A History of Modern Linguistics: From the Beginnings to World War II - Paperback

by James McElvenny (Author)

In this book, McElvenny offers a concise history of modern linguistics from its emergence in the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. Written as a collective biography of the field, it concentrates on the interaction between the leading figures of linguistics, their controversies, and the role of the social and political context in shaping their ideas and methods.

While A History of Modern Linguistics focuses on disciplinary linguistics, the boundaries of the account are porous: developments in neighbouring fields - in particular, philosophy, psychology and anthropology - are brought into the discussion where they have contributed to linguistic research.

Author Biography

James McElvenny is a Researcher in the Collaborative Research Centre "Media of Co-operation" at the University of Siegen, and has previously held positions at the universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Potsdam. He is the author of Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism (EUP, 2018), and editor of The Limits of Structuralism (2023) and Form and Formalism in Linguistics (2019).