(P/B) THE WESTERN CLASSICAL TRADITION IN LINGUISTICS

Παρουσίαση

The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics examines ancient, medieval, post-renaissance and modern conceptions of linguistics (i.e. the study of language and languages). It identifies a classical tradition extending from Ancient Greece to the twenty-first century which 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 seventeenth, eighteenth and twentieth 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 twentieth century, concluding that both approaches are necessary for the proper modelling of language in the twenty-first century and beyond. (From the publisher)

Περιεχόμενα

List of figures
List of tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
Symbols and abbreviations used in the text
Linguistics and the western classical tradition
Plato on language
Aristotle's legacy
The stoics and varro
Quintilian, Dionysius and Donatus: the start of a pedagogic tradition
Apollonius and Priscian, the great grammarians among the ancients
Prescriptivism from the early middle ages on
General or universal grammar: from the modistae to Chomsky
Phonetics, phonology, and comparative philology
Language and thought: from Epicurus until after Whorf
Saussurean and functionalist linguistics: the study of language as human communication
Paradigms for linguistic analysis: bloomfieldian linguistics and the Chomsky revolution
Epilogue
References
Index