Linguistic Turns in the Twentieth Century

in association with the Centre for Research into Imagination, Creativity and Knowledge (CRICK), Department of Philosophy

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed an explosion of interest in questions of language. Linguistics came of age as a discipline, and linguistic ideas and approaches came to permeate many other disciplines. In philosophy it has become customary to talk of a ‘linguistic turn’ having taken place in the early period of analytic philosophy, although its origins and nature have been the subject of controversy. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, published in 1921, is generally seen as an important source, however, and there is no question that this influenced both the development of logical positivism in Vienna and a whole generation of intellectuals in Cambridge. Central to logical positivism was the repudiation of metaphysics as resting on linguistic confusions; and in Cambridge, emphasis on linguistic analysis was encouraged further by the work of Moore and Russell. Wittgenstein’s later work, too, was enormously influential on the ordinary language movement that flourished, in particular, in Oxford after the Second World War, Ryle, Austin and Grice being three of the most well-known figures.

The ‘linguistic turn’ that took place in philosophy, however, was only part of a much broader turn to language in the first half of the twentieth century. Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, was seminal in the development of structural linguistics, which was to influence Lacan, Lévi-Strauss and Barthes, among others. Ogden and Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning, published in 1923, was equally influential in psychology; and the writings of Sapir and Whorf stimulated debate about the dependency of our thinking on linguistic categories. The distinction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, so central in contemporary linguistics, became established in the 1930s, when formal theories of language also began to be developed. Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, published in 1957, laid the basis for debates about generative grammar and innatism in the second half of the twentieth century. In literature, too, concern with language became a major theme, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake being just two obvious examples.

The aim of this project is to explore the origins, ramifications and influence of this turn to language through a series of seminars, conferences and workshops focusing on particular aspects.

Event details

Physics lecture room 001
12.15	Buffet lunch - hosted by the Centre for Modern Studies
1.00	Andrew Linn (University of Sheffield): ‘Phonetics, Professors and the Emergence of Applied Linguistics’
2.15	Tea/coffee
2.45	Peter Hacker (University of Oxford): ‘The Linguistic Turn in Analytic Philosophy’
4.15	End

All welcome, for further information contact: Mike Beany or Keith Allen