Lanes to Language

This book is a linguistic bike tour guide for Leipzig and its surroundings. It contains twenty scenic cycling routes in the flat Leipzig Basin, each of which focuses on a scholar who studied or worked here. The tours not only highlight places associated with famous linguists; they also target many cultural and natural attractions. In the 1870s, Leipzig became the world centre of linguistics. It retained this role for several decades, and continued to be highly visible after the Chomskyan revolution beginning in the 1950s. Based on the groundwork laid by Karl Brugmann and August Leskien, many important linguists spent substantial amounts of time in Leipzig, to study, carry out research, write a dissertation, finish a habilitation, or work as a professor, among them Ferdinand de Saussure, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, Eduard Sievers, Hermann Paul, Leonard Bloomfield, Lucien Tesnière, Nikolaj Trubetzkoy, and Manfred Bierwisch. These and several other scholars featured in the present volume played a decisive role in shaping the field of linguistics as we know it today, and the book takes great care to introduce their main ideas and discoveries. The twenty chapters thus combine, in a highly original way, descriptions of linguistically oriented bike rides with accounts of major developments in the history of language science.