This textbook provides a clear and concise overview of the main schools of linguistic thought and scholarship from the late 18th century to the present day, examining the key tenets and leading figures of each approach and assessing their impact on the field. Combining theory with practice, the author aims to familiarise students with the mechanisms used in analysing language structures, to acquaint them with the history of the discipline, and to demonstrate how different - sometimes competing - approaches can be combined to understand language and linguistics today. Written in an engaging and accessible manner, this textbook is an ideal primer for new students of linguistics at any level, as well as more experienced researchers seeking to understand the history of their field or the arguments and theories of other sub-disciplines.

This textbook provides a clear and concise overview of the main schools of linguistic thought and scholarship from the late 18th century to the present day, examining the key tenets and leading figures of each approach and assessing their impact on the field. Combining theory with practice, the author aims to familiarise students with the mechanisms used in analysing language structures, to acquaint them with the history of the discipline, and to demonstrate how different - sometimes competing - approaches can be combined to understand language and linguistics today. Written in an engaging and accessible manner, this textbook is an ideal primer for new students of linguistics at any level, as well as more experienced researchers seeking to understand the history of their field or the arguments and theories of other sub-disciplines.

No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

There are more than six thousand human languages, each one unique. For the last five hundred years, people have argued about how important language differences are. This book traces that history and shows how language differences have generally been treated either as of no importance or as all-important, depending on broader approaches taken to human life and knowledge. It was only in the twentieth century, in the work of Franz Boas and his students, that an attempt was made to engage seriously with the reality of language specificities. Since the 1950s, this work has been largely presented as yet another claim that language differences are all-important by cognitive scientists and philosophers who believe that such differences are of no importance. This book seeks to correct this misrepresentation and point to the new directions taken by the Boasians, directions now being recovered in the most recent work in psychology and linguistics.

This book presents a portrait of the contrasting beliefs, assumptions, and intellectual backgrounds of the various schools of linguistics which contributed to the subject throughout the 20th century, beginning with a glimpse of their 19th-century roots.

Linguistics, or the science of language, emerged as an independent field of study in the nineteenth century, amid the religious and scientific ferment of the Victorian era. William Dwight Whitney, one of that period's most eminent language scholars, argued that his field should be classed among the social sciences, thus laying a theoretical foundation for modern sociolinguistics. William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language offers a full-length study of America's pioneer professional linguist, the founder and first president of the American Philological Association and a renowned Orientalist. In recounting Whitney's remarkable career, Stephen G. Alter examines the intricate linguistic debates of that period as well as the politics of establishing language study as a full-fledged science. Whitney's influence, Alter argues, extended to the German Neogrammarian movement and the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. This exploration of an early phase of scientific language study provides readers with a unique perspective on Victorian intellectual life as well as on the transatlantic roots of modern linguistic theory.

Professor Stern puts applied linguistics research into its historical and interdisciplinary perspective. He gives an authoritative survey of past developments worldwide and establishes a set of guidelines for the future. There are six parts: Clearing the Ground, Historical Perspectives, Concepts of Language, Concepts of Society, Concepts of Language Learning, and Concepts of Language Teaching.

Following Landmarks in Linguistic Thought I, this second volume introduces the key thinkers in linguistics in the 20th century, including Chomsky, Derrida, Orwell, Sapir, Whorf and Wittgenstein.