ENGLISH

The Linguistics Wars

By Randy Allen Harris

Book information

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Year
1995
ISBN
019509834X, 9780195098341, 0195072561, 9780195072563
Open Library ID
OL14959165M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
23 MB (24168308 bytes)
Pages
369\369
Scanned
yes
Time added
2010-05-31 15:29:46

Description

Eminently suitable reading if you are embarking on a modern study of the field of linguistics or are writing an essay on the people and personalities involved or just like reading about the history and evolution of a science. Reads like a good novel. There are a few spots where the uninitiated might be intimidated by the technical treatments but they can be skimmed over. One gets a good sense of how, because of Chomsky, a Kuhnian style paradigm shift occured. What's missing perhaps is some insight that transformational grammar found a fertile ground because Chomsky was at MIT which did not have a deeply established linguistics department but did have a bias towards mathematical and notational models.

The author warns you that the personalities, esp. Chomsky, come off a little abrassively. I got a sense of Chomsky as exceptionally brilliant, revolutionary but a man seduced into creating his own orthodoxy - an quite mean about it too. One wonders what might have happened had Chomsky not been dismissive of the study of semantics.

I enjoyed it a lot. Prof. Harris writes extremely well. ;-)

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