Noam Chomsky has made major contributions to three fields:political history and analysis, linguistics, and the philosophiesof mind, language, and human nature. In this thoroughly revised andupdated volume, James McGilvray provides a critical introduction toChomsky′s work in these three key areas and assesses theircontinuing importance and relevance for today. This book will be of interest to students and scholars ofphilosophy, linguistics, and politics, as well as to all those keento develop a critical understanding of one of the mostcontroversial and important thinkers writing today.
For the past forty years Noam Chomsky's writings on politics and language have established him as a preeminent public intellectual and as one of the most original and wide-ranging political and social critics of our time. Among the seminal figures in linguistic theory over the past century, since the 1960s Chomsky has also secured a place as perhaps the leading dissident voice in the United States.
What is ‘American’ about American linguistics? Is Jakobson, who spent half his life in America, part of it? What became of Whitney’s genuinely American conception of language as a democracy? And how did developments in 20th-century American linguistics relate to broader cultural trends?This book brings together 15 years of research by John E. Joseph, including his discovery of the meeting between Whitney and Saussure, his ground-breaking work on the origins of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ and of American sociolinguistics, and his seminal examination of Bloomfield and Chomsky as readers of Saussure.
When it was first published in 1997, Geoffrey Sampson's Educating Eve was described as the definitive response to Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct and Noam Chomsky's nativism. In this revised and expanded new edition, Sampson revisits his original arguments in the light of fresh evidence that has emerged since the original publication. Since Chomsky revolutionized the study of language in the 1960s, it has increasingly come to be accepted that language and other knowledge structures are hard-wired in our genes. According to this view, human beings are born with a rich structure of cognition already in place. But people do not realize how thin the evidence for that idea is.
This book is a collection of readings in phonological theory with special reference to English. The essays it contains are all concerned to a significant extent with discussion and criticism of the theory of phonology developed by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle in their monograph The Sound Pattern of English.
