The work reviewed here represents “a historical account of some central ideas in modern linguistics — an account of some of the ideas and some of the events surrounding their development, debate, and disposition” (p. ix). It is in some ways not a conventional history of the field (as the authors note in the preface), as it regularly crosses disciplinary boundaries and is not structured solely chronologically. Thus, while the book treats developments in the history of linguistics such as the emergence of linguistics in the nineteenth century and the growth of European Structuralism from 1920–1940, it also looks to neighboring disciplines like philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, as well as to historiographic issues like scholarly generations. The book covers the period up until about 1940; a follow-up volume treating later developments is promised in the preface. The result is a fascinating, engaging book (if one that is not always easy to read, as the authors also acknowledge in the preface) that could use a bit of honing in some places (as discussed below).
After the preface, the volume proper opens with Chapter 1, “Battle in the Mind Fields”, setting out the issues confronted in the book, such as the problem of when exactly linguistics became a “real science” (using numerous quotations from works published between 1838 and 2007, and advancing firm opinions on the issue of assigning proper credit for scholarly advances). This is followed by a chapter on “The Nineteenth Century and Language”, which presents a sweeping overview of some of the era's main developments, e.g., the contributions of early scholars like William Jones and Rasmus Rask, the emergence of the Neogrammarian school in Germany, the question of teleology, and the impact of Ferdinand de Saussure. These discussions also sometimes draw parallels to other sciences as well, for example work by Charles Darwin and Dmitri Mendeleev.
The next three chapters move to philosophy and psychology. Chapter 3, “Philosophy and Logic in the Nineteenth Century”, divides philosophy (Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, Ernst Mach, and Franz Brentano, among others) from logic (George Boole, Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell). Chapter 4, “The Mind has a Body: Psychology and Intelligent Machines in the Nineteenth Century”, begins in Germany, with Wilhelm Wundt and others, before turning to the North American context, with scholars like William James, and then returning to Europe, specifically France, to examine work done by Alfred Binet and others. After an abbreviated discussion of “The Unity of Mankind – And the Differentiation of Types of Humans”, which ties psychology and anthropology together, the final section of the chapter is on intelligent machines, like that of Charles Babbage. Chapter 5, “Psychology, 1900–1940”, is mainly about behaviorism and Gestalt psychology, with John B. Watson, Clark Hull, and Max Wertheimer figuring prominently in the discussion.
Chapter 6, “American Linguistics, 1900–1940”, returns to linguistics proper, but starts with American anthropology, focusing on Franz Boas and Edward Sapir. From there, the discussion moves to the emergence of the concept of the phoneme, looking especially at the impact of Sapir and his students and other adherents on the issue. The next section addresses Leonard Bloomfield and his contributions; this section is followed by sections on the relationship between Sapir and Bloomfield, and the development of linguistics as a professional field.
The next two chapters are on philosophy and logic. Chapter 7, “Philosophy, 1900–1940”, covers topics like logical positivism and logical empiricism; important figures it discusses include Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, and W.V.O. Quine. Chapter 8, “Logic, 1900–1940”, addresses the philosophy of mathematics, the Turing machine, and the question of recursion, among other issues.
The final thematic chapter, Chapter 9, “European Structuralism, 1920–1940”, turns back to linguistics. This chapter focuses mainly on Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson and their contributions via the Prague Linguistic Circle. Special attention is paid to their contributions to phonology (as one might expect); it is also useful to note that the chapter addresses their agreements and their disagreements in roughly equal detail. Chapter 10, “Conclusions and Prospects”, pulls together a number of the disparate issues raised in the work and points towards some of the topics to be discussed in the promised second volume (e.g., the contributions of scholars like Charles Hockett).
Many aspects of the book deserve praise. The work offers informative, engaging discussions of the topics and scholars examined, while the consideration of ideas and figures from related disciplines further enhances its value. The book will bring to light some events, ideas, and scholars that perhaps have not received the attention and praise due to them, and which lend a fresh perspective on some established issues. It also provides many vantage points on how scholars and scholarly groups can interact (the multicolored diagrams are very useful for understanding connections in this regard). While the work is resolutely transnational in focus and outlook, it is also careful to avoid lumping national groups together (this comes through particularly clearly in the Germanophone context, where the authors distinguish clearly between German and Austrian approaches).
In any work of this size and scope readers are bound to find things that they disagree with, and the authors’ presentations of a handful of issues can be seen as problematic. To name two: first, a few scholars, particularly Saussure, Jakobson, and Trubetzkoy, are depicted as brilliant outsiders who showed the more established scholars of their time how to do linguistics properly. This comes through most clearly in the discussion of Saussure, especially on pp. 127–130, about his time in Leipzig with the Neogrammarians. I would lean away from the view of Saussure presented here somewhat, since Saussure does seem to have picked up a good deal of useful things from his Neogrammarian teachers (as discussed by Morpurgo Davies Reference Morpurgo Davies and Sanders2004 and Joseph Reference Joseph2012; see also Seuren Reference Seuren2018 for sharp criticism of the traditional view of Saussure as a scholar). Some additional contextualization of this issue, as well as further discussion of the different reception of Saussure (Reference de Saussure1879) in France and Germany, would therefore have been welcome. Second, Bloomfield's Language (Bloomfield Reference Bloomfield1933) may well have omitted discussion of recent work by Trubetzkoy and others because Language was intended as a textbook, and such books often omit the most current take on a subject, not necessarily because Bloomfield was deliberately ignoring current work (pp. 364–365). A similar point can be made about the comparison between Sapir (Reference Sapir1921) and Bloomfield (Reference Bloomfield1933) on the one hand and Trubetzkoy (Reference Trubetzkoy1939) on the other (p. 490).
Beyond such areas of dispute, there are a few lapses that can potentially undercut readers’ confidence in the work. These include the following: Hugo Schuchardt was most emphatically not a Neogrammarian, but is placed among them on p. 111; Georg Wenker's (Reference Wenker1877) important work on German dialectology would have been a welcome reference in the discussion of that topic (pp. 142–143); the attribution of the translated quotation on p. 109 from Osthoff and Brugmann (Reference Osthoff and Brugmann1878) is misleading, as the translation is from a digitized version of Lehmann (Reference Lehmann1967) (p. 612, note 103; and the date of Osthoff and Brugmann (Reference Osthoff and Brugmann1878) is given incorrectly as 1874 in note 102, also on p. 612); and it is surprising that they do not cite Anderson (Reference Anderson1985) on the history of phonology, given that it covers some of the same ground as this volume does.
Finally, two issues related to form, which may have been the publisher's choice, not the authors’, should be noted. I really wish that the authors had provided the originals of quotations in foreign languages, instead of just giving the English translations – this is not to say that the translations are good or bad, but reference to the originals would open up the discussion in new ways. I also would have strongly preferred footnotes to endnotes and a considerable reduction of the number of endnotes (many of them consist solely of references, which could presumably have been incorporated into the text itself and thus spared readers the effort of constantly flipping back and forth).
The criticisms above aside, this is a valuable addition to the scholarly literature, with a great deal of good material to examine. It points the way to a new generation of history writing for the language sciences and I am very much looking forward to the next volume.
