Toward a History of American Linguistics

E.F.K. Koerner is on the faculty at Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung, Berlin, Germany.

• 1. The Historiography of American Linguistics2. Toward a History of Americanist Linguistics3. On the Sources of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis'4. Leonard Bloomfield and the Cours de Linguistique générale5. American Structuralist Linguistics and the 'Problem of Meaning'6. On the Rise and Fall of Generative Semantics7. Noam Chomsky's Readings of Saussure from 19618. The 'Chomskyan Revolution' and its Historiography9. On the Origins of Morphophonemics in American Linguistics10. William Labov and the Origins of Sociolinguistics in AmericaIn Lieu of a Conclusion: On the Importance of the History of Linguistics

'Koerner's various essays assemble a considerable record of historiographic scholarship on American linguistics by American linguists. There are analytic gems as well as bibliographic detail' - Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences' ... readers will find many useful and informative comments to which no doubt they will wish to refer in future ... Koerner makes good use here of modern studiesm and makes helpful comments on the history of so-called 'missionary linguistics', and on many figures who still deserve to be studied in greater detail ... ' - Linguistics'This book is informative and suggestive in many ways.' - The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics