Skeptical Linguistic Essays

Author : Paul M. Postal
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 442 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2004-01-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0195343662

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Skeptical Linguistic Essays by Paul M. Postal Pdf

This volume consists of an introduction and two groups of essays by Paul M. Postal, each with a connecting theme. The first, positive group of papers, contains five previously unpublished studies of English syntax. These include a long study of so-called "locative inversion," two investigations related to raising to non-subject status, an argument for the existence of a hitherto ignored nominal grammatical category and a study of vulgar negative polarity items. Each investigation of specific English details is argued to have significant theoretical consequences. The second, negative group of papers, contains seven essays each of which seeks to show that aspects of contemporary linguistic activity are in part contaminated by elements of what is called "junk linguistics." Postal uses the term to denote work which advances proposals, puts forward claims and asserts deep results which, he argues, can only be accepted by ignoring serious standards of inquiry and scholarship. Postal claims that much of this work is nonetheless currently considered not only serious but prestigious reveals the problem to exist at the core of the field, not its periphery. These chapters include documentation of "junk linguistic" aspects in National Science Foundation refereeing, work on the foundations of linguistics, and even in widespread terminological usages. The final chapter briefly lists personal suggestions for dealing with this problem.

Author : Paul Martin Postal
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:857085575

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Skeptical Linguistic Essays by Paul Martin Postal Pdf

Author : Anthony Brueckner
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 409 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2010-08-19
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780199585861

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Essays on Skepticism by Anthony Brueckner Pdf

Anthony Brueckner is recognized as one of the leading contemporary investigators of the problem of skepticism. This collection brings together Brueckner's most important work in this area, providing a connected and comprehensive guide to the complex state of play on this intensively studied area of philosophy.

Author : Christina Behme,Martin Neef
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2018-07-26
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027263940

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Essays on Linguistic Realism by Christina Behme,Martin Neef Pdf

This book contains new articles by leading philosophers and linguists discussing a promising philosophical framework distinct from currently dominant ones: Linguistic Realism. As opposed to Nominalism and Chomskyian Conceptualism, this approach distinguishes between use of language, knowledge of language, and language as such. The latter is conceived as part of the realm of abstract objects. The authors show how adopting Linguistic Realism overcomes entrenched problems with other frameworks and suggest that Linguistic Realism will best serve those interested in formal linguistics, the cognitive dimension of natural language, and linguistic philosophy. The essays offer different perspectives on Linguistic Realism, either supporting this paradigm or taking it as a starting point for developing modified conceptions of linguistics and for further tying linguistics to the kind of formal theories of sensory cognition that were pioneered in visual perception by David Marr—whose work is predicated on exactly the object/knowledge distinction made by Linguistic Realists.

Author : Cedric Boeckx
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2006-05-09
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027293718

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Minimalist Essays by Cedric Boeckx Pdf

The Minimalism Program is many things to many researchers, and there are by now many alternative versions of it. Central to all is the fundamental question: to what extent is the human language faculty an optimal solution to minimal design specifications. Taken as a whole, the volume outlines the main features of Minimalism, its historical and conceptual sources, and provides an illustration of minimalist theorizing by looking at several properties of the syntactic component of grammar. Some contributions concentrate on what kind of computational tools are made available in a minimalist syntactic component, and how the computational system interacts with external and interface domains of the mind/brain. Other contributions specifically focus on direct empirical gains that emerge from adopting minimalist guidelines.

Author : Robert Anderson Hall
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 158 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 1987-01-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027235497

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Linguistics and Pseudo-linguistics by Robert Anderson Hall Pdf

The doctrines of transformational-generative grammar (as promulgated in 1957, with frequent later emendations) have on occasion been criticised, sometimes severely. Such criticism have, however, appeared mostly in article-form, and mostly in relatively inaccessible places. Discussions in bookform have been rare.In this book, the criticism offered by Professor Hall over more than twenty years have been brought together. They cover the range of linguistic structure (phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics), general theory, and the history of linguistics. In these essays, the many short-comings of transformational-generative grammar are revealed by critical examination, with inevitably negative conclusions. The two final essays of the book deal with parallel aberrations in current literary theory, especially Derridian “radical skepticism concerning language” and “deconstruction”, as viewed from a linguistic stand-point.

Author : Danilo Marcondes
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 137 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2020-12-10
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781793614735

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Skepticism and Language in Early Modern Philosophy by Danilo Marcondes Pdf

Danilo Marcondes argues that, contrary to a traditional view maintaining that language is not given any central role in early modern philosophy, an “early linguistic turn” in the seventeenth century opened a place for the philosophy of language as part of the philosophical system then under construction. Skepticism and Language in Early Modern Philosophy: The Early Linguistic Turn also claims that the revival of ancient skepticism at the modern age contributed decisively towards this “linguistic turn” insofar as it attacked the “powers of the intellect” in representing reality and making knowledge possible. Marcondes also argues that the concept of language itself becomes crucial to this investigation since the various understandings that developed during this period led to the central role that would be given to the philosophy of language in contemporary philosophy.

Author : Diego Gabriel Krivochen
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 518 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2023-08-21
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789004542310

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Syntax on the Edge by Diego Gabriel Krivochen Pdf

What is the most descriptively and explanatorily adequate format for syntactic structures and how are they constrained? Different theories of syntax have provided various answers: sets, feature structures, tree diagrams... Building on formal and empirical insights from a wide variety of approaches spanning more than 70 years (including Transformational Grammar, Relational Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, and Tree Adjoining Grammar), this monograph develops a new, mathematically grounded, framework in which objects known as graphs, and the constraints that follow from them, are argued to provide the best characterisation of the system of expressions and relations that make up natural language grammars. This new approach is motivated and exemplified via detailed and formally explicit analyses of major syntactic phenomena in English and Spanish.

Author : Randy Allen Harris
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 569 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780199740338

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The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris Pdf

"This book chronicles the history of linguistics from the 1950s rise of Noam Chomsky's Transformational Grammar, in alliance with cognitive psychology and Artificial Intelligence, to the current day. It centers on a highly consequential dispute at a key moment of that rise, the relative importance of structure and meaning. The dispute marks a rupture between what looked to be an approaching Chomskyan hegemony in theory and a flowering of alternate approaches that complement but do not replace his approach, as well as some that advance it in various ways. The rupture was between the theory of Generative Semantics, pushing to include more and more meaning into linguistic theory, and Interpretive Semantics, which resisted that push, putting more and more focus on linguistic structure. But in many ways the dispute can be reduced to George Lakoff, the most prominent voice on the more-meaning side, and Noam Chomsky on the more-structure side. Chomsky is a big personality, quiet and understated but always gesturing at monumental and revolutionary implications for his ideas, never failing to mobilize great numbers of linguists, often with large contingents of psychologists, philosophers, computer scientists, or biologists sharing the enthusiasm as well. Lakoff is also big personality, anything but quiet or understated, equally comfortable gesturing at grand revolutions. So, personalities are central to the dispute and its aftermath, alongside the theories, the data, and the technical developments, with other social currents playing various additional roles, from military and educational funding to the counter-culture movement of the 1960s to the growth of computational technologies, and all of these factors show up in the chronicle, along with a cast of other remarkable and influential characters. Noam Chomsky is unquestionably the most influential linguist of the twentieth century-many people claim of any century-whose work and personal imprint remains powerfully relevant today, so the book ends by an analysis of Chomsky's influence and legacy"--

Author : Barry Stocker,John Bolender
Publisher : Andrews UK Limited
Page : 162 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2014-05-12
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780989328029

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Rousseau on Language and Writing by Barry Stocker,John Bolender Pdf

Two contemporary philosophers take two very different approaches to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages, and then each reflects upon the approach of the other. Barry Stocker takes a deconstructionist approach, discussing the importance of Rousseau in the work of Jacques Derrida. John Bolender approaches Rousseau's Essay in terms of cognitive science, most especially in light of the theories of Noam Chomsky and Alan Page Fiske. Both authors agree that Rousseau's Essay still has much to teach us.

Author : Viviane Déprez,M. Teresa Espinal
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 832 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2020-03-25
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780192566270

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The Oxford Handbook of Negation by Viviane Déprez,M. Teresa Espinal Pdf

In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to a range of fundamental questions ranging from why negation displays so many distinct linguistic forms to how prosody and gesture participate in the interpretation of negative utterances. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters are arranged in eight parts that explore, respectively, the fundamentals of negation; issues in syntax; the syntax-semantics interface; semantics and pragmatics; negative dependencies; synchronic and diachronic variation; the emergence and acquisition of negation; and experimental investigations of negation. The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and will facilitate further interdisciplinary work in the field.

Author : Marcus Tomalin
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 247 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2006-02-16
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781139450812

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Linguistics and the Formal Sciences by Marcus Tomalin Pdf

The formal sciences, particularly mathematics, have had a profound influence on the development of linguistics. This insightful overview looks at techniques that were introduced in the fields of mathematics, logic and philosophy during the twentieth century, and explores their effect on the work of various linguists. In particular, it discusses the 'foundations crisis' that destabilised mathematics at the start of the twentieth century, the numerous related movements which sought to respond to this crisis, and how they influenced the development of syntactic theory in the 1950s. The book concludes by discussing the resulting major consequences for syntactic theory, and provides a detailed reassessment of Chomsky's early work at the advent of Generative Grammar. Informative and revealing, this book will be invaluable to all those working in formal linguistics, in particular those interested in its history and development.

Author : Cedric Boeckx
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2006-08-24
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780199297573

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Linguistic Minimalism by Cedric Boeckx Pdf

The Minimalist Program for linguistic theory is Noam Chomsky's boldest and most radical version of his naturalistic approach to language. Cedric Boeckx examines its foundations, explains its underlying philosophy, exemplifies its methods, and considers the significance of its empirical results.

Author : Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kravchenko
Publisher : Peter Lang
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Autopoiesis
ISBN : 3631566476

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Biology of Cognition and Linguistic Analysis by Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kravchenko Pdf

This book is an attempt to re-evaluate some basic assumptions about language, communication, and cognition in the light of the new epistemology of autopoiesis as the theory of the living. Starting with a critique of common myths about language and communication, the author goes on to argue for a new understanding of language and cognition as functional adaptive activities in a consensual domain of interactions. He shows that such understanding is, in fact, what marks a variety of theoretical and empirical frameworks in contemporary non-Cartesian cognitive science; thus, cognitive science is in the process of working out new epistemological foundations for the study of language and cognition. In Part Two, the traditional concept of grammar is reassessed from the vantage point of autopoietic epistemology, and an analysis of specific grammatical phenomena in English and Russian is undertaken, revealing common cognitive mechanisms at work in linguistic categories.

Author : Ryan M. Nefdt
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2024-05-31
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781316514252

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The Philosophy of Theoretical Linguistics by Ryan M. Nefdt Pdf

Covering a wide range of fields and theoretical perspectives, this book provides a novel philosophical account of theoretical linguistics.