Michael Cysouw
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cysouw.bsky.social
Michael Cysouw
@cysouw.bsky.social
Graphical Grammar: a history of visual analysis of syntactic structure before Chomsky and Tesnière

Radical-open-access manuscript in progress: https://cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/
The silver lining is that Microsoft under the helm of Nadella genuinely seems to believe in open source
June 15, 2025 at 8:21 PM
Sorry to say, but currently it seems like the momentum is with VSCode…
June 15, 2025 at 8:14 PM
Can you disclose the source 😳?
May 15, 2025 at 5:58 AM
Ah, thx! My Czech Language skills are basically non-existing and I am learning more as I proceed. I’m mostly just quoting from the sources up to now, but you are right that is too simplistic 🫣.
May 13, 2025 at 7:48 PM
Thanks! 🙏
March 31, 2025 at 5:48 PM
Implicit ideology? Maybe Atkinson (2011), arguing that southern Africa "could represent ... a single origin for modern languages" doi.org/10.1126/scie...

This paper raised many linguistic eyebrows:
doi.org/10.1126/scie...
doi.org/10.1126/scie...
doi.org/10.1126/scie...
doi.org/10.1126/scie...
Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa
Analysis of word sounds suggests that language originated once, in central and southern Africa.
doi.org
March 31, 2025 at 4:59 PM
BTW: the sentence that is analysed with "Schema Б" in the quoted image is the sentence "With a blunt pencil I quickly write a demand to immediately send an armed police squad." Also quite telling for an example from post-revolution Russia in 1928...
March 31, 2025 at 4:06 PM
I would love to read a book about the socio-political influences on examples given in grammar textbooks 🤔. You know: what does it say about a society that uses sentences like "John hit Mary" to teach their grammar to their children 😫
March 31, 2025 at 3:58 PM
what about "The chairman gives Mukhin the floor to report on Terentyev’s political offense" in Zeltser & Vvedensky (1925).

cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...
Graphical Grammar
cysouw.github.io
March 31, 2025 at 3:56 PM
talking about optimality theory: the history of the manicule (U+261E) is also interesting. It even occurs sometimes in 19thC grammars. However, it probably just ended up in optimality theory through the Dingbats Font

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manicule
Manicule - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
March 31, 2025 at 10:50 AM
Exactly, my formulations are still very preliminary. In this case it is technology in the context of education that seems to have given rise to graphical displays of sentence structure.
March 31, 2025 at 10:38 AM
can you explain what is shown in the figure (below the VOID...)? I gather that it has something to do with the Japanese "particles", but the intended meaning of this graphical display eludes me (I don't read Japanese unfortunately...)
March 31, 2025 at 10:15 AM
There is no direct link from the USA to russia here: but the Developments in the USA are a whole separate story. There is clean influence from german into Russia, and it might be the Neuhochdeutsche Grammatik of Hoffmann that inspired him. However, I could not find direct evidence.
March 29, 2025 at 9:39 PM