Introduction to the Theory of Grammar makes available to teachers and students of syntax a comprehensive critical review of the main results of present day grammatical theory and shows how they were achieved.
Introduction to the Theory of Grammar makes available to teachers and students of syntax a comprehensive critical review of the main results of present day grammatical theory and shows how they were achieved.
This new edition introduces the reader to Noam Chomsky's theory of language by setting the specifics of syntactic analysis in the framework of his general ideas. It explains its fundamental concepts and provides an overview and history of the theory.
The present text is a re-edition of Volume I of Formal Grammars in Linguistics and Psycholinguistics, a three-volume work published in 1974. This volume is an entirely self-contained introduction to the theory of formal grammars and automata, which hasn't lost any of its relevance. Of course, major new developments have seen the light since this introduction was first published, but it still provides the indispensible basic notions from which later work proceeded. The author's reasons for writing this text are still relevant: an introduction that does not suppose an acquaintance with sophisticated mathematical theories and methods, that is intended specifically for linguists and psycholinguists (thus including such topics as learnability and probabilistic grammars), and that provides students of language with a reference text for the basic notions in the theory of formal grammars and automata, as they keep being referred to in linguistic and psycholinguistic publications; the subject index of this introduction can be used to find definitions of a wide range of technical terms. An appendix has been added with further references to some of the core new developments since this book originally appeared.
Marking a return to generative grammar in its original sense, this book focuses on the development of precisely formulated grammars whose empirical predictions can be directly tested. Problem solving is also emphasised.
The Arabic grammatical tradition is one of the great traditions in the history of linguistics, yet it is also one that is comparatively unknown to modern western linguistics. The purpose of the present book is to provide an introduction to this grammatical tradition not merely by summarizing it, but by putting it into a perspective that will make it accessible to any linguist trained in the western tradition. The reader should not by put off by the word ‘medieval’: Arabic grammatical theory shares a number of fundamental similarities with modern linguistic theory. Indeed, one might argue that one reason Arabic theory has gone unappreciated for so long is that nothing like it existed in the West at the time of its ‘discovery’ by Europeans in the 19th century, when the European orientalist tradition was formed, and that it it only with the development of a Saussurean and Bloomfieldian structural tradition that a better perspective has become possible.
In the past few decades, the development of theoretical linguistics has proved to be successful in shedding light on the intricate nature of language and knowledge of grammar, which contributes to a deeper understanding of the human mind. This book discusses various issues in syntax and logical structure of natural language from theoretical perspectives. The primary data on which theoretical claims are made is drawn from Japanese and Japanese-type languages, but it also contains discussion of related phenomena in English which have never been discussed from the same viewpoint in the current literature. Although the book is written in the format of a version of the Extended Standard Theory tradition, informally referred to as the Principles and Parameters Approach or 'Government and Binding (OB) Theory', it should be of interest to a much wider audience. The reader interested in other theoretical frameworks will find the discussion in this book easily translatable in the framework of his or her choice - in fact, I would like to claim that the problems posed by this book are inevitable in any theory of syntax and semantics of natural language.
This book provides a snapshot of the field of language acquisition at the beginning of the 21st Century. It represents the multiplicity of approaches that characterize the field and provides a review of current topics and debates, as well as addressing some of the connections between sub-fields and possible future directions for research.