Fritz Rahn (1891–1964) and Wolfgang Pfleiderer (1877-1971) in the 1950s wrote *Deutsche Spracherziehung*. It has a very simple graphical method, squares for main clauses and circles for subordinate clauses. It does not help to grasp the complexity of long sentences. cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Maxime Lanusse (1853-1930) and Henri Yvon (1873-1963) in 1921 write *Cours complet de grammaire française*. The examples still reflect the war. AFAIK this is the first graphical display of an *analyse logique* in the French grammatical tradition. (spot the error!) cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Georges Galichet (1904-1992) wrote many French textbooks, starting with *Essai de grammaire psychologique* (1947). He uses idiosyncratic graphical syntactic analyses throughout his work, starting in 1947 with an *arête de poisson* ‘fishbone diagram’. Read more: cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Radivoj Francis Mikuš (1906-1983) from Ljubjana wrote various innovative syntactic papers in the 1950s, including a full example of rewrite rules in 1952, without knowledge of Harris (1946) and before the first such proposals by Chomsky. Read more about Mikuš here: cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Henri Bonnard (1915-2004) in 1950 wrote a textbook *grammaire française* which includes graphical analyses inspired by Damourette & Pichon. Bonnard used colours in the classroom on the blackboard. In 1959 Grevisse took over Bonnard's system of graphical syntax. cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

In their massive 4500-page *Essai de grammaire de la langue française* Jacques Damourette (1873-1943) and Édouard Pichon (1890-1940) include a single graphical analysis (Volume 3 from 1930, p. 185), which appears to have inspired Bonnard and indirectly Grevisse. cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Dora Schulz (1906-1974) and Heinz Griesbach (1918-2008) taught German at the *Goethe Institut* since the early 1950s. They wrote a *Grammatik der deutschen Sprache* in 1960. It contains the first full-fledged illustration of a *Feldermodell* for the German sentence. cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Johannes Kinker (1764-1845) in 1817 published his thoughts on language at the royal dutch academy. He included a pasigraphic (his term) sentence analysis of Cicero, but different from Maimieux's pasigraphy, Kinker's approach is a real syntactic analysis #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Maurice Grevisse (1895-1980), a Belgian teacher, wrote *Précis de grammaire française* in 1939. Inspired by Henri Bonnard, he added syntactic schemas to the 25th edition of 1959. This version of the book is still in print today as *Le petit Grevisse*. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Felipe Senillosa (1790-1858) in 1817 wrote *Gramática española* in Buenos Aires. About a third of this book consists of graphical syntactic analyses. Most are constituent-like analyses, but a final tour-de-force is an interlocking dependency tree. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), professor in Leipzig and co-founder of modern psychology, used graphical syntactic analyses based on binary subdivisions of a *Gesammtvorstellung*. This influenced Bloomfield (who ignored the graphics) and (indirectly) Chomsky #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Lev Ivanovich Polivanov (1838-1899), student of Buslaev and founder of the Polivanovskaya Gymnasium in Moscow, wrote many versions of a *Учебникъ русской грамматики*. In 1873 he adds a graphical analysis of complex sentences using vertical lines. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Jan Gebauer (1838-1907), a major figure in Czech linguistics, started out as a school teacher. He wrote a *Mluvnice česká* (1890) which includes various different graphical approaches to syntax, including hierarchical braces and line diagrams. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Theodor Paul (not Hermann!) was a teacher's teacher. In 1910 he wrote a German grammar in which he used verb-centric graphical sentence analyses. His graphics are rather clumsily because the lines only go horizontal and/or vertical (see the alt-text). #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Christian Müllener was a Swiss teacher (any tipps about his biography are welcome) wrote *Praktische Übungsschule* (1885) in which he provided exercises to construct sentences based on simple clauses and aa symbolic structure of the complex sentence. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Martin Hattala (1821-1903), teacher and later professor in Prague, used a simplified *Periodenbild* in his 1857 *Srovnávací mluvnice* for a complex sentence from Ján Kollár. AFAIK, this is the earliest example of graphical grammar in Czech grammars. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Karel Kunz was a 19thC teacher in Opava, Czech Republic. I cannot find anything on his biography, suggestions welcome! In 1859 he wrote *Náuka o větách* (lessons about sentences), in which he uses a 'depiction in letters' to analyse complex sentences. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Friedrich Julius Horn (1809-1841) was a teacher in Rastenburg (today Kętrzyn in Poland). In his *Grammatik der neuhochdeutschen Sprache auf historischer und logischer Grundlage* (1837) he used *Periodenbilder* to analyse sentences with multiple subordination, following Lehmann (1833). #linguistics

