Hans Christian Aarsleff | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 19 July 1925 Rungsted Kyst, Denmark |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | history of linguistics, the history of ideas, history of philosophy |
Hans Christian Aarsleff (born 19 July 1925) is a Danish linguist and academic, who has served as emeritus professor of English at Princeton University since 1997. Aarsleff is a renowned specialist in the history of linguistics, the history of ideas, and the history of philosophy of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. [1]
After graduation from the gymnasium with distinction in 1943, majoring in science and mathematics, he studied English language and literature at the University of Copenhagen. In 1948 he gained a scholarship for graduate study at the University of Minnesota, where he spent the next eight years until he came to Princeton in 1956. His doctoral dissertation, “The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860”, was completed in 1960. It was published by Princeton University Press in 1967 [2] (re-issued 1983), and soon became a classic among historians of linguistics. He was a much sought-after guest speaker at many conferences and universities in and outside the United States. He stayed at Princeton, where he rose to the rank of full professor in 1972, for the rest of his career. [3] He was elected to both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. [4] [5]
Right from the start, Aarsleff’s work on the history of linguistics fanned out to cover the history of ideas, the history of philosophy, and the history of science, resulting in major essays on Leibniz, Locke, Condillac, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Descartes, and Herder. In 1982, a selection of his essays was published under the title “From Locke to Saussure: Essays in the Study of Language and Intellectual History”, again a high profile publication in the field. Aarsleff also contributed a number of entries to Charles C. Gillispie’s “The Dictionary of Scientific Biography”, among which are major essays on John Wilkins and Thomas Sprat. In June 1991, a special conference was held in honor of Hans Aarsleff at the Sorbonne in Paris. This resulted in a festschrift “La linguistique entre mythe et histoire”, edited by Daniel Droixhe and Chantal Grell (Münster: Nodus, 1993).
Aarsleff's writings on Wilhelm von Humboldt caused controversy as they drew attention to the fact that Humboldt was heavily influenced by French philosophers and linguists, which was denied by established German scholarship. [6] [7] [8] His writings on the French-Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure caused similar controversy, as he argued that Saussure’s central ideas were strongly influenced by the French 19th-century philosopher-critic Hippolyte Taine, which was denied by Saussure scholars, who have shown that the ideas which Aarsleff attributes to Taine can be traced to other sources about whom Saussure himself wrote, whereas there is not a single reference to Taine in his vast writings, published and unpublished. [9] [10]
In 1970, Aarsleff published an article “The history of linguistics and Professor Chomsky” in the high-profile linguistic periodical Language . This article drew much attention as it was an attack on Noam Chomsky's much publicized work of the preceding years in the history of linguistics, contending that it was based on deficient and partisan scholarship. Although major specialists in the field were of the same opinion, [11] [12] the fierce and vilifying reactions by Chomsky and his followers [13] made Aarsleff a controversial figure among Chomskyan theoretical linguists. [14]
Among his major publications are:
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.
Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics. Philology is also defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist.
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian-American linguist and literary theorist.
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt was a Prussian philosopher, linguist, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin, which was named after him in 1949.
In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations to produce new sentences from existing ones. The method is commonly associated with American linguist Noam Chomsky.
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac was a French philosopher and epistemologist, who studied in such areas as psychology and the philosophy of the mind.
Johann Gottfried von Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism.
Syntactic Structures is an influential work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957. It is an elaboration of his teacher Zellig Harris's model of transformational generative grammar. A short monograph of about a hundred pages, Chomsky's presentation is recognized as one of the most significant studies of the 20th century. It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning. Thus, Chomsky argued for the independence of syntax from semantics.
Peter Hugoe Matthews, FBA is a British linguist and historian of linguistics. He is a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and was formerly Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge (1980–2000). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985.
The term Cartesian linguistics was coined by Noam Chomsky in his book Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (1966). The adjective "Cartesian" pertains to René Descartes, a prominent 17th-century philosopher. As well as Descartes, Chomsky surveys other examples of rationalist thought in 17th-century linguistics, in particular the Port-Royal Grammar (1660), which foreshadows some of his own ideas concerning universal grammar.
Johann Leo Weisgerber was a Lorraine-born German linguist who also specialized in Celtic linguistics. He developed the "organicist" or "relativist" theory that different languages produce different experiences. He was the son of a village teacher who served as a young man in the German army in Flanders, so could not return to his home city. During World War II his pan-Celticist ideology was co-opted to support the German war effort, as did pro-Polish and pro-Czech ideology on the side of the allies.
The Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences was an academy established in Berlin, Germany on 11 July 1700, four years after the Prussian Academy of Arts, or "Arts Academy," to which "Berlin Academy" may also refer. In the 18th century, it was a French-language institution since French was the language of science and culture during that era.
Langueandparole is a theoretical linguistic dichotomy distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics.
The Port-Royal Grammar was a milestone in the analysis and philosophy of language. Published in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, it was the linguistic counterpart to the Port-Royal Logic (1662), both named after the Jansenist monastery of Port-Royal-des-Champs where their authors worked. The Port-Royal Grammar became used as a standard textbook in the study of language until the early nineteenth century, and it has been reproduced in several editions and translations. In the twentieth century, scholars including Edmund Husserl and Noam Chomsky maintained academic interest in the book.
Structural linguistics, or structuralism, in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within the system. It is derived from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a dynamic system of interconnected units. Saussure is also known for introducing several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today. Two of these are his key methods of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis, which define units syntactically and lexically, respectively, according to their contrast with the other units in the system.
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax is a book on linguistics written by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1965. In Aspects, Chomsky presented a deeper, more extensive reformulation of transformational generative grammar (TGG), a new kind of syntactic theory that he had introduced in the 1950s with the publication of his first book, Syntactic Structures. Aspects is widely considered to be the foundational document and a proper book-length articulation of Chomskyan theoretical framework of linguistics. It presented Chomsky's epistemological assumptions with a view to establishing linguistic theory-making as a formal discipline comparable to physical sciences, i.e. a domain of inquiry well-defined in its nature and scope. From a philosophical perspective, it directed mainstream linguistic research away from behaviorism, constructivism, empiricism and structuralism and towards mentalism, nativism, rationalism and generativism, respectively, taking as its main object of study the abstract, inner workings of the human mind related to language acquisition and production.
In linguistics, the term formalism is used in a variety of meanings which relate to formal linguistics in different ways. In common usage, it is merely synonymous with a grammatical model or a syntactic model: a method for analyzing sentence structures. Such formalisms include different methodologies of generative grammar which are especially designed to produce grammatically correct strings of words; or the likes of Functional Discourse Grammar which builds on predicate logic.
Ernst Frideryk Konrad Koerner was a German author, researcher, professor of linguistics, and historian of linguistics.
Julie Tetel Andresen is a prominent American linguistic historiographer and romance novelist.
Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, born in Hamburg, Germany, was an American philosopher and professor of German Studies and Humanities at Stanford University. Mueller-Vollmer studied in Germany, France, Spain and the United States. He held a master's degree in American Studies from Brown University, and a doctorate in German Studies and Humanities from Stanford University, where he taught for over 40 years. His major publications concentrate in the areas of Literary Criticism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Romantic and Comparative Literature, language theory, cultural transfer and translation studies. Mueller-Vollmer made noteworthy scholarly contributions elucidating the theoretical and empirical linguistic work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, including the discovery of numerous manuscripts previously thought lost or otherwise unknown containing Humboldt's empirical studies of numerous languages from around the world.
The kind of scholarship manifested by Aarsleff differs in quantity but not in quality from that recently displayed by Trevor-Roper in identifying the Hitler ‘diaries’
