Readings in modern linguistics (for Students of English) [antikvár]

The present book of readings by outstanding representatives of linguistic science is primarily intended to show members of English seminars something of the diversity as weil as development of both the theoretical assumptions about language that have been put forward in this century by American, British and other scholars and of the various procedures and techniques applied to tackle smaller and larger issues of English descriptive grammar, lexis, semantics and style. (A companion volume of readings on English linguistic history is in active preparation.) Necessarily the boundaries between a purely theoretical and a practical approach on the one hand and those between the various departments of language study on the other can only be tentatively drawn. The thematic, and within that the loosely chronological, arrangement of the articles and book passages into six sections must be seen as one of convenience rather than an attempt at strict classification. It is the compilers' hope that modest in scope as the selection is from a vast, expanding and embarrassingly rich field, it is still fairly representative of the major schools of linguistic thought and analysis to include enough crucial, controversial and, we believe, interesting problenfis of theory and concrete analysis so that every teacher and student wishing to use the reader can find in it plenty of points to discuss, think about and, especially, pursue further. Indeed, to introduce new ideas, to provoke agreement and disagreement were our main guiding principles in selecting the texts. Though varying in difficulty the level of discussion is everywhere advanced. The emphasis throughout is laid on the modernbroadly understood. Being uncommitted to any one particular school or theory-nor do we see any justification to be militantly committed in a transition period of our science when ideas are in ferment and change quickly and theories are often revised by their exponents-we are convinced that "traditionalist" views are not necessarily antiquated and are in fact weil worth hearing and studying. Apart from the intrinsic intere st of the matter of the chosen texts, we were led in the selection by a desire to present the student with good examples of how to write about lingusitic topics, how to tackle a problem and conduct a solid argument in the specialised technical style of linguistics. Being only too weil aware of the experimentál character of this book of readings and of the fact that it includes much less of interesting material