The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics (Equinox Textbooks & Surveys in Linguistics) - Softcover

Allan, Keith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1904768962 ISBN 13: 9781904768968

Publisher: Equinox, 2007

Synopsis

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. The second edition (ISBN 9781845536657) includes a new final chapter that traces the history of semantics and pragmatics from earliest times to the present day.

About this title

About the Author

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. 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) and Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language (with Kate Burridge, CUP 2006) and The Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics (Elsevier, 2009).

Review

'Allan has given us an excellent and well-documented account of western linguistics from the Greeks (and sometimes before them) until current trends on the topic such as pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.' --Historiographia Linguistics XXXV:1/2

About this edition

• Publisher: Equinox
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1904768962
• ISBN 13: 9781904768968
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 351