Archives - Literature: Page 21
Author: thelanguageguy (Fri Feb 17, 2006 5:46 pm)
Title: A great book....The Linguistics Wars
I just finished reading a really great book by Harris called the Linguistics Wars, published in 1993. The book tells about the split in the linguistics community between descriptive and generative linguistics. The book describes the work of the European structuralists in the tradition of Saussure and the transfer to the United States of his ideas. Bloomfield and Hockett carried these on, much to the dismay of Noam Chomsky. There has been an ongoing debate in the field of linguistics between these two schools of thought that has scarcely been resolved. The book take a non-partisan view of the war between linguistic schools and explains the opinions and reasoning behind each type of thought. It's a great book for anyone interested even remotely in linguistics.