Histoire des Théories Linguistiques

La grande question métaphysique, aujourd’hui, en matière de langage, est de savoir si le modèle computationnel suffit à expliquer le comportement linguistique humain. Est-ce que la faculté de langage de chacun d’entre nous et sa compétence dans telle ou telle langue, s’expliquent parce que nous avons des algorithmes implémentés dans notre tête ? C’est une question qui appartient de plein droit à la philosophie de la linguistique. Elle possède cependant une portée plus vaste. En aval, en effet, elle concerne la représentation d’une bonne partie du comportement humain, selon le modèle qu’en donnent les cognitivistes de stricte obédience. En amont, elle concerne le vieux débat de théorie de la connaissance entre le rationalisme et l’empirisme. L’ouvrage prend résolument partie pour une nouvelle forme d’empirisme, l’externalisme qui soutient le caractère originellement artificiel et externe de l’intelligence humaine. Le statut du langage est la pierre de touche de l’argumentation. Quoi qu’il soit le lieu de l’intelligibilité, sa facticité est irréductible. La démonstration de la sous-détermination grammaticale (aucun système de règles ne peut engendrer l’ensemble des énoncés émis par les locuteurs d’une langue donnée) ; l’hypothèse de l’histoire (la temporalité est créative) ; l’hypothèse des outils linguistiques (grammaire et dictionnaires sont des outils qui modifient l’écologie de la communication humaine) et la conjecture sociologique (ce n’est pas dans les individus mais entre eux que se passent les processus cognitifs) permettent d’étayer l’essentiel de l’analyse. En matière d’ontologie, celle-ci conduit à un réductionnisme fonctionnel. La thèse ultime de l’externalisme, c’est que l’esprit lui-même est d’essence historique et empirique.

International audience

This paper shows the existence of an auditory demonstrative in Khaling. The use of the demonstrative is illustrated via examples taken from narrative discourse. It is described here within the context of the spatial demonstrative system, in order to demonstrate how it is specifically used to highlight that perception of the referent is attained using the sense of audition, regardless of the visibility of the object in question. Khaling appears to be unique in having a true auditory demonstrative and it is hoped that this description will prompt field linguists to refine the description of the contrasts found within the demonstrative systems of languages around the world.

Summary There is no need to repeat earlier complaints that the historiography of missionary linguistics was being neglected, since the situation has changed considerably sine the last decades of the past century. The first decade of the 21st century in particular has witnessed a veritable explosion of research activities. This article surveys the state of the art in the field of recent work in the historiographical subfield called ‘Missionary linguistics’, covering the period 2002–2012. It represents an update of Zimmermann (2004) and provides separate sections devoted to earlier studies of missionary linguistics, international conferences, published volumes, journals, reprints and editions of primary sources, exhibitions and other activities related to the subject. The reference list is divided in two sections, (1) primary sources, with some 140 entries, and (2) secondary sources, including more than 300 titles. It is hoped that this account will suggest several additional research topics and inspire scholars to make further advances in this fascinating field of research.

Cet article présente les diverses manières de constituer un corpus en analyse du discours, et plus particulièrement dans le domaine de l’analyse du discours du côté de l’histoire. Il adopte une perspective historique, en prenant comme point de départ la configuration initiale des années 1970. Cependant, il s’agit aussi d’accorder une importance particulière à la formation de « corpus réflexifs », tant du côté de la lexicométrie que de l’archive et du matériau d’enquête. La notion de réflexivité du discours apparaît alors au centre de toute interrogation sur la constitution des nouveaux corpus.

This third volume on Missionary Linguistics focuses on morphology and syntax. It contains a selection of papers derived from the international conferences on missionary linguistics held in Hong Kong/Macau and Valladolid. As with the previous two volumes (2004, on general issues, and 2005, on orthography and phonology), this volume looks at methodology and descriptive techniques from a historical point of view, offering articles of interest to historiographers of linguistics, typologists, and descriptive linguists. It presents research into languages such as Tarasco (Pur’épecha), Massachusett, Nahuatl, Conivo, Sipibo, Guaraní, Vietnamese, Tamil, Southern Min Chinese dialects, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Tagalog and other Austronesian languages, such as Yapese and Chamorro.

RÉSUMÉ : Dans cet article, nous nous proposons de retracer l'histoire de l'analyse de conversation, en la resituant tant du point de vue de sa filiation, avec l'ethnométho- dologie, la dialectologie et l'anthropologie linguistique que de ses relations avec les champs connexes apparus à la même époque aux États-Unis comme l'ethnographie de la communication, la sociolinguistique ou la grammaire generative. Dans une seconde partie, nous exposerons ses principaux concepts et les méthodes qui lui sont propres, et nous nous attacherons à montrer la spécificité de ses objets et de son orientation, qui apporte un renouvellement certain des problèmes traditionnellement traités par la pragmatique et les recherches sur le discours.

Today, collaboration and the exchange of information are increasing steadily and players need to agree on the meaning of words. The first task is therefore to define the domain’s terminology. However, terminology building remains a demanding and time-consuming task, even in specialised domains where standards already exist. While reaching a consensus on the definition of terms written in natural language remains difficult, we have observed that in specialised technical domains, experts agree on the domain conceptualisation when it is defined in a formal language. Based on this observation, we have introduced a new paradigm for terminology called ontoterminology. The main idea is to separate the linguistic dimension from the conceptual dimension of terminology and establish relationships between them. The linguistic component consists of terms (both normalised and non-normalised specialised words) linked by linguistic relationships such as hyponymy and synonymy. The term definition, written in natural-language, is considered a linguistic explanation. The conceptual component is a formal ontology whose concepts are linked by conceptual relationships like the is-a (kind of) and part-of relations. The concept definition, written in a formal language, is viewed as logical specification. An ontoterminology enables us to link these two non-isomorphic networks in a global and coherent system. 1

The large amount of positive and negative reactions expressed about the works of the Viennese School of terminology, urges one to reexamine its important (main) sources and first of all, Eugen Wuster's texts. Starting with a corpus extracted from the Einführung gathering the synonymic pairs emerging from the reading of this handbook, one can study the art of reformulation used in this text and analyse how terms are being introduced in a well designed construction. These terms appear like real keywords, representative of important themes in the theory of terminology. It is interesting to find that a holder of the terminological theory resting on the principle of biunivocity uses repeated (and paradoxical) synonymy.

