History of the Language Sciences

Gonçalo Fernandes (UTAD) 

Between History and the Language Sciences: The Portugaliæ Monumenta Linguistica and the Re-conceptualization of Archives

Over the last decade, archives have shifted from being viewed as static repositories of the past to being recognized as dynamic infrastructures that actively shape knowledge production across disciplines. This change is especially evident in the history of science, where archives are increasingly treated as sites of critical, cross-disciplinary reflection. Calls to decolonize archival practices, combined with the transformative impact of digital media, have inspired new approaches to organizing, accessing, and interpreting collections. In linguistics, these shifts have led to tangible innovations — from large-scale computational corpora to the digitization and preservation of endangered language materials — reflecting a growing awareness of the intellectual and cultural value embedded in archival holdings.

Within this context, the Portugaliæ Monumenta Linguistica (PML) exemplifies an active digital archive bridging tradition and innovation. Launched in 2023 by the Centre for Studies in Letters (CEL), headquartered in Vila Real (Portugal), the platform initially comprised three major corpora: Portuguese Grammars, Portuguese Orthographies, and Missionary Linguistics under Portuguese Royal Patronage. In 2025, the scope was broadened and restructured. The Missionary Linguistics corpus became the Corpus of Missionary Linguistics, now including metalinguistic texts by Catholic, Protestant, and other missionaries active in diverse colonial and mission contexts. The newly created Corpus of Non-Missionary Colonial Linguistics incorporates works by non-religious authors — administrators, traders, travelers, settlers, and even native scholars — many of whom documented African languages outside missionary frameworks. Another addition, the Corpus of Epistolary Exchanges between Luise Ey and Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos, focuses on original manuscript letters exchanged between Luise Ey (1854–1936) and Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos (1851–1925), offering unique insight into the intellectual, linguistic and cultural networks of their time.

This presentation will explore:

1. How the PML challenges the notion of archives as solely historical spaces, emphasizing their role in contemporary scientific inquiry;

2. How practices in linguistic curation, indexing, and open data can inform other domains, including geography, botany, and the history of science;

3. How interdisciplinary perspectives can define the specificities of linguistic archives and shape governance strategies for digital collections.

By combining theoretical reflection on archives with the practical case of the PML, this talk contributes to the debate on the challenges and opportunities of digital archives in historiography and the language sciences, within a global agenda of preservation, accessibility, and the decolonization of knowledge.

John Goldsmith (University of Chicago) "A case study of mentor and student: Zellig Harris and Noam Chomsky, and the analysis of the English verbal auxiliary"

Abstract: There has been increasing interest in understanding the significance of the mentor/student relationship, which can be studied in terms of personality, of social identity and context, and intellectual orientation. 

My talk will look at Zellig Harris (1909-1992) and Noam Chomsky (1928-), a teacher and his student. Harris was one of the handful of leading American linguists in the 1940s and 1950s, and Chomsky became a world-famous linguist in the 1960s.  Chomsky's breakout publication was Syntactic Structures, in 1957, and readers agreed that his analysis of the English verbal auxiliary was the case study that stunned the world with its originality. 

I was one of the people stunned by the originality of that analysis, but I was also stunned in my reading of Zellig Harris's work to find the substance of the analysis already in Harris's 1955 presidential address to the LSA, and I have been trying to understand how this work sheds light on the relationship between the two. My own conclusion---which is my best account, but by no means certain---is that Chomsky learned most of it from Harris in informal conversations (at meetings that he has both acknowledged and denied), and that he did not expect the analysis to be so passionately defended by his readers---and that in his opinion, it was not the analysis of the auxiliary that was important but rather the larger framework in which rules were written and applied. In a sense, the analysis got away from him. 

But the bigger story is still this (regardless of whether my account above is correct or not): even as this analysis of the auxiliary heralded the start of the Chomskian era, it was still well within the Harrisian era. The analysis is, from this point of view, better viewed as how an analysis grows and develops within the student/teacher dyad than it is as the beginning of a rupture between incompatible points of view.

