The stories of linguistics : an introduction to language study past and present / Kim Ballard.

CW088

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine generated contents note: 1 Introduction -- Defining linguistics as a discipline -- Linguists at work -- stories of linguistics -- Piecing together the stories of linguistics -- Language frameworks -- Suggestions for further reading and research -- 2 nature of language -- object of study -- Saussure's system of signs -- arbitrariness of signs -- Chomskyan revolution -- Human language, animal communication -- design-features of language -- difficulty of defining language -- Suggestions for further reading and research -- 3 emergence of language -- Two starting points: Berlin and Paris -- Questions we need to ask -- Three very early thinkers, and the story of Adam -- coming of the scientific age -- Two French philosophers -- Gottfried Herder's prize-winning essay -- Darwin's giant leap forward -- Finding fossils -- Anatomical clues about the evolution of language -- Dating the emergence of language -- Protolanguage and grammaticalisation -- story with no ending -- Suggestions for further reading and research -- 4 Language diversity -- world's many languages -- relationship between languages -- significant event in India -- nineteenth-century philologists -- Classifying the world's languages -- ancestral world language? -- Languages in contact -- Attitudes to diversity -- Suggestions for further reading and research -- 5 Language variation -- Mapping regional variation -- Real speakers come to the fore -- Watching change happen -- birth of sociolinguistics -- Variation studies take off -- Male/female language variation -- Cultural variation -- individual speaker -- Suggestions for further reading and research -- 6 structure of language -- medieval perspective -- Early grammarians -- Establishing a metalanguage -- speculative grammarians -- Port-Royal Grammar -- In search of more universals -- Structural differences -- Structural similarities -- Leonard Bloomfield and the descriptivists -- coming of the generative age -- structure of speech -- Suggestions for further reading and research -- 7 construction of meaning -- `Colorless green ideas sleep furiously' -- undeniable importance of meaning -- Exploring word meanings -- components of meaning -- Fuzziness proves useful -- Semantic change -- Meaning is left out in the cold -- Linguists at war -- linguistic turn -- Ordinary language philosophy -- Cooperation and relevance -- birth of pragmatics -- Approaches to discourse -- `The curse of the confusion of tongues' -- Suggestions for further reading and research -- 8 linguistic brain -- functions of the brain -- structure of the brain -- linguistic brain -- Charting the btain for language -- Technological breakthroughs -- Closing in on language -- Language in the mind -- Language and thought -- Suggestions for further reading and research -- 9 Language acquisition -- forbidden experiment -- Studying language acquisition -- diary keepers -- Behaviourism -- Chomsky's revolutionary idea -- developing brain, the developing mind -- child's world -- Acquisition, impairment and loss -- Suggestions for further reading and research -- 10 continuing story -- expanding field of linguistics -- Making the world a better place -- What technology has done for linguistics -- big unanswered questions of linguistics -- future of evolutionary linguistics -- future of brain exploration and neurolinguistics -- future of theoretical linguistics -- continuing story of linguistics -- Suggestions for further reading and research