R. H. Robins’s research while affiliated with University of London and other places

... Heavily influenced during this period by Darwinism, the study of languages entailed the reconstruction of their origins back to Proto-Indoeuropean, culminating by the end of the century in the work of the Neogrammarians (cf. Robins 1978Robins , 1997 All the trends summarised above can be found in the samples included in CETeL, and some of these trends are directly related to specific challenges faced during the process of compilation. These difficulties will be described in the next section. ...

Reference:

‘A matter both of curioſity and uſefulneſs’: Compiling the Corpus of English Texts on Language

... ITA). 9 The four significant breakthroughs identified by Hockett comprise the address delivered by Sir William Jones (1746Jones ( -1794 to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta on 2 February 1786 (Jones 1786, Robins 1987, the appearance of 'Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung' (1875) by Karl Verner (1846-1896, the posthumous publication of Cours de linguistique generale (1916) by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857Saussure ( -1913, and Noam Chomsky's (b. 1928) Syntactic Structures (1957 comparative spirit evident in early 19 th -century German scholarship. ...

Reference:

Edwin Guest Philologist, Historian, and Founder of the Philological Society of London