History of the Language Sciences

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.