What Would We Have Done Without Chomsky? An Alternative History Of Linguistics In The Last Century

• Authors: Roger T. Bell
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper probes the current orthodoxy in linguistics by imagining and speculating on a fantasy world: a century of development without Transformational Generative Grammar which leads to an autonomous linguistics with its roots in the human sciences, as an offshoot of [cognitive] anthropology or sociology, rather than in cognitive psychology. Such a linguistics would, by now, have created a broad, sophisticated, holistic theory of language as a multilevel, social phenomenon in which semantics, syntax, and pragmatics would be modeled as distinguishable but interlocked and interacting systems. What will be discussed will, it is hoped, make a small contribution to outlining what an alternative linguistics might still look like, not as a replacement of the present models and theories but as an extension and enhancement of them in our common search for an adequate description and explanation of the phenomenon of human language.

Keywords

EN

history of linguistics; generative grammar; methodology

• Publisher: Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk
• Journal: Lingua Posnaniensis
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 50
• Pages: 37-46

Contributors

author

Roger T. Bell

• Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation Hankuk University of Foreign Studies 270 Imun-Dong Dongdaemun-Gu Seoul 130-791 South Korea