Prof. Dr. Michael Cysouw (Philipps University Marburg): Graphical Grammar

The history of graphical grammar: Since the publications of Chomsky in 1957 and Tesnière in 1959, the use of graphical representations of sentence structure has become a cornerstone of contemporary linguistics. What is largely unknown, however, is that such methods have a long history that goes back well before Chomsky and Tesnière. Both researchers were rather reticent about the sources of inspiration for their syntactic representations, giving the impression that their graphical approaches were groundbreaking innovations. Prof. Cysouw's lecture shows that there is a continuous tradition of graphic grammar dating back to around 1830 (with some even older precursors). Hundreds of authors around the world use graphics to analyze syntax. This includes many widely used textbooks that have been used in dozens of editions over several decades. Graphic grammar, whose history at the time of this lecture thus spans about 200 years, thus concerns theoretical questions of syntactic modeling, but also aesthetic issues and application in (school) practice.