ABSTRACT
This chapter provides readers with a historical survey of ideas that can be considered predecessors to the contemporary linguistic worldview research agenda. It starts with Ancient Greeks and their debates that involved the naturalist vs. the conceptualist view of language and the role of regularity (the analogist view) vs. that of irregularity and diversity (the anomalist view). These debates were continued and reframed in novel historical contexts, developing into such philosophical and linguistic problems as the universalism of concepts in light of linguistic diversity. A series of crucial developments for what later became the linguistic worldview conception took place in Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the figures of Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, and especially Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt’s legacy is then traced in Neo-Humboldtians, with further advancement of the field coming from American anthropological linguistics of the first half of the 20th century (the linguistic relativity principle), in post-WWII Western ethnosemantics, and in Slavic ethnolinguistics that developed independently soon afterwards. Finally, crucial questions for current linguistic worldview research are synthesized, paving the way for a more systematic survey of specific approaches in Chapter 3.
