Negation in English and Other Languages
Negation in English and Other Languages

Author: Otto Jespersen

Publisher:

Published: 2020-05-07

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the introductory.The nucleus of the following disquisition is the material collected during many years for the chapter on Negatives in vol. III or IV of my Modern English Grammar (abbreviated MEG), of which the first two volumes appeared in 1909 and 1914 respectively (Winter, Heidelberg). But as the war has prevented me (provisionally, I hope) from printing the continuation of my book, I have thought fit to enlarge the scope of this paper by including remarks on other languages so as to deal with the question of Negation in general as expressed in language. Though I am painfully conscious of the inadequacy of my studies, it is my hope that the following pages may be of some interest to the student of linguistic history, and that even a few of my paragraphs may be of some use to the logician. My work in some respects continues what Delbrück has written on negation in Indo-European languages (Vergl. Syntax 2. 519 if.), but while he was more interested in tracing things back to the "ursprache", I have taken more interest in recent developments and in questions of general psychology and logic....

Chomsky's Minimalism
Chomsky's Minimalism

Author: Pieter A. M. Seuren

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2004-08-26

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 019534667X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Noam Chomsky's current theory, published in 1995, is known as The Minimalist Program and has been presented as his crowning achievement. It argues, familiarly, that there exists a universal grammar that is hardwired, and that, like an efficient machine, this grammar will tend to use the least possible number of constraints (phonetically and syntactically) to produce an utterance. Minimalism has spawned in linguistics an entire research program, despite being fundamentally misguided, according to distinguished linguist and philosopher of language Pieter Seuren. Seuren's accessible and spirited attack argues that the Minimalist Program is deeply flawed. He proposes that it fails to satisfy the basic criteria for sound scientific work, such as respect for data, unambiguous formulations, and falsifiability. Seuren points to the original acrimonious split in the 1960s and 1970s between Chomsky's generative grammar and the alternative generative semantics proposed by his followers, and argues that the latter theory was sounder and unfairly suppressed. Seuren maintains that this suppression--and the cult surrounding Chomsky and Minimalism more generally--has done great damage to linguistics by impairing open discussion of empirical issues and excluding valid alternatives. Chomsky's Minimalism will generate controversy among linguists in its attack on the fundamental assumptions used by an entire generation of researchers.