Thesis ID: CBB001560819

Explications: Etymology as Language Science, 1822--1941 (2007)

unapi

Pourciau, Sarah M. (Author)


Princeton University
Hahn, Barbara
Jennings, Michael


Publication Date: 2007
Edition Details: Advisors: Hahn, Barbara; Jennings, Michael
Physical Details: 234 pp.
Language: English

This dissertation argues that the 19 th century "science" of etymology, which had largely disappeared from the arsenal of mainstream linguists by the early 20 th century--due in part to the shift toward synchrony so famously called for by Ferdinand de Saussure--actually reemerges in a new and perhaps even more powerful form at the moment of its apparent displacement. With the publication, in 1822, of the second edition of Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik , the 19 th century study of language had become synonymous with the study of its rule- governed transformation over time. Grimm's famous formulation of the so-called "sound laws" provided a criterion for distinguishing true etymologies from false ones, and in doing so turned this traditionally dubious mode of inquiry into the foundational methodology of a fledgling language science. When, therefore, later linguists choose to look elsewhere for their methodological ground, their apparent rejection of 19 th century etymological techniques implied a 20 th century shift in the understanding of language-in-time. My primary contention is that this shift--which also, of necessity, implies a shift in the understanding of history per se--occurs less as a real rejection than as a subversive reinterpretation. The etymology of Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik does not vanish from linguistics with the introduction of the Saussurean sign or the Jakobsonian phoneme; it merely relinquishes its historicist baggage. How exactly this transformation occurs is the subject of Part I of the dissertation, which reads the Saussurean critique of historical linguistics against the backdrop of the 19 th century paradigm. What this transformation has to do with 20 th century theories of poetic language is the subject I explore in Part II, where I argue that structuralist poetics, with its radically anti-historicist approach to Germany's most "originary" poetic forms (from the Nibelungen material to the Stabreim verse), functions as testing ground for the more general rethinking of language origins.

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Description Looks at a shift in the discipline of linguistics from Grimm to Saussure. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/10 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3286129.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001560819/

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Authors & Contributors
Kaplan, Judith R. H.
Kaplan, Judith
Joseph, John Earl
Willet, Richard
Bach, Dominique
Rabault-Feuerhahn, Pascale
Concepts
Linguistics; philology
Language and languages
Arts and humanities
Psychology
Anthropology
Biographies
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
18th century
Places
Germany
France
Netherlands
Switzerland
China
Rome (Italy)
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