Johann Willibald Nagl (1856-1912) worked on dialects in Graz and Vienna, but also published *Deutsche Sprachlehre für Mittelschulen* in 1906. He uses a verb-centric approach for his syntactic analysis, which also can include subordinate clauses. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Václav Zikmund (1816-1873) was a Czech teacher in Prague. His *Skladba jazyka českého* (1863) contains various graphical syntactic analyses, among them a very early dependency tree (left) and an illustration of different possible constituency structures (right). cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Alexander Matveyevich Peshkovsky (1878-1933) was a prolific author of grammatical textbooks and together with D.N. Ushakov reinvigorated language teaching in Russia after the revolution. He experimented with various graphical syntactic displays. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Sergey Efimovich Kryuchkov (1897-1969) and Mikhail Vasilyevich Svetlaev (1898-1959) wrote *Грамматика учебник*, which Tesnière (1959:15) cites as an inspiration. By this point in time the Russian revolution has arrived in grammars (check the alt-text)! #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Pyotr Vladimirovich Smirnovsky (1846—1904) was a teacher in St. Petersburg and wrote the *Учебник русской грамматики* in 1884. It includes a few very early examples of dependency trees. It remains unclear how Smirnovksy came up with this idea. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Dmitrij Nikolajevič Ušakov (1873-1942), professor for Russian language in Moscow, in 1926 wrote *Учебная книга по русскому языку* with A.M. Smirnova and N.N. Nikolajevna, which Tesnière mentions as a major inspiration for his stemmata (1959: 15, fn. 1). #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Stepan Grigorievich Barkhudarov (1894-1983) wrote many grammatical textbooks throughout his long life using different kind of graphical grammar. The earliest example occurs in the second volume on syntax of his *Грамматика русского языка* (1938). #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Sofya Afanasyevna Zeltser and Dmitry Nikolaevich Vvedensky in 1925 wrote *Как самому изучать русский язык* 'How to learn Russian yourself'. It includes a single dependency-like tree with the words as edges, not as nodes. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Konstantin Fedorovich Petrov (1850-1914) wrote a two-volume *Русскій язык* in 1880. Around 1906 it was extended by an extra page with dependency-like trees. Any information about this author or his inspiration for adding graphics is highly appreciated! #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Johann August Lehmann (1802-1883), school principal in Marienwerder, in 1833 proposed his highly influential *Periodenbild*, a graphical analysis of clausal subordination. Analysing Goethe, Lehmann says *das Bilde dieser Periode zeigt deren Übelstände.* #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Karl Lugebil (1830-1887), professor in St Petersburg, wrote a review of Anton Dobiasz' book about Apollonius Dyscolus in 1883. Lugebil's graphic illustrates different meanings of copula constructions. This is an early example of hierarchical bracketing! #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Karl Mager (1810-1858), teacher and general educator, wrote *Deutsches Sprachbuch* in 1842. It includes a visual analysis of multi-clause sentences by using indentation for levels of subordination and alphanumeric codes to analyse the kind of clause. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Trying to find graphical grammar in 19thC Russian grammars: any pointers are highly appreciated! Today I found an early example from 1844 by Fedor Ivanovich Buslaev (1818-1897). This is an analysis of complex clausal centre-embedding in a Krylov fable. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Franz Wollmann (1871-1961), director of a teacher's seminary in Vienna, wrote *Deutsche Sprachkunde auf sprachgeschichtlicher Grundlage* in 1935. Like others, he used a dependency-type tree, but he also allowed for subordinate clauses as possible nodes. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

