The paper analyzes some early theoretical works on psychology of language presented in the works of the trend setting historical linguist Zoltán Gombocz (1887–1935), Antal Klemm (1883–1963) a master of historical syntax, and Gyula Lux (1884–1957) a successful language education expert.
All three were representatives of classical mentalistic linguistics, and interpreted language as relevant for psychology, even if they emphasized change instead of structure. The paper presents the specific ideas of Klemm regarding the historical articulation of sentence structure along psychological and logical lines. Both Gombocz and Lux follow Wundt that we must draw evidence from gestural language for the origin of spoken language. Gombocz and Klemm deal with the possible mechanisms of word class formation. Klemm's reconstruction of word classes takes communication as a starting point. Initial communication is about an object given as a non-linguistic stimulus: [this thing] apple. The (psychological) subject is given, only the predicate is pronounced. This would be followed by combining two nominal words in a predicative way: wood-fire. Then the property words would appear, and finally the combination of object and property (apple-red).
Bickerton, D. (1981). Roots of language. Karoma Publishers, New York.
Bickerton, D. (1984). The language bioprogram hypothesis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7: 173–221.
Blumenthal, A. (1970). Psychology and language: a historical introduction to psycholinguistics. Wiley, New York.
Chomsky, N. (1968). Language and mind, Harcourt. Third edition 2006. Cambrige University Press, New York.
Givón, T. (2009). The genesis of syntactic complexity: Diachrony, ontogeny, neuro-cognition, evolution. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003). The resilience of language: what gesture creation in deaf children can tell us about how all children learn language. Psychology Press, New York.
Gombocz, Z. (1903). Nyelvtörténet és lélektan Wundt néplélektanának ismertetése. ‘History of Language and psychology. Introduction to Wundt’s ethnopsychology’. Athenaeum, Budapest.
Gombocz, Z. (1906). Paul és Wundt a nyelv eredetéről. ‘Paul and Wundt on the origin of language’. Nyelvtudomány, 1: 316–320.
Gombocz, Z. (1912). Die bulgarisch-türkischen Lehnwörter in der ungarischen Sprache. Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne XXX, XVIII + 252.
Gombocz, Z. (1997). Jelentéstan és nyelvtörténet. ‘Semantics and languge history’. Akadémiai, Budapest.
Gombocz, Z. and Meyer, E. (1909). Zur Phonetik der ungarische Sprache. Belings, Uppsala.
Haeckel, E. (1866). Generelle Morphologie der Organismen. ‘General morphology of organisms’. Georg Reimer, Berlin.
Hewes, G.W. (1973). Primate communication and the gestural origin of language. Current Anthropology, 14(1–2): 5–12.
Husserl, E. (1900). Logische Untersuchungen. ‘Logical investigations’. Fischer, Halle.
Jeannerod, M. and Jacob, P. (2005). Visual cognition: a new look at the two-visual systems model. Neuropsychologia, 43: 301–312.
Kicsi, S. (2006). Gombocz Zoltán 1877–1935. Életrajz és pályakép. ‘Zoltán Gombocz. 1877–1935. Biography and intellectual path’. ELTE Eötvös Kiadó, Budapest.
Klemm, A. (1925). Zur Geschichte der sog. Tempora in den finnisch-ugrischen Sprachen. Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen, 17: 55–64.
Klemm, A. (1928). A mondattan elmélete. ‘The theory of syntaxʼ. MTA, Budapest, (Academic inaugural delivered in 1927).
Klemm, A. (1942). Magyar történeti mondattan.ʻHungarian historical syntax’. MTA, Budapest.
Klemm, A. (1948). Nyelvészet, logika, pszichológia. ‘Linguistics, logic, psychology’. Magyar Nyelv, 44(2): 118–127.
Lamendella, J.T. (1976). Relations between the ontogeny and phylogeny of language: a neorecapitulationist view. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 280: 396–412.
Lengyel, Z. (1976). Magyar gyermeknyelvi kutatások a XIX. században. ‘19th century Hungarian child language research’. Magyar Nyelv, 72: 81–90.
Lux, G. (1927). A nyelv. ‘Language’. Atheneum, Budapest.
Lux, J. (1961). Wörterbuch der Mundart von Dobschau (Zips). Elwert, Marburg.
MacWhinney, B. (1976). Hungarian research on the acquisition of morphology and syntax. Journal of Child Language, 3: 397–410.
Nelson, K. (1974). Concept, word, and sentence: interrelations in acquisition and development. Psychological Review, 81(4): 267–285, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036592.
Nerlich, B., Clarke, D.D, and Sokal, M.M (1998). The linguistic repudiation of Wundt. History of Psychology, 1: 179–204.
Slobin, D. (2004). From ontogenesis to phylogenesis: what can child language tell us about language evolution? In: Langer, J., Parker, S.T., and Milbrath, C. (Eds.), Biology and knowledge revisited: from neurogenesis to psychogenesis. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 255–285.
Stern, C. and Stern, W. (1907). Die Kindersprache. Barth, Leipzig.