Reichard, Gladys (1893-1955)

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2005

The classic age of British linguistics coincided with post-World War II expansion. This first generation of linguists had to cover the whole discipline without professional training specific to linguistics because it did not yet exist. Peter Trudgill notes: "Like many other people of my generation, I became interested in linguistics without knowing that there was any such thing" (p. 287). Most British linguists began with the study of particular languages, with Classics most frequent. The Council of the (British) Philological Society sponsored this collection of personal memoirs by 23 founders, of whom only three were women (Jean Aitchison, Gillian Brown, and Anna Morpurgo Davies). Although each sketch begins with a fairly standardized resume format, authors had considerable leeway in both format and content. Entries are arranged alphabetically, but cross-references among linguists abound, across as well as within generations. The urgency of the documentary project is highlighted by the death of coeditor R. H. Robins early on (although his reminiscences are included); Vivien Law also died before publication. The contributors stressed their own careers and experiences, with only Anna Morpurgo Davies and R. H. Robins foregrounding the history of linguistics as a sign of disciplinary maturity. The reader must draw the generalizations across individuals and institutions. Despite the British focus of the project, the Atlantic has proved no barrier to Anglo-American linguistic collaboration. Many linguists held American fellowships or teaching positions. R. E. Asher spent time in Chicago. N. E. Collinge worked at Yale, Pennsylvania, and Toronto, where he was drawn to but remained skeptical about Chomskian linguistics. Gerald Gazdar was influenced by Ed Keenan during the latter's time at King's College. Geoffrey Leach went to MIT to study with Chomsky, ironically while Chomsky was in London. John Lyons and Peter Matthews were much influenced by their time at Indiana. Anna Morpurgo Davies visited several American universities. Randolph Quick encountered American structuralism at Yale. Peter Trudgill tried to give a British flavor to American sociolinguistics. The amount of fieldwork on non-Indo-European languages reported by these linguists may surprise Americans accustomed to Chomskian pride in monolingualism. Many attribute this emphasis to wartime experience with exotic languages. John Trim explains that Firth drew students into war work at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), whereas Daniel Jones "did not engage in war work and lost most of the younger people" (p. 274), to the detriment of work in phonetics. Fieldwork in modern Icelandic moved W. Sidney Allen from Classics toward linguistics and built on his Norwegian wartime experience. For SOAS at the University of London, fieldwork was "normal," creating overlap with social anthropology (W. S. Allen, p. 19), largely through the continuing Malinowskian influence of J. R. Firth. Jean Aitchison was drawn into the sociolinguistic study of Tok Pisin in New Guinea. R. E. Asher did fieldwork in South India with Tamil and later Malayalam. John Bendor-Samuel studied with Kenneth Pike in the U.K. before his fieldwork with Jebero in the Peruvian Amazon; his long-term work in Africa alternated with summer teaching for SIL. Gillian Brown (wife of volume editor Keith Brown) worked on Bantu languages in Uganda and specialized in language teaching and applied linguistics (now found mostly in education departments in Britain). Joseph Cremona studied dialects of his native Italian, while David Crystal's sense of linguistic diversity arose from his partial childhood bilingualism in Welsh. Michael Halliday learned Chinese during the war and turned later to its linguistic analysis; the Chinese experience also motivated him to apply Marxist principles to his linguistic work. Although Richard Hudson has worked primarily on English, he mentions flirtations with other languages as an integral part of defining himself as a linguist. Frank Palmer began to study East African languages during the war; later, at SOAS, where Robins functioned as his "fairy godmother" (p. 231), he insisted on spoken language and time in "a relevant country" (p. 235) as part of the undergraduate linguistics curriculum. Robins himself took Japanese with Firth and then taught it for the duration of the war.

Historiographia Linguistica, 2002

Interviews in the History of Linguistics, 2022

In this interview, we're joined by Floris Solleveld from the University of Leuven, who's going to give us an overview of how linguistics emerged as a discipline in the nineteenth century.

Journal of Pragmatics, 2005

Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 2008

/27 u * BARTON'S Memoirs of Rittenhouse, p. 614. t THACHER. American Medical Biography, i. p. 408. J This eventually became the property of the University. See Barton's Rittenhouse, p. 377. Trans. Amer. Phil, fcoc., ii, p. 368.

Journal of Linguistics, 1966

2023

This book has been printed by grants from Svenska Akademien (the Swedish Academy), Olle Engkvists stiftelse (Olle Engkvist's Fund) and the Editorial Board of Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.