Bethany Anderson (University of Illinois) "Towards a (Cybernetic) Human Science’: Margaret Mead, Communication, and the Study of Culture at a Distance”

In January 1975, anthropologist Margaret Mead delivered her presidential address, “Towards a Human Science,” for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Given three years before she passed away, the address summarizes many of her views on anthropology, the human sciences, and the scientific enterprise. In it, she articulated two essential points: first, that to meet the world’s challenges, scientific disciplines needed to come together to create a unified, interdisciplinary science; and second, the importance of fostering mutual understanding—across cultures, nations, and disciplines. To achieve both ends, employing a cybernetic framework for communication was paramount. Using her participation in the Macy Conferences on cybernetics and her work at the Research in Contemporary Cultures (RCC) program at Columbia University as points of departure for reaching these goals, this talk explores the ways that a cybernetic understanding of communication informed Mead’s work during the Cold War. Through the RCC program and several successor projects, Mead and fellow anthropologist Rhoda Métraux developed interdisciplinary methods for “studying culture at a distance.” Such methods were intended to understand and support communication with cultures (or systems) which were inaccessible due to either spatial or temporal barriers, one important challenge being how to constructively engage with the Soviet Union. By examining Mead’s engagement with cybernetics, this talk discusses the ways she mapped lessons learned from cybernetics onto geopolitical concerns to articulate a language of diplomacy and foster dialogue during the Cold War.

Note: background readings for this session have been uploaded below. In addition, Bethany recommends taking a look at an online publication related to her talk, which can be found here: https://histanthro.org/notes/communication-without-control-macy-conferences/ 

Anna Schewelew (University of California, Santa Barbara) will be joining us to discuss research from her dissertation project in this talk, titled "'Patently Silly'? On Warren Weaver as a Theorist of (Machine) Translation. Anna's research draws on translation theory, media theory and the history of science in order to examine assumptions about language, meaning, multilingualism and the act of reading that are implicit in machine translation systems. Her presentation will be informed by other interests that include mathematical and non-mathematical notions of probability in literature and art, fictions of translation, performance studies and the Soviet Cosmopolis.

SPRING BREAK!

"Thoughts on the future of (computational) linguistics"

Research methods in linguistics, as in other fields, are increasingly computational. But over the decades, the relevant fashions have changed again and again, with major shifts in motivations, methods and applications. When digital computers first appeared, linguistic analysis adopted the new methods of information theory, which accorded well with the ideas that dominated psychology and philosophy. Then came formal language theory and the idea of AI as applied logic, in sync with the development of cognitive science. That was followed by a revival of 1950s-style empiricism—AI as applied statistics—which in turn was followed by the age of deep nets and large language models. There are signs that the climate is changing again.

Allegra Giovine, "Wrangling with words: General Semantics and the ideal of scientific living in the mid-20th century US"

Suffering from a sub-clinical personality disorder, or perhaps a full-blown psychiatric ailment? Wendell Johnson's 1946 book, People In Quandaries, deepened Alfred Korzybski's program of General Semantics (Science and Sanity, 1933) to show how errors of language and meaning contribute to the psychophysiological problems of our personal nervous systems. Informed by his work as a speech pathologist and influenced by insights of linguistic anthropology, Johnson's Quandaries was just one popular contribution among many to bring science into "everyday living" and fix the myriad social problems brought on by natural language. I'd like to explore the semantic angst that propelled the General Semantics (GS) enterprise and motivated other sometimes foolhardy projects to bring order and clarity to language, meaning, and knowledge in the mid-20th century US.

Notes on readings: Attached are a few excerpts from People In Quandaries as optional reading. Excerpt 1 (ToC and Intro) is for context. If you have just 10 minutes and want to have fun, you can: - check out Excerpt 5 for the semantic exercises in the back of the book, e.g. Exercise 14 ("Non-Allness: The Relativity of Abstracting," pp. 494-5). - skim Excerpt 4 (the final chapter, "The Urgency of Paradise," pp. 467-83) to get a sense of Johnson's overall architecture and stakes for human communication. If you want to get a better sense of how Johnson's General Semantics worked, you can check out Excerpt 2 (Chapter 6, "The World of Words," pp. 112-42). And if you want to learn more about Johnson's application of GS to speech pathologies, check out Excerpt 3 (Chapter 17, "The Indians have no word for it," pp. 439-66) Note: The full text of PIQ is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/peopleinquandari0000unse_s4e6

Judy Kaplan (Science History Institute), "The Information Science of Linguistics"
 
In 1971, a group of linguists associated with Stanford University launched the Language Universals Phonological Archiving Project (SPA), the “first computerized database of phonological segment inventories” in the world. Led by two young researchers, Donald Sherman and Marilyn Vihman, the Project’s goals were twofold: to identify “adequate descriptive categories for linguistic phenomena,” and to explore “appropriate media and formats for storing, controlling, and accessing descriptive linguistic data.” Marshalling standards that had recently been developed by the Library of Congress for the representation of bibliographic data (MARC), the SPA was intended to merge linguistic and informational ontologies. The project was visionary, if ultimately unsuccessful. Architects sought to balance their need for control against users’ desire for flexibility, anticipating recent developments in the open design of information systems. But the project depended on soft money and the labor of junior scholars, which made it impossible to sustain over time.
 
