Attempts to diagnose schizophrenia have been grounded in theories concerning what linguistic deviance reveals about mental function. Tuczek's patient 'Frau M.' was institutionalized for using a language which mixed German and French elements. The psychiatrist Goldstein cherry-picked her utterances to support his advocacy of frontal lobotomy. Louis Wolfson was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy for his intolerance of hearing or seeing English, his mother tongue. His book lays out his phonetic and trans-linguistic strategies for converting English utterances into other languages. The evidence provided by these cases of schizolinguistics are significant for present-day understanding of the psychology and philosophy of language. (c) 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

A significant appearance of the term enunciation in work by Vil & eacute;m Mathesius (1882-1946), a founding member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, is not mentioned in Joseph (2025), which aims to widen the received history of enunciation theory. 'Enunciation' is the counterpart to 'theme' in Mathesius's (1929) functional sentence perspective. His equating of enunciation (replaced in the 1930s by 'rheme') with 'psychological predicate' links his use of the term to the aim in later enunciation theory of bringing speakers and speech events directly into linguistic analysis.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) notoriously published very little in the 20th century, though he was just 43 when it began in 1901. What he did put before the public in these years, beyond his teaching, was in every case called forth by some social or personal duty, either to the community of Geneva academics to which he belonged, or to individual scholars who had played some part in his career. This article surveys his publications over these years.

Abstract The “nation‐state” is the idea of a territory populated by a people imagined as unified ethnically and culturally, with a shared national language. From the early 19th century to the start of the 21st, the nation‐state was central to how the world was managed on an international scale; but it has been increasingly recognized that this way of thinking is fundamentally racist and oppressive, with significant consequences for language politics and policy. This entry surveys the history of the linguistic dimension of nation‐states, up to the present, including the impact of globalization over recent decades. Five cases, chosen to exemplify five different types of nation‐state situation, are discussed: Iberia, where the linguistic fragmentation of Spanish has been bound up with movements for political separatism, India, established as a postcolonial nation‐state with “scheduled” status for numerous languages (22 at present), Ireland, with a “heritage” language that competes with the languages of recent immigrants for support in the education system, Iroquois, a set of five related languages which were never standardized into a unified form that might have competed with English. Israel, where a modern national language, Ivrit, was developed to unite a linguistically diverse population.

Les ouvrages de Meillet sont marqués par un chauvinisme national et social que nous, ses commentateurs, tendons à excuser au motif qu’il était typique de son époque. Mais pas tous ses contemporains ont utilisé des termes tels que « langues de civilisation » et « petites langues » qui figurent tout au long de l’œuvre meilletienne. Cet article examine ses vues sur la nécessité d’une consolidation linguistique en Europe comme partie du processus de civilisation pour sauvegarder la paix dans le contexte de sa linguistique « humaniste » qui refusait de séparer les langues de leurs locuteurs. Une telle séparation qui se trouve chez beaucoup de linguistes de l’époque aurait pu éviter ce qui semble aujourd’hui inacceptable dans son travail ; mais il faut lui accorder le mérite d’avoir osé maintenir la langue dans la sphère de la vie humaine.

Meillet's publications display a national and social chauvinism which we, his commentators, tend to excuse on the grounds that it was typical of his time. But not all his contemporaries used terms such as "languages of civilisation" and "little languages" which are found across Meillet's work. This article examines his views on the necessity of a linguistic consolidation in Europe, as part of the process of civilisation, and in order to keep the peace, in the context of his "humanist" linguistics, which refused to separate language from their speakers. Such a separation, common in the work of many linguists of the period, could have avoided what today seems unacceptable in his work; but we must give him credit for having dared to keep language within the sphere of human life.

In the second half of the 20th century a linguistic approach emerged that aimed to complement the analysis of language structure: enonciation, centred on speakers and the act of speaking. Emile Benveniste has had his role raised to author of the theory, despite its developing simultaneously in work by Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan, and later Tzvetan Todorov, with each of whom he had professional and personal ties. Others who figure in its formulation are J. L. Austin, Charles Bally, Leonard Bloomfield, Jacques Damourette and Edouard Pichon, Bronislaw Malinowski, Hendrik Pos and, to some extent, Karl Buhler. Of particular significance is work published in 1969 by Jean Dubois and Michel Foucault, both of whom give enunciation a clearer and fuller treatment than is found in the 1970 paper by Benveniste regarded as the locus classicus. The present article argues for, not sidelining Benveniste, but approaching the invention of enunciation as dialogic - a case of distributed cognition - instead of treating it on the lines of the 'Great Man theory of history' which this journal's founder, E. F. K. Koerner, worked hard to oppose.

This paper considers options for positioning the present in relation to the past in teaching the history of linguistics. It proposes three approaches as having been demonstrably practiced (presentist, trajectorial and heliocentric), plus a fourth (antiquarian) that is less likely to be publicized. They are exemplified and explored through a look at how the history of linguistics has been taught within the history of linguistics, in particular by William Dwight Whitney (a presentist), Ferdinand de Saussure (a trajectorialist) and Noam Chomsky (a heliocentrist). Key questions that arise include: What strategies and tactics can be inferred from their treatment of their predecessors? And to what extent can the teacher determine the course orientation, given that students, coming to it with their various backgrounds, experiences and expectations of the science, will receive it in different ways? Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.

L’idée d’une grammaire représente la recherche d’une simplicité essentielle qui sous-tend la complexité langagière. Il n’est pas surprenant alors que les grands pas en avant dans l’histoire de la théorie linguistique ont consisté en des concepts simplificateurs, de la triade conceptuelle des Modistes à la typologie tripartite de Humboldt, puis aux dichotomies structuralistes et à la réduction générativiste des langues du monde à une seule langue humaine. La simplicité n’est pas simple, pourtant. Elle prend diverses formes à diverses époques, et entre les chercheurs d’une même époque. Cet article analyse le rôle joué par la dichotomie simple-complexe dans les théories de Lucien Tesnière (1893-1954), Michael Halliday (1925-2018) et Noam Chomsky, leurs interprétations psychologiques – surtout celle de la théorie hallidayenne par Basil Bernstein (1924-2000) – et les efforts pour les appliquer dans la pédagogie. Dans les trois cas, de bonnes intentions ont été subverties par un concept inadéquat de la simplicité syntaxique. Comment adapter la dichotomie simple-complexe pour atteindre l’égalitarisme éducatif désiré par Tesnière, Halliday et Chomsky ? Faut-il la réimaginer ? Ou l’abandonner entièrement ? Ou ce but louable est-il destiné à rester utopique ?

This chapter examines the tensions inherent in how languages and identities are mapped geographically and cognitively, and the particular issues which multilingualism brings out in this mapping. Linguistic atlases require clear boundaries to be drawn within messy realities – a utopian undertaking with significant uses, which, on balance, may or may not outweigh the risks of declaring this or that language as belonging to, or dominant in, this or that place. There has in addition been a strong tendency to represent the cognitive dimensions of multilingualism and identity using the same mapping techniques developed in geographical representation, both with fMRI research and in recent work based on a crossing from geographical to cognitive (including emotional) representation, as multilingual children are asked to divide up and colour in an outline figure representing which of their languages represents which part of their personal identity. The aims of this chapter are to probe the ways in which multilingualism and identity are conceived and mapped, to establish the limits of their representation, and to enrich understanding of the linguistic phenomena which they are designed to capture.