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PREFACE This book is intended as a general introductory survey rather than as a textbook, and it is written for students of languages who do not yet wish to confine their studies to any of the specialist fields of the academic linguist. There are in existence no works of a truly introductory nature, which at the same time as outlining the scope and content of comparative linguistics take in the relevance of the more recent and rapidly expanding general linguistics, a science which has to some extent eclipsed and evenrendered obsolete certain parts of the theory built up by comparatists. There are still quite a few undergraduate students for whom comparative philology or linguistics stops at the beginning of this century. I am still encountering students of foreign languages, well qualified at that, who have hardly so muck as heard of the already long-established names such as Saussure, Meillet, Sapir, Jespersen. I am suggesting that this is at least one of the reasons why some of them have found their philology courses a chore, an encumbrance malignly devised to fill up their curriculum. There can be no more than a minority of students of modern languages who find their way to the most recent and consequently more topical advances in linguistics as a whole. True, there are a good many students introduced to this science when they.,? pursue English as a foreign language; and a few by way of the social sciences, especially anthropology. It is however just such as these who, for good or ill, manage to by-pass the more traditional philological discipline. Students of modern languages with an intimate and sensitive acquaintance with one or more languages can contribute to modern linguistics in a way that others cannot. A Bridge between comparative and general linguistics is provided, although the scope and extent of the latter is no more than sketched. I I have tried at the risk of distortion and superficiality to suggest the multiform developments taking place in structural linguistics and semantics. This transition is not easy for anyone who has not a fairly wide knowledge of the more popular works, whereas the highly condensed work of Saussure, with its staggering Cartesian sweep, is, I imagine, too difficult except for the advanced student. gutes Exemplar, Einband mit kleinen altersbedingten Spuren * Verlag: English Universities Press, 1966 * Bindung: Gebundene Ausgabe, englische Ausgabe.
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