Women have always been a dynamic force in American linguistics, yet this has not always been apparent in current histories of linguistics. For 20th-century linguistics, this text argues, the same story has been told over and over: a story of leading men, their followers, and their interest in language as a structure observable in patterns of the distribution of forms. This text challenges this received history by presenting a re-evaluation of 20th-century American linguistics which focuses on the contributions of women to our modern understanding of language. This book relates an account of...

This book examines the way in which a group of key Spanish and Latin American intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries discussed the concept of the Spanish language. The contributors analyse the ways in which these discussions related to the construction of national identities and the idea of an Hispanic culture.
This book will be essential reading for sociolinguists, scholars of the Spanish language, historians of the Hispanic culture, and all those with an interest in the relationship between language and culture.

The year 1924 was the founding of the Linguistic Society of America, the year when linguistics in America was beginning to become professionalized and no longer the domain of philologists or amateur students of language. From an initial consideration of 17th century missionary study of indigenous languages, Toward a History of American Linguistics goes on to focus mainly on the ideas of scholars who dominated linguistic thinking post-1924. Beginning with the anthropological linguistics tradition associated primarily with the names of Franz Boas, Edward Sapir and their students and concluding...

The Italian philosopher Vico is primarily known as a philospher of history. But his main intention was the foundation of 'science', true and secure knowledge, in the tradition of Bacon and Descartes. Contrary to both, Vico bases 'science' on the 'political world', on society and culture, instead of on nature or pure reason. The political world is mainly a world of signs and languages, and knowledge is always mediated through signs and languages. Hence, Vico's philosophy is a linguistic (or sematological) turn of philosophy - the first linguistic turn in the history of philosophy. This book...

From the ancient Mediterranean world to the present day, our conceptions of what is universal in language have interacted with our experiences of language learning. This book tells two stories: the story of how scholars in the west have conceived of the fact that human languages share important properties despite their obvious differences, and the story of how westerners have understood the nature of second or foreign language learning.
In narrating these two stories, the author argues that modern second language acquisition theory needs to reassess what counts as its own past. The book...

This study presents a re-evaluation of 20th century American linguistics focusing on the contributions of women to the modern understanding of language. It relates an account of linguistics as perceived by three women in the early 20th century.

This book presents an insightful account of the academic politics of the Nazi era and analyses the work of selected linguists, including Jos Trier and Leo Weisgerber. Hutton situates Nazi linguistics within the politics of Hitler's state and within the history of modern linguistics.

This unique work challenges the assumption that dictionaries act as objective records of our language, and instead argues that the English dictionary is a fundamentally ethnocentric work. Using theoretical, historical and empirical analyses, Phil Benson shows how English dictionaries have filtered knowledge through predominantly Anglo-American perspectives. The book includes a major case study of the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and its treatment of China.

Jurgen Trabant reads the profound insights into human semiosis contained in Vico's 'sematology' as both a spirited rejection of Cartesian philosophy and an early critique of enlightened logocentricism. Sean Ward's translation makes this work available to an English-reading audience for the first time.