This volume represents a selection of 25 out of altogether 86 papers given at the Eighth International Conference for the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS VIII), which took place at the Ecole Normale Supérieure at Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris, in September 1999. This conference was marked… read more
In my paper, I will discuss the articulation between the horizon of projection (the anticipation of the evolution of a field of knowledge) and the horizon of retrospection (its background) in the special case of early machine translation. Because its horizon of retrospection (World War II… read more
The notion of ‘founding text’ is an uneasy one for the history of sciences where it always refers to an après-coup construction. This paper aims to disentangle the threads of this aftermath effect in the case of Harris’s text, Discourse Analysis, published in 1952, which became a founding text for… read more
This paper aims at presenting Harris’ use of information theory as a specific case of transfer of mathematical concepts and methods into linguistics. First, it will show that distributional analysis had characteristics which made it particularly receptive to some aspects of information theory,… read more
Our aim in this paper is to show, that, although Chomsky’s interest in empiricist British linguistics was always very limited, and the controversy of Transformational Grammar against British empiricism was led more by Neo- Firthians against Chomsky than by Chomskyans against Firth and his… read more
In my paper, I would like to address the issue of collocation works, starting from Firth’s view on meaning by collocation, in order to see how it has been worked out in Corpus Linguistics. Meaning by collocation, first conceived by Firth as lexical meaning, concerned, later in his work, not only… read more
