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".

In a controversial look at the study of linguistics today, Mortéza Mahmoudian examines twentieth-century theories of language in light of empirical evidence. In the past, linguists have had to choose between a general linguistic theory aimed at universal explanatory power and specific, limited linguistic models. Arguing that at various levels of linguistic analysis different theories offer more or less explanatory power, Mahmoudian makes a persuasive case for an integrated approach incorporating the strengths of both methods. The author begins with the identification of principles which, despite differences in terminology, are held in common by most twentieth-century linguists. He shows the implications, merits, and shortcomings of the major schools of linguistic thought, as well as the techniques one can use in gathering data. Ranging over a wide variety of international linguistic thinking, Mahmoudian takes up the question of what he calls experimentation, or the extent to which the application of certain linguistic theories have validity in constucting models. Simultaneously a survey of the current state of linguistic theory and a case for the necessity of empirical verification in linguistics, Modern Theories of Language builds a bridge across the gulf between many long-standing conflicts in the theory of language. Accessibly written, this provocative work predicts future theorerical and epistemological developments and will prove essential reading for students and scholars of linguistics, as well as specialists in cognitive psychology and Romance languages.

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.

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.

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.

Philosophy of Language introduces the student to the main issues and theories in twentieth-century philosophy of language. Topics are structured in three parts in the book. Part I, Reference and Referring Expressions, includes topics such as Russell's Theory of Desciptions, Donnellan's distinction, problems of anaphora, the description theory of proper names, Searle's cluster theory, and the causal-historical theory. Part II, Theories of Meaning, surveys the competing theories of linguistic meaning and compares their various advantages and liabilities. Part III, Pragmatics and Speech Acts, introduces the basic concepts of linguistic pragmatics, includes a detailed discussion of the problem of indirect force and surveys approaches to metaphor. Unique features of the text: * chapter overviews and summaries * clear supportive examples * study questions * annotated further reading * glossary.