Network perspective in the historiography of linguistics – taking the Neogrammarians as an example

This paper proposes a network perspective grounded in Fleck’s ideas and Social Network Analysis within digital humanities. By moving beyond traditional text analysis and Kuhn’s paradigm model, it uncovers the obscured relational structures in the historiography of linguistics. Taking the Neogrammarian School as a case study – a group whose membership and role remain contested despite numerous previous studies – this paper reconstructs its inner structure and its relations with contemporaries through citation network analysis of ten journals with linguistic focus from the Neogrammarian period. The interpretation of the network interconnections draws both on network statistics and original sources, revealing that the Neogrammarian school constituted an open, heterogenous and dynamic scientific group. Comparison with other schools in linguistics shows that they share the characteristic of openness despite differences in cognitive and organisational cohesion. This contrasts with Kuhn’s notion of a scientific community as the bearer of a homogenous paradigm, a concept frequently applied to the previous historiographical studies of linguistics. The network perspective presented here enables our field to be studied on its own terms, without relying on frameworks derived from the natural sciences. It complements traditional approaches by supporting more grounded theoretical generalisations regarding scholarly interactions in the history of linguistics.