What is 'American' about American linguistics? Is Jakobson, who spent half his life in America, part of it? What became of Whitney's genuinely American conception of language as a democracy? And how did developments in 20th-century American linguistics relate to broader cultural trends?This book brings together 15 years of research by John E. Joseph, including his discovery of the meeting between Whitney and Saussure, his ground-breaking work on the origins of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' and of American sociolinguistics, and his seminal examination of Bloomfield and Chomsky as readers of Saussure. Among the original findings and arguments contained herein: • why 'American structuralism' does not end with Chomsky, but begins with him; • how Bloomfield managed to read Saussure as a behaviourist avant la lettre; • why in the long run Skinner has emerged victorious over Chomsky; • how Whorf was directly influenced by the mystical writings of Madame Blavatsky; • how the Whitney–Max Müller debates in the 19th century connect to the intellectual disparity between Chomsky's linguistic and political writings.

What is 'American' about American linguistics? Is Jakobson, who spent half his life in America, part of it? What became of Whitney's genuinely American conception of language as a democracy? And how did developments in 20th-century American linguistics relate to broader cultural trends?This book brings together 15 years of research by John E. Joseph, including his discovery of the meeting between Whitney and Saussure, his ground-breaking work on the origins of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' and of American sociolinguistics, and his seminal examination of Bloomfield and Chomsky as readers of Saussure. Among the original findings and arguments contained herein: • why 'American structuralism' does not end with Chomsky, but begins with him; • how Bloomfield managed to read Saussure as a behaviourist avant la lettre; • why in the long run Skinner has emerged victorious over Chomsky; • how Whorf was directly influenced by the mystical writings of Madame Blavatsky; • how the Whitney–Max Müller debates in the 19th century connect to the intellectual disparity between Chomsky's linguistic and political writings.

No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

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.

It is not unusual for contemporary linguists to claim that “Modern Linguistics began in 1957” (with the publication of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures). Some of the essays in Chomskyan (R)evolutions examine the sources, the nature and the extent of the theoretical changes Chomsky introduced in the 1950s. Other contributions explore the key concepts and disciplinary alliances that have evolved considerably over the past sixty years, such as the meanings given for “Universal Grammar”, the relationship of Chomskyan linguistics to other disciplines (Cognitive Science, Psychology, Evolutionary Biology), and the interactions between mainstream Chomskyan linguistics and other linguistic theories active in the late 20th century: Functionalism, Generative Semantics and Relational Grammar. The broad understanding of the recent history of linguistics points the way towards new directions and methods that linguistics can pursue in the future.

This wide-ranging and original study reveals how prevalent modernism has become in the social sciences. With contributions from a number of leading international scholars, Modernism and the Social Sciences explores the rise and nature of modernist tropes and approaches within social sciences such as economics, econometrics, behaviourism, sociology, administrative science, linguistics, history and anthropology. The essays demonstrate how the social sciences turned away from the developmental historicisms of the nineteenth century. Instead, social scientists have become increasingly committed to synchronic and formal explanations that rely on models, correlations and ideal types, and they have increasingly appealed to systems and functions and to institutions and norms. This book will reveal wider trends and parallels to specialists in particular disciplines and it will also appeal to those interested in intellectual history and social science theory. This volume is a companion to Historicism and the Human Sciences in Britain, a product of the Mellon project on Britain's Modernity, published by Cambridge in 2017.

What was the first language, and where did it come from? Do all languages have properties in common? What is the relationship of language to thought? Fifty Key Thinkers on Language and Linguistics explores how fifty of the most influential figures in the field have asked and have responded to classic questions about language. Each entry includes a discussion of the person’s life, work and ideas as well as the historical context and an analysis of his or her lasting contributions. Thinkers include: Aristotle Samuel Johnson Friedrich Max Müller Ferdinand de Saussure Joseph H. Greenberg Noam Chomsky Fully cross-referenced and with useful guides to further reading, this is an ideal introduction to the thinkers who have had a significant impact on the subject of Language and Linguistics.

Today’s interest in social history and private life is often seen as a twentieth-century innovation. Most often Lucien Febvre and the Annales school in France are credited with making social history a widely accepted way for historians to approach the past. In Lost Worlds historian Jonathan Dewald shows that we need to look back further in time, into the nineteenth century, when numerous French intellectuals developed many of the key concepts that historians employ today. According to Dewald, we need to view Febvre and other Annales historians as participants in an ongoing cultural debate over the shape and meanings of French history, rather than as inventors of new topics of study. He closely examines the work of Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Hippolyte Taine, the antiquarian Alfred Franklin, Febvre himself, the twentieth-century historian Philippe Ariès, and several others. A final chapter compares specifically French approaches to social history with those of German historians between 1930 and 1970. Through such close readings Dewald looks beyond programmatic statements of historians’ intentions to reveal how history was actually practiced during these years. A bold work of intellectual history, Lost Worlds sheds much-needed light on how contemporary ideas about the historian’s task came into being. Understanding this larger context enables us to appreciate the ideological functions performed by historical writing through the twentieth century.

As each period in the history of the language sciences has chosen to focus on different key questions, the study of that history promises to open our eyes to the variety of interesting questions that can be asked, and answered – taking off the blinders of contemporary preoccupations. September 1–5, 2005, linguists from twenty-five countries gathered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to share their passion for the history of their discipline. This volume is a distillation of many fine contributions from that conference, shedding light on the many different approaches to the study of language.

A "compelling indictment of the news media's role in covering up errors and deceptions" (The New York Times Book Review) due to the underlying economics of publishing—from famed scholars Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. With a new introduction. In this pathbreaking work, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order. Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.