Intro

In this episode, we enter the age of classical structuralism by exploring the phonological research of Roman Jakobson and his colleague Nikolai Trubetzkoy undertaken within the Prague Linguistic Circle.

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References for Episode 15

Primary Sources

Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan (1877), ‘Podrobnaja progamma lekcij . . . v 1876–1877 uč. godu’ [A detailed program of lectures for the academic year 1876–1877].
(English trans. in Stankiewicz (1972), pp. 92–113)

Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan (1895), Versuch einer Theorie phonetischer Alternationen, Strassburg: Trübner. archive.org
(English trans. in Stankiewicz (1972), pp. 144–212)

Durnovo, Nikolaj, Bohuslav Havránek, Roman Jakobson, Vilém Mathesius, Jan Mukařovský, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, & Bohumil Trnka (1929), ‘Thèses présentées au Premier Congrès des philologues slaves’, in Mélanges linguistiques dédiés au Premier Congrès des Philologues Slaves, pp. 5–29. Praha: Jednota Československých Matematiků a Fysiků. BnF Gallica
(English trans. by Marta K. Johnson, 1978, ‘Manifesto’, in Recycling the Prague Linguistic Circle, ed. Marta K. Johson, pp. 1–31. Anne Arbor: Karoma.)

Ehrenfels, Christian von (1890), ‘Über Gestaltqualitäten’, Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 14, 249–292. BnF Gallica

Jakobson, Roman (1962), ‘Retrospect’, in Selected Writings, vol. I, pp. 631–658. The Hague: Mouton.

Jakobson, Roman (1971 [1929]), Trans. of article on the Prague Linguistic Circle in Čin, 31 October 1929, in ‘Retrospect’, Selected Writings, vol. II, pp. 711–712. The Hague: Mouton.

Kruszewski, Mikołai (1881), Ueber die Lautabwechslung, Kazan: Universitätsbuchdrückerei. Google Books
(English trans. by Robert Austerlitz in Koerner (1995), pp. 3–36)

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1879), Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes, Leipzig: B.G. Teubner. archive.org

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1922 [1916]), Cours de linguistique générale, ed. by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, Paris: Payot. 3rd edition, 1931: BNF Gallica
(English translation: Ferdinand de Saussure, 1959 [1916], Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Wade Baskin, New York: Philosophical Library. 2011 edition available from archive.org)

Ščerba, Lev (1912), Russkie glasnye v kačestvennom i količestvennom otnošenii [Russian vowels in their qualitative and quantitative relationships]. St. Petersburg: Erlich. MPI History of Science

Trubetzkoy, Nikolai (1939), Grundzüge der Phonologie. Prague.
(English trans. by Christiane A.M. Baltaxe, 1969, Principles of Phonology. Berkeley: University of California Press. archive.org)

Secondary Sources

Anderson, Stephen (2021 [1985]), Phonology in the Twentieth Century: Theories of rules and theories of representations, Berlin: Language Science Press. (1st ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.) Open access

Ash, Mitchell G. (1995), Gestalt psychology in German culture, 1890–1967: Holism and the quest for objectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cassirer, Ernst (1945), ‘Structuralism in modern linguistics’, Word 1, 99–120.

Daston, Lorraine & Peter Galison (2007), Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.

Dosse, François (1991), Histoire du structuralisme, I. Le champ du signe, 1945–1966. Paris: Editions La Découverte.
(English translation: 1997 by Deborah Glassman, History of structuralism, vol. 1: The rising sign, 1945–1966. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.)

Dosse, François (1992), Histoire du structuralisme, II. Le chant du cygne, de 1967 à nos jour. Paris: Editions La Découverte.
(English translation: 1997 by Deborah Glassman, History of structuralism, vol. 2: The sign sets, 1967–present. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.)

Harrington, Anne (1996), Reenchanted Science: Holism in German culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Holenstein, Elmar (1975), Roman Jakobsons phänomenologischer Strukturalismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (French edition: Jakobson ou le structuralisme phénoménologique. Paris: Editions Seghers, 1975.)

Jakobson, Roman (1971), ‘The Kazan’ School of Polish linguistics and its place in the international development of phonology’, in Selected Writings, vol. II, pp. 394–428. The Hague: Mouton.

Joseph, John E. (2001), ‘The Exportation of Structuralist Ideas from Linguistics to Other Fields: An Overview’, in History of the Language Sciences: An International Handbook on the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present, ed. by Sylvain Auroux, E. F. K. Koerner, Hans-Josef Niederehe, and Kees Versteegh, vol. 2, pp. 1880–1908. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Joseph, John E. (2012), Saussure, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Koerner, E.F. Konrad, ed. (1995), Mikołai Kruszewski: Writings in general linguistics, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Mugdan, Joachim (1984), Jan Bauduoin de Courtenay (1845–1929), Leben und Werk. München: Fink. See in particular chapter 2, section 2, and chapter 3.

Mugdan, Joachim (1985), ‘The origin of the phoneme: farewell to a myth’, Lingua Posnaniensis 28, 137–150. Author’s copy

Randwańska Williams, Joanna (1993), A paradigm lost: The linguistic theory of Mikołai Kruszewski. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Sériot, Patrick (2012 [1999]), Structure et totalité. Les origines intellectuelles du structuralisme en Europe centrale et orientale. Limoges: Editions Lambert-Lucas.
(English translation: 2014 by Amy Jacobs-Colas, Structure and the whole: East, west and non-Darwinian biology in the origins of structural linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter.)

Stankiewicz, Edward, trans. & ed. (1972), A Baudouin de Courtenay reader: The beginnings of structural linguistics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Indiana University Press open access HTML

Toman, Jindřich (1995), The Magic of a Common Language: Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Waugh, Linda & Monique Monville-Burston (2002), ‘Introduction to Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings’, in Selected Writings: Phonological studies, pp. v–xcviii. Berlin: De Gruyter.