International audience

Contains fulltext : mmubn000001_211246093.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)

Cet ouvrage, consacré à l'histoire de l'automatisation-mathématisation des sciences du langage, se situe en histoire et épistémologie des sciences du langage. Il s'inscrit dans l’histoire du récent. Deux moments sont distingués : la traduction automatique dans les années 1950, et les études sur corpus informatisés dans les années 1990 avec le développement inédit des ordinateurs. La traduction automatique, issue des sciences de la guerre, a été conçue comme technologie de guerre froide aux États-Unis pour fournir des traductions en série des travaux soviétiques. Elle a été conçue en dehors de la linguistique. L’ouvrage s’attache à montrer, selon une approche comparative, comment les sciences du langage ont intégré cette technologie pour amorcer leur automatisation. Cette intégration revêt diverses formes selon les traditions culturelles et linguistiques des pays impliqués (États-Unis, ex-URSS, Grande-Bretagne et France). Les études sur corpus au contraire se situent dans la continuité de thématiques familières aux sciences du langage, notamment l’étude des textes, écrits et oraux, et du lexique.

This is the second volume to be dedicated to the pioneering linguistic work produced by the religious missionaries who, within the scope of the European colonial enterprises along the period 1550–1850, described dozens of autochthonous languages, many of which are only known today thanks to their endeavours. The twelve papers joint in the present volume — which dedicated special attention to the orthographical and phonological dimension of their work — provide a comprehensive picture of the descriptive problems faced by these linguists avant la lettre , notably: the difficulties faced before the less familiar features of these languages, such as vowel quantity, accentuation, tonality, nasalization, glottalization, ‘gutturalization’; the building of (re)definitions and the creation of a new metalanguage, like ‘saltillo’, ‘guturaciones’, etc.; The book elucidates the creativity and innovations proposed by individual missionaries and the instructive and pedagogical dimension of their work.

Abstract The morphological expression of non-verbal predication is a geographically widespread, although not very frequent, typological feature. This paper highlights the existence of two radically contrasting types of non-verbal predicative inflection. Construction A has already been described in the literature. It consists of attaching person-sensitive inflection markers to non-verbal predicates, possibly extending this treatment to adverbs and adverbial phrases (locational and temporal), pronouns and quantifiers. This type is well attested in Uralic, Turkic, and Paleosiberian, as well as in some Amazonian language families (most notably Chicham), but it has also been pointed out for some sparse languages of Oceania and Africa. Such non-verbal person inflections diachronically stem from incorporation of conjugated copula elements. Construction B, by contrast, is much rarer and is described here for the first time. It also consists of a dedicated morphological form of the non-verbal predicate (limited, however, to nouns and adjectives), but such form stands out as morphologically lighter than any other form to be found in nouns or adjectives in argument or attribute position. While the latter forms carry some kind of case marker, the noun/adjective predicate merely consists (or historically did) of the word’s root. This type of construction can be found in the small Zamucoan family and still survives in some Tupí-Guaraní languages. Diachronic inspection of Semitic indicates, however, that this predicative strategy was possibly adopted in some ancient varieties, although at later stages it intertwined with the expression of referential specificity. The paper compares the two construction types, highlighting similarities and differences.

International audience

Although even today missionaries are active in linguistic fieldwork, the chronological focus of this chapter is on lexicographical production during the colonial period. Its geographical focus is the culturally defined area that is traditionally called Mesoamerica. To the east and south, Mesoamerica extends to the Caribbean Sea and the southern borders of the area where Mayan languages are spoken, excluding the Caribbean islands and the southern part of central America. The frontier to the north is more problematic. The current border between the United States and Mexico is not the appropriate frontier, because it does not correspond to earlier borders of the Spanish territories; moreover, the lexicographical traditions from what is sometimes called the Greater Southwest, in other words northern Mexico, are quite different from those of the central part of Mesoamerica. Those traditions will therefore be treated in Chapter 28.

International audience

"L'étude historique des sciences du langage constitue un domaine relativement neuf, qui a connu de très importants développements au cours des quarante dernières années. Bien que l'enseignement de cette discipline se répande désormais largement, il n'existait encore aucune synthèse maniable des questions et des problèmes traités par les spécialistes. C'est l'ambition de cet ouvrage de tenter de combler ce manque. Son plan, chronologique, est construit autour de quelques moments remarquables dans le développement des idées sur le langage et les langues depuis l'Antiquité, moments marqués par l'invention de concepts, de modèles, de théories et d'objets techniques (grammaires et dictionnaires), dont on examine ici la transmission, la circulation, les réorganisations successives, ou parfois l'occultation. Parce que la compréhension de ces évolutions implique celle du fonctionnement des sociétés aussi bien que de la structure des connaissances, cette histoire articule points de vue externes (anthropologique, sociologique...) et perspective épistémologique"--P. [4] of cover.

International audience

et de quelque manire que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord pralable et crit de l'diteur, en dehors des cas prvus par la lgislation en vigueur en France. Il est prcis que son stockage dans une base de donnes est galement interdit.