History and Philosophy of Linguistics Reading group Next meeting: Tuesday, August 16, 2011, Woolley S302, 57pm (note new room), followed by dinner somewhere local
Reading: Tomalin, Marcus 2004: Leonard Bloomfield: Linguistics and mathematics. Historiographia Linguistica xxxi: 105136. Although Leonard Bloomfield (18871949) has long been recognised as one of the leading linguists of the first half of the 20th century, and, although in recent years various aspects of his work have been subjected to renewed scrutiny, there are still several strands of his research that remain largely unexplored. In particular, Bloomfield¹s knowledge of developments in specific branches of contemporaneous mathematics, and the consequences this had for his approach to linguistics, are issues that have never really been discussed in sufficient detail. For instance, although Bloomfield¹s interest in the work of the Vienna Circle has been considered in the past, there has been no extensive attempt to elucidate the precise nature, and full extent, of his familiarity with symbolic logic, recursive function theory, and the technical machinery of Hilbertian Formalism. In addition, although it is known that Bloomfield produced at least one lengthy unpublished manuscript that was primarily concerned with the foundations of mathematics, the implications this research had for his more mainstream linguistics work have never been adequately considered. Accordingly, in this paper, a preliminary attempt is made to explore Bloomfield¹s informed preoccupation with mathematics, and the focus falls upon three related themes. First, the sources of his mathematical knowledge are considered in an attempt to reveal the origins of his familiarity with these topics. Second, the basic outline of his proposal for a linguistics-based solution to the crisis in the foundations of mathematics is reconstructed from existing fragments, and the consequences of this work are assessed. Finally, the influence of Formalism upon Bloomfield¹s linguistic research is considered, with particular reference to his complex attitude towards the status of form and meaning in linguistic theory. As will be demonstrated, apart from being of interest in its own right, a more complete appreciation of Bloomfield¹s mathematical work sheds new light on specific developments in syntactic theory in the 1940s and 1950s. Reading available by signing up to http://hplinguistics.pbworks.com. Enquiries: [email protected] All welcome!
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