Les Langues Indo-Européennes

Meillet, Antoine

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511695261.005

Cited by 3 publications

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“…I recall the shock and awe I experienced sixty years ago, upon reading, in Meillet’s Introduction , how “every time a child begins to speak, he introduces some innovations” (1937: 19; my translation). At the time, I objected not only to the issue being raised, but to its being raised in this context, at that by a savant like Antoine Meillet, who was famous for his work in ‘serious’, that is, comparative linguistics.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For me, as a burgeoning structuralist, children and their imagined innovations simply had no place in that universe of studies. But Meillet, on the same page 19 of his Introduction , unabashedly expands his views and clearly states that: “such innovations are the beginnings of language development and change”, and goes on to say:“[l’enfant] ne reçoit pas des autres des procédés d’articulation:… il ne reçoit pas des paradigmes grammaticaux: il recrée chaque forme sur le modèle de celles qu’on emploie autour de lui,…”‘[The child] does not inherit articulatory procedures or grammatical paradigms; he re-creates every form according to the model of the forms that people around him use,…’ (Meillet 1937: 19)…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…‘[The child] does not inherit articulatory procedures or grammatical paradigms; he re-creates every form according to the model of the forms that people around him use,…’ (Meillet 1937: 19)…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As to se , it is reduced from a ‘full’ pronoun to a substitute for a pronoun (which already itself had been reduced to semi-autonomous status; as Meillet remarks:“… ces petits mots [ je, tu, elle,… ] n’existent plus d’une façon indépendante et ne se rencontrent qu’avec le verbe;…” (‘these small words do not exist any longer in an independent way and are not found except in connection with the verb”; Meillet 1937: 440).…”

Section: Changing Functions Changing Forms: the Definite Articlementioning

confidence: 99%

“…“… ces petits mots [ je, tu, elle,… ] n’existent plus d’une façon indépendante et ne se rencontrent qu’avec le verbe;…” (‘these small words do not exist any longer in an independent way and are not found except in connection with the verb”; Meillet 1937: 440).…”

Section: Changing Functions Changing Forms: the Definite Articleunclassified

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Sunt verba rerum: the pragmatic life of words

Mey

2016

SpringerPlus

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Pragmatics is not about language as such, viewed in isolation, but about words as they are being used. And words are never things, pure objects; words have their history and lives: their story is the story of their users. Pragmatic thinking focuses not just on what ‘is’ there (the ‘essentialist’ method of linguistics), but on how what ‘is’ there, ‘got’ there, and what it ‘does’ there, in a ‘functionalist’ approach, characteristic of pragmatics. Such a functional approach relies heavily on the processes that are material in creating the conditions for words to be used in a particular way: both those processes we normally call ‘historical’ (the history of what has been) and those that are characteristic for what happens in our own times: the pragmatic life of words. I will illustrate these reflections by focusing on a series of well-known linguistic phenomena, first of all the historical ‘emptying’ of content known as ‘semantic bleaching’, and second the transformation of the ways words function, commonly known under the name of ‘grammaticalization’ or ‘grammaticization’. To better understand these processes, I will first focus on what I call the ‘historical bias’ of structuralist linguistics, including a brief discussion of issues having to do with language development and how linguists and historians traditionally have tried to deal with this.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Changing Functions Changing Forms: the Definite Articlementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Changing Functions Changing Forms: the Definite Articleunclassified

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Sunt verba rerum: the pragmatic life of words

Mey

2016

SpringerPlus

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Psycho-historical linguistics: its context and potential

Winters¹

2017

English Language and Linguistics

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Historical linguistics is a field that, perhaps more than other branches of linguistics, can be said to exhibit a certain conservatism. To be clear, this term is not meant in any traditional political sense. Rather it is meant to capture the notion that, as a discipline, diachronic studies seem to accept and build on previous theories and empirical findings to a greater extent than do most synchronic subdisciplines. This may be because data are comparatively rare and hard to come by. One result of this scarcity is that, once analyzed, there are fewer opportunities for reanalysis predicated on new data. There are, of course, occasions when more or less radical proposals are brought forward subsequently, which result in debates of the kind which are much more common in synchronic syntax, say, or phonology. The reconstruction of the Indo-European consonant system (Beekes 1995: 132–4 provides a summary), for example, continues to be debated almost two hundred years after it was first proposed.

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7 Morphological analogy: Only a beginning

Goldsmith¹

2009

Analogy in Grammar

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A range of approaches to word structure assume segmentation of words into morphs. This chapter proposes explicit algorithm that takes natural language text as its input, and produces the morphological structure of text as its output. Within this model, formal notions that correspond naturally to the traditional notion of analogy are useful and important as part of a boot-strapping heuristic for the discovery of morphological structure. At the same time, it is necessary to develop a refined quantitative model in order to find the kind of articulated linguistic structures that are to be found in natural languages.

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Les Langues Indo-Européennes

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Sunt verba rerum: the pragmatic life of words

Sunt verba rerum: the pragmatic life of words

Psycho-historical linguistics: its context and potential

7 Morphological analogy: Only a beginning

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