The asterisk from historical to descriptive and theoretical linguistics: An historical note

Giorgio Graffi
University of Verona
Summary

The use of the asterisk in descriptive and theoretical linguistics is attested well before the 1950s (contrary to what has been maintained by Householder in 1973). It is suggested that the meaning of the asterisk was extended from that of ‘unattested form’, which was standard in historical linguistics, to that of ‘unattested form’ in sense of ‘non-existent’; a further step was to assign to the asterisk the meaning of ‘impossible form’, hence also of ‘ungrammatical sentence’.

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