In 1950 Robert Killinger (1925-2006) and Alfred Doppler (born 1921) write a book about grammar for a wider audience. It wasn't a smash hit, but it shows again that drawing syntactic trees was widespread and well-known long before Chomsky and Tesnière stepped on the scene. #linguistics

Franz Honcamp (1805-1866), teacher in Büren, was laid off in 1854 because of his church-criticism (still a thing in 19thC Germany). His 1841 textbook has numbered tables (citing Becker) that are almost exactly like the Universal Dependency (UD) format. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

\morningShowerRevelation LLMs are overparameterized models: perfect fit, but little insight (this idea is of course not new: Bartlett et al. (2019) call it “benign overfitting”) Maybe somebody should try AIC-type model selection: Not to get better LLMs, but to obtain interpretable parameters

Hanz Glinz (1913-2008), professor in Aachen, wrote an early structuralist grammar of German, called *Die innere Form des Deutschen* (1952). He uses syntactic tests as the basis of his analysis. He exemplifies his approach with a massive fold-out sheet. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Helmut Gipper (1919-2005), professor in Münster, quotes one of Weisgerber's examples using a Chinese boxes display. I know of at least four independent uses of this visual in the 1940s in linguistics. Does anybody know why this suddenly becomes popular? #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Leo Weisgerber (1899-1985) expanded upon Drach's notion of *Umklammerung* in 1950 by using a graphical display that is isomorphic to a Chomskian constituency analysis. Apparently, this was developed independently from USA-style *Immediate Constituency*. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Erich Drach (1885-1935), often cited as the founder of *Felderanalyse* for German syntax, actually does not propose anything new except for the term *Feld*. Much more interesting is his analysis of *Umklammerung* as an early example of constituency. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Update on Otto Jespersen: I found a single graphical analysis in his work. The abstract letters *S* and *P* are probably an influence from Wundt and Sheffield, whom he cites before the term "immediate constituents" becomes fashionable in the USA. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

\rant Jumping on the Hayes’ bandwagon (“the siren’s call”): Science has become a competition for money (funding) evaluated by the amount of attention gathered (citations) as a proxy to the actually intended competition for ideas based on merit. Can we come up with a better operationalization?

#linguistics #langsky

Hjelmslev's infamous and often-quoted lexical semantic map about wood, shown on the left, originally published in *Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse* (1943: 50) is actually an unquoted example taken from Otto Jespersen's *Sprogundervisning* (1901: 129), shown here on the right.

Adolph Diesterweg (1790-1866), educator and father of publisher Moritz Diesterweg, in 1830 wrote *Praktischer Lehrgang* for German teachers. AFAIK it contains the first clause-internal graphical analysis. The use of braces is actually well thought-out. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Antal Lonkay (1827-1888), teacher in Pest, wrote a German grammar for Hungarians in 1855. He used a templatic analysis of the German sentence with a special non-finite position at the end of the sentence, long before Drach (1937) or Diderichsen (1946). #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Karl Jauker (1850-1924?), director of the teacher's seminary in Graz, wrote a *Deutsche Sprachlehre* (1904) for teachers. His graphics closely follow the proposals of Trunk, also from Graz. This image shows the various clauses of a multi-clause sentence #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Carl Rebbe (1862-1948), teacher in Gothenburg, wrote *Svensk språklära för realskolan* in 1912 but it was still in print in the 1970s. I only found a 1935 version: does anybody have access to other editions? Rebbe's graphical syntax is inspired by Beckman (1904). cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) was a detailed grammarian (cf. his massive Modern English Grammar), who did not use fancy graphics. Towards the end of his career he published a highly detailed algebraic system for language analysis *Analytical Syntax* (1937) #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965) of *glossomatik*-fame never seems to have applied his analytic system to syntactic analysis – or did I miss something? These images are all I found, and they are rather trivial depictions of government/agreement relations. #linguistics cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...