In this presentation, I will outline the brief history of the SPA and its digital afterlife to explore a series of interrelated questions. First, I hope to reflect with other participants on the construction and use of disciplinary-specific archives in scientific research. Second, this case study will give us the opportunity to analyze areas of overlap and divergence when it comes to twentieth-century linguistics and information science. Finally, the presentation will motivate a discussion of labor relations in the history of empirical linguistic traditions. 
 
A short 1972 report on the project is attached for your reading pleasure! 

John Goldsmith (University of Chicago), "Information Theory for Linguists" 
Abstract: Information came on the scene in the late 1940s, and something about it seemed to speak to linguists at the time, but not much came of that interest for quite a while (despite the enthusiasm of Jakobson, Harris, and Hockett--though Chapter 7 of Trubetzkoy's Grundzüge was prescient in this regard). In the last 30 years, however, things have changed a great deal. There is much more that linguists can learn and employ from information theory these days. The principal reason for the change is that in its original form, information theory was devoted to averages over large ensembles, and this averaging had the unfortunate effect of washing out what was of greatest interest to linguists. I will illustrate some of the ways that linguists now look at some of the central ideas of information theory (entropy, mutual information, ideal compressed length, e.g.) with considerable interest. I'll choose my examples from phonology and morphology, but it is not hard to apply the same ideas to syntax as well. The specific focus will be on obtaining methods that induce grammatical structure from data. 

MEETING POSTPONED TO NOVEMBER 12TH!

Framing Discussion and Introductions
For our first meeting, we will read two short published papers to frame this year's emphasis on the relationship between linguistics and information science: Frederick Jelinek's retrospective, "Some of my Best Friends Are Linguists," and Fernando Pereira's essay, "Formal Grammar and Information Theory: Together Again?" We plan, also, to set aside time for (re-)introductions to begin the year.

Chen-Pang Yeang, "Information, Cryptography, and Noise" 
This talk, which draws on the attached chapter, focuses on the roles of noise in Claude Shannon's development of information theory in the 1940s. It explains how Shannon formed his core concepts of generic noise through his wartime cryptographic work, how such concepts of noise configured his so-called "channel Coding Theorem," and how he came up with various visual representations of noise as modeling of uncertainty at large. While the content of this presentation is not about linguistics in its narrow sense, Shannon's information theory did have profound influences on the studies of languages in the mid-20th century. His talk about redundancy, entropy, and coding became well-known intellectual resources among linguists at the time.

Stella Gevorgyan-Ninness and Ian Stewart, "Informal Networks and Official Surveys: Language Collecting in the Nineteenth Century"
 
This session features two papers about 19th collection practices, which should provide rich opportunities for comparative analysis (!).
 
Stella Gevorgyan-Ninness, "Creating Language Expertise: Informal Transnational Networks in the Nineteenth Century"  
This presentation offers some preliminary results from a chapter in my manuscript on the acquisition of linguistic knowledge among Armenian, German, and Russian scholars in the nineteenth century. It deals with the contribution of informal networks to scholarship. Using my circulation of knowledge research, it is possible to observe from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, missionaries and lay people from different countries were interested in Slavic languages and Native American languages. 
This cooperation led to changes in two areas: firstly, missionaries and lay people helped advance language science, and secondly, their disagreement but also agreement about how language science should be written helped to place language expertise in institutions and begin the work of writing a nation’s language history. This professionalization of language science separated many loosely connected interests in ethnographic research, travel literature, the study of society into separate disciplines. These developments provide a bridge for understanding the European comparative historical linguistics of Franz Bopp, August Schleicher, and Jacob Grimm from the early to the mid-nineteenth century which created a new system of language classification. This research would not have been possible without the work of missionaries and lay scholars including women. My paper will provide a few examples of these informal transnational networks devoted to Slavic and Native American languages.
 
