'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 penultimate 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. In this second edition there is a new final
chapter that traces the history of semantics and
pragmatics from earliest times to the present day.
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