1 The Cambridge History of Linguistics (CHL)
The CHL is an authoritative, one-volume, chronologically arranged account of the history of the study of language, including (late) twentieth-century ‘recent history.’ It is comprised of chapters written specifically for the volume and has been conceptualized to appeal to a variety of readers: linguists who want to know (more) about their shared intellectual heritage or to find out how their specific area of study developed; scholars with expertise in neighboring disciplines who seek to understand what has been done in linguistics relating to their concerns; language/linguistics teachers and students and curious readers who wish to gain more insight into the study of language. While we don’t expect that readers will necessarily have a background in the areas they will be reading about, we do assume that they will be acquainted with basic terms/concepts used in linguistics, e.g., syntax, phonology, phoneme, semantics, case, mood, demonstrative, etc.
The establishment of language as a focus of study took place over many centuries and reflection on its nature emerged in relation to very different social and cultural practices. As a result, there has been, and there still is, some disagreement among specialists about what should count as linguistics and thus be part of its history. There have also been debates about whether linguistics should be understood as separate from other disciplines or linked to them in some way (see the Introduction to Part III). A broad and inclusive definition of linguistics as ‘the study of language’ has been adopted for this volume in order to cover what we feel would be of most interest to readers. In our decision-making we have also taken into account the importance, originality, and pertinence of language-related concerns within various cultures and intellectual traditions from ancient times up to the year 2000, although (difficult) choices had to be made given the space constraints of a single volume.
2 Note on the Text
The CHL may be read selectively since each chapter is self-contained. Or readers may focus on topics of interest to them by following the cross-references that have been added (‘see Chapter xx’). They may also use the headings and subheadings in the Index, which has been constructed as a guide to where information on specific subjects, languages, major figures, institutions, etc. can be found. There is as well a single combined list of References at the end of the volume, which gives details about the scholarly work cited in the Introductions to Parts I, II, and III and all the chapters. In addition, key words for the chapters and the book as a whole are included on the Cambridge website (www.cambridge.org/9780521849906).
The CHL is more than a mere chronicle. While the authors have been asked to be broadly non-partisan in their exposition, they have also been encouraged, where appropriate, to address controversial issues (and to show their preferences while respecting other views). As is the case for all aspects of scholarship, no presentation of history is objective, neutral or purely factual, since any attempt to choose, classify, discuss, or evaluate previous work necessarily shows the viewpoint of the person who does it.
3 Division into Three Parts, with an Introduction to Each
This History is divided into three parts: I Ancient, Classical, and Medieval Periods; II Renaissance to Late Nineteenth Century; III Late Nineteenth-through Twentieth-Century Linguistics. These groupings are based on their pertinence to the history of linguistics and how conceptions about language have been connected to the times in which they are embedded. The geographic spread is wide for Part I (Middle/Near East, India, China, Korea, Japan, Europe). For more recent periods, the focus, in Part II, is on European linguistics, and, in Part III, on ‘western’-type linguistics practiced by scholars in various regions of the world. In order to underscore what typifies the three parts of the CHL, each one is preceded by an Introduction, which adds a unique dimension to the volume by situating reflection about language in relation to previous and concurrent work and also to relevant aspects of the broader intellectual and social-cultural contexts of the given historical periods.
When deciding on a boundary between the three parts, a delicate balance between continuity and innovation had to be achieved since, as each of the Introductions shows, if looked at up close there is no clear-cut separation between periods, but from a more distant perspective significant shifts in ideas are apparent. It could be argued whether the Middle Ages should be included with the ancient and classical periods – as in this book – or with the Renaissance. However, we feel that Mark Amsler’s Introduction to Part I and the discussions in Chapters 5, 6A, 6B, and 6C make an excellent argument, implicitly, for the former grouping. As well, putting the Renaissance at the beginning of Part II marks not only changes in intellectual life, art forms, scientific and political thought, but also the start of a shift in focus in the study of language, as discussed in Lia Formigari’s Introduction to Part II. As is clear from their titles, Parts II and III both include the late nineteenth century. The chapter on the Neogrammarians is at the end of Part II since their work was the culmination of research that had begun earlier (see Introduction to Part II and Chapter 12). The rest of the scholarship in the late nineteenth century is discussed in Part III, since it is connected with major realignments in linguistics in the first half of the twentieth century (see our Introduction to Part III and Chapter 13).
4 General Overview and Synopsis of Each Part of the Volume
Part I (Ancient, Classical, and Medieval Periods) covers 2,000 years, Part II (Renaissance to Late Nineteenth Century) encompasses 400 years, and Part III (Late Nineteenth- through Twentieth-Century Linguistics) concentrates on a little over 100 years. In this progressive compression of the historical focus, we have been guided by our desire to have a workable balance between an emphasis on those trends that have had the most impact on the present, with a weighting toward the modern era, and at the same time reasonable historical depth. While no perfect resolution of these competing demands is possible, we feel that this division best satisfies the varied expectations of the broad audience of this book. As a result, the highly condensed approach in Part I and the less compact presentation in Part II provide readable overviews of linguistic concerns and contributions to knowledge during those time periods, while Part III offers a closer look at certain aspects of the greatly expanding research in linguistics characteristic of the twentieth century.