Ian Stewart, "The First Linguistic Survey of India, c. 1806-c. 1811"
This article recovers the history of the first systematic British attempts to survey the languages of India. Long before George Abraham Grierson proposed his monumental survey of Indian languages, the Scottish judge James Mackintosh suggested a similar undertaking to the Literary Society of Bombay in 1806. This article follows those who pursued the project over the next five years. Their efforts stretched across India, the northwest frontier into Afghanistan, east into Burma, as far north as Nepal and all the way south into Ceylon. Almost all of those involved in these efforts were Scots educated at the University of Edinburgh, and so as well as reconstructing a forgotten chapter in the history of British imperialism, this article supplements our pictures of the histories of imperial knowledge production and Scottish orientalism.

Kristine Palmieri, "Grand Visions of Alterthumswissenschaft: Classical Philology as Language Science in early Nineteenth-Century Germany"
This chapter examines three grand visions of classical philology that were articulated in the period 1805–1807. This analysis focuses especially on the vision of George Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1858), professor of philology and ancient history at the University of Heidelberg, and on his statement that, “the science of antiquity presents two sides for consideration, the historical and the exemplary.” Creuzer’s views are compared first with those of Johann Heinrich Voß (1751–1826), the famous translator of Homer and devout philhellene, who was radically opposed to Creuzer’s approach to classical philology. This chapter then turns to the programmatic statement on classical philology, “Description of the Science of Antiquity” (Darstellung der Alterthumswissenschaft) (1807) written by Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824). The comparison of these three views both illuminates the relationship between philology and pedagogy, which emphasizes the important role that the classical philology played in the development of cultural philhellenism, and highlights the unique status of the philology seminar as a space in which classical philology was taught as an independent field of scientific research.

*NOTE SPECIAL TIME*
Paul Michael Kurtz, "Knowledge Infrastructure ca. 1900: The Case of Assyriology at the British Museum" 
 
Abstract: 
Stripping himself in excitement at the British Museum, George Smith stated, in 1872, “I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion.” What he read both shocked and awed: an account of the Deluge – yet from a still more ancient age and in a different language than Genesis. Controversy ensued, of biblical proportions. But how did that clay fragment make its way to London, from Iraq, and how could that now famous text become visible in the first place, buried not only under earth but also beneath crystalline deposits?

This paper presents an initial foray into the history of infrastructure in Semitic philology during the nineteenth century. Focusing on the transport of cuneiform tablets from Iraq, on the one hand, and their storage, organization, and processing at the British Museum, on the other, it examines material problems and material solutions at the bedrock of philology. It considers the affordances essential to making, transmitting, and inculcating textual and linguistic knowledge. Along the way, this exploration examines processes of experimentation and boundaries between experts and technicians and addresses larger questions of epistemic objects, actor-networks, and cooked data.

 
Reading:
E.A. Wallis Budge, The Rise & Progress of Assyriology (London: Hopkinson, 1925), 143–74. Available digitally on Archive.org.

*NOTE SPECIAL TIME*
Gregory Radick (University of Leeds), "Language, Darwinism and the Human/Non-Human Boundary"
Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) includes a famous passage on moral progress as due to human reason continuously expanding the range of beings to whom – and, eventually, to which – human sympathies extend.  This chapter tracks the fortunes of this passage across the last century and a half of public Darwinism, dwelling in particular on three instances: first, its debut in Darwin’s Descent; second, its return in the 1950 UNESCO Statement on the “Race Question,” as the sole quotation from a scientific author; third, its return again in the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker’s 2011 bestseller The Better Angels of Our Nature, as an epigraph to the concluding chapter.  Against any impression that this lineage might convey of a consensus stably enduring from Darwin’s day to ours, I aim to show on the contrary that beneath the surface continuity is a remarkable discontinuity, located in the years around 1900.  Once we recognize this discontinuity, we can better understand how Darwinian theory came to be used in the twentieth century first to underwrite the concept of human rights biologically and then to undermine that concept.
 

