Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Extensions and implications of linguistic theory: an overview
- 2 Grammar and language processing
- 3 Grammatical principles of first language acquisition: theory and evidence
- 4 Second language acquisition and grammatical theory
- 5 Brain structures and linguistic capacity
- 6 Abnormal language acquisition and the modularity of language
- 7 Grammatical aspects of speech errors
- 8 Grammar and conversational principles
- 9 Discourse analysis: a part of the study of linguistic competence
- 10 Speech act distinctions in grammar
- 11 Computer applications of linguistic theory
- 12 Metrics and phonological theory
- 13 Grammatical theory and signed languages
- 14 The linguistic status of creole languages: two perspectives
- 14.I Creole languages and the bioprogram
- 14.II Are creoles a special type of language?
- 14.III A dialog concerning the linguistic status of creole languages
- Subject index
- Name index
- Contents of volumes I, III, and IV
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Extensions and implications of linguistic theory: an overview
- 2 Grammar and language processing
- 3 Grammatical principles of first language acquisition: theory and evidence
- 4 Second language acquisition and grammatical theory
- 5 Brain structures and linguistic capacity
- 6 Abnormal language acquisition and the modularity of language
- 7 Grammatical aspects of speech errors
- 8 Grammar and conversational principles
- 9 Discourse analysis: a part of the study of linguistic competence
- 10 Speech act distinctions in grammar
- 11 Computer applications of linguistic theory
- 12 Metrics and phonological theory
- 13 Grammatical theory and signed languages
- 14 The linguistic status of creole languages: two perspectives
- 14.I Creole languages and the bioprogram
- 14.II Are creoles a special type of language?
- 14.III A dialog concerning the linguistic status of creole languages
- Subject index
- Name index
- Contents of volumes I, III, and IV
Summary
Linguistic theory: extensions and implications is the second of four volumes comprising the work, Linguistics: the Cambridge survey. The first volume, Linguistic theory: foundations, presents an overview of the state of grammatical research today, focussing on particular components of the grammar and their interactions (e.g. ‘syntactic theory,’ ‘morphological change,’ ‘the phonology–phonetics interface,’ and so on). This second volume, like the first, addresses the motivation for, and adequacy of, the reigning conceptions in theoretical linguistics. However, unlike the first, it is devoted to probing the independent evidence for these conceptions, that is, evidence that can be adduced beyond the introspective data about grammatical patterning upon which theorizing has traditionally relied so heavily. The chapters in this volume also show how the theory lends itself to natural extensions that help provide answers to questions raised in diverse branches of linguistics and allied fields.
The first chapter, in addition to introducing the following ones in some detail, provides an historical sketch of the attempt to motivate the concepts of generative grammar externally and to apply them to practical goals. The point is stressed that the history of this enterprise has been a very uneven one. There was a widespread consensus in the 1960s that generative grammar was both motivated and applicable, a consensus that had collapsed by the mid 1970s. But now the pendulum has swung back again, for reasons that the authors of the following chapters will make abundantly clear, and the prestige of generative grammar among psychologists, neurologists, computer scientists, and so on has reached an all-time high.
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- Information
- Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey , pp. vii - viiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988