This book serves as a welcome addition to the better known English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 1604-1755, by Starnes & Noyes (new edition published by Benjamins 1991). Whereas Starnes & Noyes describe the history of English lexicography as an evolutionary progress-by-accumulation process, Professor Hayashi focuses on issues of method and theory, starting with John Palsgrave’s Lesclarissement de la langue francoyse (1530), to John Walker’s A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791). This book also includes a detailed discussion of Dr. Johnson’s influential Dictionary of the English Language (1755).

This innovative and ground-breaking study explores the complex relationship between linguistic theory and literature during the Romantic period, focusing particularly on William Hazlitt's writings about linguistic theory and also considering figures such as Leigh Hunt, Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas De Quincey.

First published in 1900, this was the first of two volumes of the magnum opus from pioneer assyriologist and linguist Rev. Archibald Sayce and provided an introduction to theories on the nature, behaviour and development of languages along with the morphology and physiology of speech. In it, Sayce was the first to emphasize the principle of partial assimilation and the linguistic principle of analogy. This 4th edition, ten years after the first, reflected on the limitations of science revealed since 1890, in an era when languages, like other humanities subjects, still idealised scientific approaches. Archibald Henry Sayce was one of the greatest comparative linguists of the time, being proficient in Accadian, Arabic, Cuneiform, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Hittite, Japanese, Latin, Persian, Phoenician, Sanscrit and Sumerian. He had a good knowledge of every Semitic and Indo-European language and could write good prose in at least twenty languages. Sayce's first major contribution to scholarship was a highly significant translation of an Accadian seal, a 'bilingual text' from which to translate cuneiform, similar to the Rosetta Stone. Here then, no doubt, the reader learns from a master of comparative linguistics.

This study, first published in 2000, examines the role of language as an instrument of empire in eighteenth-century British literature.

Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.

This collection of articles (the Vercelli conference proceedings) places the theme of scepticism within its philosophical tradition. It explores the English philosophical thinkers, the French context, as well as major Italian figures and Spanish culture. It pays special attention to the relationships between history of philosophical ideas and the problems rising from the history of sciences (medicine, physics, linguistics, historical scholarship) in the 17th and the18th centuries.

There are more than six thousand human languages, each one unique. For the last five hundred years, people have argued about how important language differences are. This book traces that history and shows how language differences have generally been treated either as of no importance or as all-important, depending on broader approaches taken to human life and knowledge. It was only in the twentieth century, in the work of Franz Boas and his students, that an attempt was made to engage seriously with the reality of language specificities. Since the 1950s, this work has been largely presented as yet another claim that language differences are all-important by cognitive scientists and philosophers who believe that such differences are of no importance. This book seeks to correct this misrepresentation and point to the new directions taken by the Boasians, directions now being recovered in the most recent work in psychology and linguistics.