Jac. van Ginneken

Starting with his Grondbeginselen van de psychologische taalwetenschap ('Fundamentals of Psychological Linguistics') based on which he wrote his dissertation Principes de linguistique psychologique, Van Ginneken worked on developing a psychological foundation for linguistics and language. Three substantial parts of his convictions are presented in the following:

First, Van Ginneken opposed the prevalence of the neogrammarians' methods in linguistics and was a proponent for a psychological approach to linguistics in a more synchronic way, thereby allowing, he thought, to gain an extended view of the diachronic development of language as well.

Second, language, it seemed to him, had its foundations in sub- or unconscious regions of sentiment and emotion. This notion, which he explained in his Principes, had its opposition in the field of language psychology from those who saw language as prevailingly cognitive, notably Edward Sapir.

Third, in the latter half of his life, Van Ginneken developed the idea, that besides psychological factors, sound changes were influenced by genetic and anthropological ones, a view which did not find much agreement in the linguistic community at the time and much less after the Second World War, when much of language biology began to be seen as an absurdity of pre-War sciences.