
some of the basic tenets of Functional Grammar, such as the
notion of ‘transposition’ (function shifting), his views on
sentential structure, and his treatment of passives as
attributive constructions. The paper also explores Lenz’s
contributions to Indo-European linguistics and his
theoretical affinities with, if not anticipations of, the
work of other well-known linguists like Bühler, Tesnière,
Hjelmslev, and Benveniste. In sum, the author seeks to
vindicate Rodolfo Lenz and his insightful views in both
general linguistic theory and Spanish grammar.

    Andrés Bello: Sus antecedentes en la filosofía
británica y su proyección en la lingüística moderna,
Enrique Obediente — Francesco D’Introno
    In this article we will analyze two aspects of Andrés
Bello’s (1781–1865) grammatical thought: its relation to
the English empiricists and its similarity with generative
grammar. His relation to the English empiricists is due to
the fact that Bello spent 19 years in London, where he
became familiar with the work of Locke, Berkeley, Hume and
Reid. In fact his philosophical work, Filosofía del
entendimiento, sounds like some of those philosophers’
essays. From the empiricists Bello derives the idea that
there is no innate universal grammar with rules present in
all languages, as well as his concept of language as an
independent system of arbitrary and conventional signs.
>>From Reid he derived his interpretation of the evolution of
the language: signs start as ‘natural’ (i.e., they allow
humans to communicate without any particular language), and
then they become ‘artificial’, i.e., arbitrary and
conventional, particular to each grammatical system.
Because of his philosophical position, Bello has been
compared to structuralist linguists. Here we will show that
some of Bello’s grammatical thoughts can be compared with
those of Chomsky. The reason for this is that in his
grammatical analysis Bello uses concepts reminiscent of
generative grammar. For example, Bello proposes the notion
of an ‘latent proposition’ similar to that of ‘deep
structure’. And when he analyzes for example relative
clauses and elliptical constructions, he uses concepts that
are familiar to generative grammarians. In other words, the
paper tries to show that methodologically and analytically
Bello shares some concepts present in Chomsky’s linguistic
theory. It also shows differences between Bello and
Chomsky, and concludes by pointing out that the major
difference between the two linguists is that Bello assumes
language can be learned through a symbolic system, while
Chomsky assumes language to be innate and independent of
other cognitive systemsof the mind.

    Polysemy: Patterns of meaning and patterns in history,
Brigitte Nerlich & David D. Clarke
    40 years ago Stephen Ullmann wrote that polysemy was
the pivot of semantics. He was referring then to
traditional synchronic and diachronic semantics. Nowadays,
some 40 years later, polysemy has again become a central
topic in cognitive semantics. This article traces the
history of this important concept, from Antiquity to the
first half of the 20th century. Bréal’s treatment of
polysemy is the pivot around which the article itself
turns, as it was Bréal who invented the term ‘polysemy’ a
century ago.

                      Más información:
           http://www.benjamins.nl/jbp/index.html

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