Date: 20-May-2007 From: Janet Joyce <jjoyceequinoxpub.com> Subject: The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics: Allan
Title: The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics
Series Title: Equinox Textbooks and Surveys in Linguistics
Published: 2007
Publisher: Equinox Publishing Ltd.
http://www.equinoxpub.com/
Author: Keith Allan
Hardback: ISBN: Pages: 368 Price: U.K. £ 60 Comment: US $90
Paperback: ISBN: Pages: 368 Price: U.K. £ 16.99 Comment: US $ 29.95
Abstract:
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.
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