Review article
Traditions, innovations, and connections in writing the history of linguistics

Toon Van Hal
University of Leuven
Table of contents

Among historians of linguistics, the thirteenth International Conference of the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS XIII) in Vila Real (Portugal) will be recalled as a well attended and splendidly organized conference. This edition of the triennial event resulted in two substantial volumes with selected papers, a SIHoLS volume as well as a Nodus volume, both of which were published only two years after the conference. Anyone taking on the task of reviewing ICHoLS proceedings is immediately confronted with the immense breadth of our field, which calls for modesty on the reviewer’s part. The contributions included (60 in total) are highly diverse, not only in terms of topics, languages and periods dealt with or approaches chosen, but also (although less significantly) in terms of quality. It is fair to say that a small minority of the contributions lack sufficient depth of analysis, or fail to refer to secondary sources other than previous scholarship written by the same author. On the other hand, it would be absurd to pretend that I could critically evaluate the essays in these two volumes with any great expertise. Instead of spelling out any weaknesses I might detect in fields that happen not to be too remote from my own ‘comfort zone’, I will mainly limit my evaluative remarks to taking a critical look at the shape of our field in its entirety as reflected in these volumes. As a matter of fact, both volumes elicit a different kind of review, in that they invite the reader to reflect on the state of, and trends within, the present-day historiography of linguistics.

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