History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences James McElvenny

In this interview, we talk to Floris Solleveld about the character of linguistic research in the 19th century. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts References for Episode 11 Primary Sources Adelung, Johann Christoph and Johann Severin Vater (1806–1817), Mithridates, oder…Read more ›

In this episode, we examine some of the major critiques directed against the Neogrammarians and see what they tell us about the state of linguistics around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. We focus in particular on…Read more ›

In this episode, we introduce the Neogrammarians, the dominant school of linguistics in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts References for Episode 9 Primary Sources Brugman, Karl (1876a), ‘Nasalis sonans in der indogermanischen…Read more ›

In this episode, we look first at the critiques of Schleicher’s “physical” and Steinthal’s “psychological” theory of language put forward by the American linguist William Dwight Whitney. We then turn to Whitney’s own conception of language as a “human institution”…Read more ›

In this interview, we talk to Dr Clara Stockigt about missionary grammars in Australia and their links to the academic linguistic scholarship of the time. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts References for Episode 7 Primary Sources Bleek, Wilhelm H.…Read more ›

In this episode, we look first at August Schleicher’s proposal for a linguistic “morphology” and its intellectual background in nineteenth-century biology. We then compare Schleicher’s approach to the scheme of language classification developed by H. Steinthal within Völkerpsychologie, or “psychology…Read more ›