Michael E. Lynch (Cornell University), "Harvey Sacks and the 'Linguistics Turn' in the Analysis of Conversation" 
Harvey Sacks (1935–1975) is generally acknowledged as the founder of conversation analysis, which originated as part of the sociological subfield of ethnomethodology. Although he died at the age of 40 in an automobile accident nearly 50 years ago, there has been renewed interest in his work, in part because the field of Conversation Analysis (CA), which became established in the social and behavioral sciences in the decades following his death, appears to some of us to have drifted from Sacks’ radical treatment of conversation as a social production. This presentation is part of an effort based on readings and online discussions of Sacks’ transcribed lectures and some preliminary research at the Sacks’ archive. The focus of this presentation will be on the ‘linguistics turn’ in Conversation Analysis (not to be confused with, the linguistic turn in mid-20 th century Anglo-American philosophy). This ‘turn’ from ethnomethodology (the investigation of elementary features of human actions) to subfields of linguistics (psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics) has broadened interest in CA, but calls for a reminder of Sacks’ use of linguistic resources in his investigations. The talk will focus on how Sacks, in his transcribed lectures and writings, invokes grammatical features of sentences as resources that parties to a conversation to compose and coordinate social actions. Sacks’ turn is from linguistic order to orders of coordinated action. In recent years, the professional ‘turn’ in CA has gone from a focus on social action to analysis of particulars of language and psychology.
 
 

James McElvenny and Floris Solleveld, "Australian Languages and Cultures: Histories of Documentation" 
 
This session features two papers about the study of Australian Aboriginal languages in the 19th century, how the cultural and natural environment was entailed in that study, and the colonial/missionary/scientific networks of which it was part.
 
Colonial science between Kleinstaaterei and the Word of God: The 1838 Lutheran mission to South Australia
James McElvenny (University of Siegen)
 
In this talk, I present a case study of the first Lutheran mission to South Australia and look at the entanglements it reveals between scientific data collection in the colonial field, Protestant missionary efforts, and the political jockeying and pursuit of prestige among the German states of the nineteenth century. The focus lies on Christian Gottlob Teichelmann (1807–1888) and Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann (1815–1893), sent in 1838 by the Dresden Missionary Society to proselytize the Aboriginal inhabitants of Adelaide. Their ordination in the small central German duchy of Altenburg led them into an association with the local Naturforschende Gesellschaft des Osterlandes and the nobleman Hans Conon von der Gabelentz (1807–1874), senior government official in the duchy and renowned gentleman scholar. Through this association, Teichelmann and Schürmann sent back to Altenburg natural scientific specimens and linguistic and ethnographic documentation from South Australia. I will examine how typical this arrangement was in the scientific landscape of the time and the place of the data and specimens collected by the missionaries in the circulation of knowledge between the colonial field and European metropole.
 
 
Holy Echidnas: The McCrae-Lloyd correspondence on Aboriginal and San language and culture
Floris Solleveld (University of Bristol)
 
In May 1875, Australian poet George Gordon McCrae sent a letter to German philologist Wilhelm Bleek in Cape Town, responding to a request for information about Aboriginal languages and cultures in Australian newspapers. By the time McCrae’s letter arrived in November, Bleek was dead. However, Bleek’s sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd, with whom he had been working in his final years to record a massive corpus of San [Bushman] oral literature from |Xam narrators, kept up the correspondence.
With the ensuing letters, McCrae sent Lloyd a collection of essays on shamanism and food taboos among the Kulin Aboriginal people of Port Philip Bay (near Melbourne) as well as several vocabularies. One essay, about the food taboos regarding the holy parts of the ‘porcupine ant eater’ (echidna), inspired Lloyd to draw comparisons with a |Xam tale about a man who turned into a porcupine and talked to the rain but said something wrong that made the rain turn to hail. This correspondence has only recently come to light and narrowly escaped destruction in the 2021 fire at UCT libraries. I will discuss it against the background of colonial-age cultural and linguistic comparisons, and in relation to the theories of Wilhelm Bleek about the origin of language and grammatical gender in particular.
 

Introductions, "Epistemic Transfer"
For this first meeting, we invite all participants to bring an image, slide, excerpt, artifact, or recording to share and discuss. We hope that these will help us introduce our interests  to one another and, ideally, to frame the theme of epistemic transfer, which will guide our readings and presentations this year. With this thematic focus, our goal is to highlight historical interactions between the language sciences and other knowledge traditions, so we heartily welcome objects for show-and-tell that come from outside mainstream linguistics. Participants are encouraged to think about instances where transfers (e.g., of methods, concepts, tools, and norms) have been embraced, mediated, resisted, or even refused. To inform our discussion and analysis of these objects, we ask everyone to please read the essay "History of Science and History of Philologies" by Lorraine Daston and Glenn Most before coming to the meeting.