
A View of Language
Pieter A. M. Seuren(Author)
Oxford University Press
Published on 3. January 2002
Book
Hardback
544 pages
978-0-19-924481-2 (ISBN)
Description
This book collects the best and most influential essays of one of the world's most original linguistic scholars and thinkers. They show Pieter Seuren's remarkable erudition from classical antiquity to current theory, his descriptive and theoretical sophistication, and his beautiful clarity of style. They provide many examples of the cogency of his argument and his willingness to speak out trenchantly against accepted wisdom.
In the extensive introduction the author describes the evolution of his theoretical position and its development in relation to Chomskyan syntactic theory and model-theoretic semantics. He argues here and throughout the book that grammar and semantics should be studied as branches of cognitive science, not as mere formalisms. He propounds, develops, and applies a theory of semantic syntax in which a grammar is seen as a mediating device between propositionally structured thoughts and corresponding surface structures. He rejects conventional notions of autonomous grammar as unsustainable and, in a realist theory of language, unnecessary. He demonstrates that his semantic theory achieves empirically adequate and formally precise explanatory generalizations, developing a theory of discourse semantics as a means of providing elegant accounts of topic-comment structure.
The twenty-two essays are divided into four parts dealing broadly with general theory, syntax, semantics, and the linguistics of creole languages. Many of the author's classic papers will be found here, including those on autonomous versus semantic syntax, predicate raising and datives, clitic pronoun clusters, donkey anaphora ('every man who owns a donkey beats it'), serial verb constructions, and many more. Provocative and thoughtful, accessible and entertaining, they add up to a book of real, enduring value.
In the extensive introduction the author describes the evolution of his theoretical position and its development in relation to Chomskyan syntactic theory and model-theoretic semantics. He argues here and throughout the book that grammar and semantics should be studied as branches of cognitive science, not as mere formalisms. He propounds, develops, and applies a theory of semantic syntax in which a grammar is seen as a mediating device between propositionally structured thoughts and corresponding surface structures. He rejects conventional notions of autonomous grammar as unsustainable and, in a realist theory of language, unnecessary. He demonstrates that his semantic theory achieves empirically adequate and formally precise explanatory generalizations, developing a theory of discourse semantics as a means of providing elegant accounts of topic-comment structure.
The twenty-two essays are divided into four parts dealing broadly with general theory, syntax, semantics, and the linguistics of creole languages. Many of the author's classic papers will be found here, including those on autonomous versus semantic syntax, predicate raising and datives, clitic pronoun clusters, donkey anaphora ('every man who owns a donkey beats it'), serial verb constructions, and many more. Provocative and thoughtful, accessible and entertaining, they add up to a book of real, enduring value.
Reviews / Votes
This book collects the best work of one of the world's most original linguistic thinkers ... This is a book of real, enduring value. * Folia Linguistica * This collection of articles from Pieter Seuren, my first linguistics teacher, will introduce to a wider public one of linguistic's most original minds, a scholar who has never feared to tread his own path and whose students have benefitted not only from his insight but also from his example. The articles in this collection, ranging from formal semantics to Creole studies, raise essential questions at the heart of linguistic theory and practice. * Bernard Comrie, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
numerous figures
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 34 mm
Weight
975 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-924481-2 (9780199244812)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Pieter A. M. Seuren was lecturer of linguistics at Cambridge and Oxford universities. From 1974 until 1999 he was Professor of Philosophy of Language and of Theoretical Linguistics at Nijmegen University. Upon retirement in 1999, he became a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen. He is the author of, among others, Operators and Nucleus (1969), Discourse Semantics (1985), Semantic Syntax (1996), and Western Linguistics: An Historical Introduction (1998).
Author
, Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Content
1. LANGUAGE, WORLD, AND COGNITIVE PROCESSING ; 7. PREDICATE RAISING AND DATIVE IN FRENCH AND SUNDRY LANGUAGES ; 12. PRESUPPOSITIONS AND THE UNIVERSE OF INTERPRETATION ; 19. SEMANTIC TRANSPARENCY AS A FACTOR IN CREOLE GENESIS