The Western Classical Tradition in LinguisticsKeith Allan
Series: Equinox Textbooks and Surveys in Linguistics Hardback Price £60.00/$90.00 Paperback Price £16.99/$29.95 |     |
Description
The Western Classical Tradition in linguistics extends from Ancient Greece to the 21st century and has spread from Europe to the other four inhabited continents. It is a story of successive stages of language study, each building upon, or reacting against, the preceding period. There is a theoretical track passing through Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics to the scholastics of the later middle ages; on to the vernacular grammarians of the renaissance, then the rationalists and universal grammarians of the 17th, 18th and 20th centuries. Joining this, is a tradition relating language to thought handed on from Epicurus and Lucretius to Locke, Condillac, Humboldt, Saussure, Boas, Sapir, Whorf and today’s cognitivists. There is at the same time a pedagogical track deriving from the Greek grammarians Dionysius Thrax and Apollonius Dyscolus via the Latins, Donatus, Priscian, and their commentators; a track that gives rise to prescriptivism and applied linguistics. The book’s last chapter examines the re-ascendancy of hypothetico-deductive theory over the inductivist theories of the early 20th century, concluding that both approaches are necessary for the proper modelling of language in the 21st century and beyond.
The Western Classical Tradition in linguistics extends from Ancient Greece to the 21st century and has spread from Europe to the other four inhabited continents. It is a story of successive stages of language study, each building upon, or reacting against, the preceding period. There is a theoretical track passing through Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics to the scholastics of the later middle ages; on to the vernacular grammarians of the renaissance, then the rationalists and universal grammarians of the 17th, 18th and 20th centuries. Joining this, is a tradition relating language to thought handed on from Epicurus and Lucretius to Locke, Condillac, Humboldt, Saussure, Boas, Sapir, Whorf and today’s cognitivists. There is at the same time a pedagogical track deriving from the Greek grammarians Dionysius Thrax and Apollonius Dyscolus via the Latins, Donatus, Priscian, and their commentators; a track that gives rise to prescriptivism and applied linguistics. The book’s last chapter examines the re-ascendancy of hypothetico-deductive theory over the inductivist theories of the early 20th century, concluding that both approaches are necessary for the proper modelling of language in the 21st century and beyond.
Contents
1. Linguistics and the Western Classical Tradition
2. Plato on Language
3. Aristotle’s Legacy
4. The Stoics and Varro
5. Quintilian, Dionysius and Donatus: The Start of a Pedagogic Tradition
6. Apollonius and Priscian, the Great Grammarians among the Ancients
7. Prescriptivism from the Early Middle Ages On
8. 'General' or 'Universal' Grammar: From the Modistae to Chomsky
9. Phonetics, Phonology and Comparative Philology
10. Language and Thought: From Epicurus until after Whorf
11. Saussurean and Functionalist Linguistics: The Study of Language as Communication
12. Paradigms for Linguistic Analysis: Bloomfieldian Linguistics and the Chomsky Revolution
Epilogue
Reviews
In my opinion, Allan has given us anexcellent and well-documented account of western linguistic from the Greeks (and sometimes before them) until current trends on he topic such as pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. I can therefore recommend his book not only to undergraduates but also to graduate students. Historiographia Linguistics XXXV:1/2
Specifications
| ISBN-10 (Hardback) | 1904768954 |
| ISBN-13 (Hardback) | 9781904768951 |
| Price (Hardback) | £60.00/$90.00 |
| ISBN-10 (Paperback) | 1904768962 |
| ISBN-13 (Paperback) | 9781904768968 |
| Price (Paperback) | £16.99/$29.95 |
| Publication Date | February 2007 |
| Pages | 368 |
| Size | 244 x 169 mm |
| Readership | Undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers |
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