The coverage of Part I is global and multicultural/multilingual. It ranges over traditions in the ancient Near East, India, East Asia, Greece and Rome, Medieval Europe, and the premodern Near East that constitute the beginnings and subsequent development of views about language, and it gives the reader a sense of the diversity and originality of work done throughout that time period. What was common to these traditions was that the science of language was embedded in other social and cultural practices (philosophy, theology, translation, schooling) and that grammarians’ (linguists’) influence came from the power of writing and literacy. We do not return to the East Asian, Indian, and Near/Middle Eastern traditions in Parts II and III, because, in general, their subsequent history is typified by faithful cultural transmission of the earlier ideas, with only slight alteration. The major changes that happened in these areas came with the colonialist expansion of various European powers, which resulted in members of those other cultures going to the West for training and taking back the very different ideas they learned there. This led to reaction to, and dialogue with, the western views discussed in Parts II and III.
Part II focuses on the West from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. Linguistic universalism in Europe that had been provided by the general use of Latin was gradually lost, due to the progressive development of national identities, and their associated languages. The fundamental concepts of the Greek (and Latin) grammarians continued to be adhered to, but at the same time, there were significant changes in the ways of looking at language, including the recognition of linguistic diversity across the world. European colonial expansion eventually caused a major shift in the western tradition due to contact and confrontation with, on the one hand, (East) Asian languages and languages of the Indian sub-continent (Sanskrit, in particular) and ancient linguistic thought (especially Pāṇini’s), and on the other hand, the very different, typically unwritten, languages of what were characterized as ‘primitive,’ ‘indigenous’ or ‘exotic’ peoples in, e.g., the Americas, the Pacific, and Africa.Footnote 1 This resulted in both the description of many newly discovered languages (through dictionaries and grammars) and the development of comparative and historical linguistics in Europe and subsequent spread of these new approaches into other countries. Concurrently, the growth and prestige of science prompted the Neogrammarians’ interest in establishing a (historical) ‘science of language.’ It was in the last decades of the nineteenth century that the term ‘linguistics’ became commonly used to designate this science (in opposition to ‘philology,’ which focused on the form and interpretation of literary texts).
Part III is devoted to specific aspects of linguistics in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century when (modern) linguistics was founded. There were fundamental changes which became the hallmark of what most scholars (linguists and non-linguists alike) think of now as linguistics. Since the twentieth century was a time of considerable growth in linguistic scholarship, it was assumed that the various audiences of the CHL would be interested in a more detailed treatment of the last 100 years or so of linguistic work than of previous centuries. The seventeen chapters of Part III, the topics of those chapters, and the division into two unequal subparts are the result of these concerns. The four chapters in Part IIIA cover the most important aspects of western linguistic thought from the late nineteenth century to c. 1960, while the thirteen chapters in Part IIIB discuss various types of research in 1960–2000, the period of the global development and expansion of language studies into new domains, including those directly relevant to scholarship at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The turning point in Part IIIA is the shift in focus, attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure, from the systematic investigation of language change (historical linguistics) to the nature of language in general (general linguistics). During the 1920s and 1930s, structuralism, broadly defined, became a major trend with different types of linguistics and chief areas of study across research centers in Continental Europe, Britain, and North America (NA, especially the USA and Canada). The state of affairs that had begun in the 1920s weakened during World War 2 but continued after the war, up to about 1960 (or 1955–65), a pivotal period of transition from structuralism to a variety of other orientations (see our Introduction to Part III).
The several shifts that occurred in the 1960–2000 time period are detailed in Part IIIB: the emphasis on syntax; the foundation of generativism and formal grammar under the predominant influence of Noam Chomsky. At the same time, there was a growth of interest in the relationship of language and mind as well as the cultural and social contexts in which they are situated, and the (re)integration of language use and function into linguistic studies. In addition, a widened definition and interdisciplinary scope of linguistics emerged, with, concomitantly, the development of research investigating language from many points of view, especially with different theoretical and methodological approaches. This is reflected in Part IIIB with chapters about new ideas concerning traditional areas of linguistic investigation, e.g., phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, lexicology, historical linguistics, as well as chapters that chronicle the opening of linguistics to interdisciplinary trends, e.g., discourse analysis, pragmatics, language and philosophy, language and society, anthropology/language and culture, language and (cognitive) psychology, semiotics, and linguistics applied to world problems.
5 Twentieth-Century International Expansion of Western Linguistics
In the twentieth century, linguistics expanded into a major worldwide discipline with an international community of scholars. However, this ‘globalism’ was centered on western traditions as practiced for the most part in Europe, North and South America, and Australia/New Zealand. As such, the representation of modern linguistic thought in Part IIIA takes into account contributions in various languages. However, scholarly work written in English grew considerably from 1960 to 2000 and thus a number of chapters in Part IIIB focus on trends connected to Anglo-American research. It should also be noted that because of the abundance of studies carried out on language during the period covered by Part III, and especially Part IIIB, the order of chapters is only partly chronological. Given the short time frame, it was not possible to distribute them into chronological layers. However, the content in each of the chapters is arranged historically as much as possible.
In addition to the issue of chronology, the difficulty of dealing with ‘contemporary’ history had to be addressed. With the ‘recent’ past, it is especially difficult to foresee which approaches or questions will be most salient in the future. We have done our best to choose topics that we feel will still be relevant in the years to come, and will engage the broad audience of the CHL.
