The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics - Second Edition - Keith Allan

The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics - Second Edition - Keith Allan

Preface to the second edition

The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics - Second Edition - Keith Allan

Keith Allan [+-]
Monash University
Keith Allan is Professor of Linguistics at Monash University. His research interests focus mainly on aspects of meaning in language, with a secondary interest in the history and philosophy of linguistics. His books include Linguistic Meaning (2 vols, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon (with Kate Burridge, OUP, 1991), Natural Language Semantics (Blackwell, 2001), Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language (with Kate Burridge, CUP 2006), Concise Encyclopaedia of Semantics (Elsevier, 2009) and The English Language and Linguistics Companion (with Julie Bradshaw, et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

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 penultimate 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. In this second edition there is a new final chapter that traces the history of semantics and pragmatics from earliest times to the present day.

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Citation

Allan, Keith . Preface to the second edition. The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics - Second Edition. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. xv Jun 2010. ISBN 9781845536657. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=29448. Date accessed: 28 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.29448. Jun 2010

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