17.188, Review: General Ling/Phil of Lang:Chapman&Routledge (2005)

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Subject: 17.188, Review: General Ling/Phil of Lang:Chapman&Routledge (2005)

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1)
Date: 17-Jan-2006
From: Anca Gata < Anca.Gata at ugal.ro >
Subject: Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 04:29:10
From: Anca Gata < Anca.Gata at ugal.ro >
Subject: Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language 
 

EDITORS: Chapman, Siobhan; Routledge, Christopher
TITLE: Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language
PUBLISHERS: Edinburgh University Press & Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1775.html 

Anca Gata, Department of Applied Modern Languages, ''Dunarea de 
Jos'' University of Galati, Romania

DESCRIPTION

This volume is a collection of entries concerning some of the most 
representative thinkers in the fields of Linguistics and the Philosophy 
of Language.

The book opens with a Preface (pages ix-x) of the editors, includes 
Notes on Contributors (names and affiliation -- pages xi-xii), and an 
Index (pages 279-282). 

The 80 key thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language are 
each dealt with separately in entries ranged in alphabetical order. The 
entries vary between 1 and 8 pages, and include each a short 
bibliography consisting of 'Primary works' belonging to the author and 
a list of 'Further Reading', which mentions some of the most important 
writings about the authors, the nature of their contribution and critical 
approaches. 

The key thinkers in the volume represent the 'Western tradition of 
thought' (page ix), belonging to the European and American areas. 
These key thinkers are: Aristotle, Arnauld, Austin, Ayer, Bakhtin, 
Barthes, Benveniste, Berkeley, Bernstein, Bloomfield, Boas, Bopp, 
Bourdieu, Brugmann, Cameron, Carnap, Chomsky, Davidson, Derrida, 
Descartes, Dummett, Firth, Fodor, Frege, Geach, Goodman, 
Greenberg, Greimas, Grice, Grimm, Halliday, Hegel, Hjelmslev, 
Hockett, Humboldt, Hume, Husserl, Jakobson, Jones, Kant, Kripke, 
Kristeva, Labov, Lacan, Leibniz, Lewis, Locke, Malinowski, Martinet, 
Marx, Mill, Milroy, Montague, Moore, Morris, Peirce, Piaget, Pike, 
Plato, Popper, Putnam, Quine, Ramsey, Rask, Russell, Ryle, Sacks, 
Sapir, Saussure, Searle, Sinclair, Skinner, Strawson, Tannen, Tarski, 
Todorov, Trubetzkoy, Whorf, Wittgenstein. 

The selection criteria of the key thinkers, as mentioned in the Preface, 
appear to have been the following: they belong to a tradition 
extending from antiquity to the present day; they represent 
the ''Western tradition of thought''; they are mainly linguists and 
philosophers, but also ''psychologists, anthropologists, cognitive 
scientists, critical theorists and mathematicians''; they have ''an 
important contribution to the description or the theory of language''; 
they ''worked with the subject''; they ''have been significant in similar 
areas of thought''; they ''influenced or were influenced by the subject''; 
they provided in their work ''significant contrast'' to established 
theories (p. ix). The first four criteria apply to all of the thinkers, while 
the last ones only partially and only to some of them.

As mentioned in the editors' Preface, the entries describe the work of 
thinkers mainly in the fields of linguistics and philosophy, but also in 
psychology, anthropology, cognitive sciences, critical theory, 
mathematics, since these have contributed in important ways to the 
description or to the theory of language.

An overview of the each particular thinker's work is provided in each 
entry, in some cases preceded by a short biographical presentation -- 
''where this is relevant to illuminating the character of the thinker or 
explaining his or her career and ideas in their historical and cultural 
context'' (p. ix). 

The short presentation below is meant to give an idea on the contents 
of some entries.

Logic, thought, meaning and language -- Russell gave a most notable 
theory on descriptions, by applying a logical treatment to natural 
language. Ryle elaborated a 'concept of mind' later developed by 
representatives of analytic philosophy in Oxford and argued that, in 
studying meaning, one has to study the word and not an abstract 
notion of meaning. Wittgenstein considered language ''as a goal-
directed and use-governed system of communication'', thus coining 
the concept of 'language game'. Tarski proved that it is impossible to 
define truth within a natural language in a comprehensible way. 
Carnap contributed to the development of analytical philosophy and 
investigated meaning matters; under Tarski's influence, he worked on 
the semantics of modal operators, by also providing an elaboration of 
the notions of extension and intension previously discussed by Frege. 
Quine criticized Carnap, by arguing that notions such as meaning and 
synonymy can not be applied to natural languages and by advancing 
the idea that we hold a theory of the world biased by a system of 
sentences and influenced as such by our sensory experience and by 
our knowledge of language. Strawson argued that logical and natural 
language conditionals differ in that in natural language the entities in 
conditional relationship are also in some causal connection while this 
is not the case in logical conditional. Grice, who also worked with 
Strawson on Aristotle's categories, developed Strawson's ideas on 
meaning, distinguishing between 'what is said' and 'what is implicated'; 
Grice also gave a psychological account on linguistic communication 
seen as being co-operative and end-driven, which has been the basis 
of an important number of studies in contemporary pragmatic studies. 
Davidson advanced the thesis of the compositionality of meaning, 
which asserts that the meaning of a sentence is generated from the 
meanings of its parts; subsequent development of some areas in 
linguistics relies on this idea, such as research in the meaning of 
connectives and quantifiers. Lewis's contribution is best represented 
by his work on possible worlds as represented in language in 
counterfactual conditionals.

Development of linguistics -- Bloomfield is known for having largely 
used the concept of 'phoneme' (devised by Baudouin de Courtenay) 
and insisted that sound is the first element that should be examined in 
linguistics, and meaning afterwards. Unlike Bloomfield, Sapir 
considered meaning to be essential in language. Whorf is the father of 
the concept of 'allophony'. Whorf advocated, in the same line with 
Sapir, for linguistic relativity, which consists in considering a linguistic 
community's perception of the world as determined by the language 
they use. This is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Trubetzkoy 
was -- within the Prague School -- the founder of phonology as distinct 
from phonetics, and studied the phonological systems and the 
prosody of ''hundreds of languages'', his work being mainly focused on 
synchrony. Benveniste developed his own conception of language use 
by establishing his theory of subjectivity, based on the notion 
of 'enunciation', largely made use of in subsequent French linguistic 
and literary studies; he was mainly interested in the speaker's activity 
and his intervention in discourse by means of deictics. 

Linguistics and literature -- Influenced in some respect by Benveniste, 
Barthes is the father of the 'writing degree zero' theory, which argues 
in favour of the idea that an objective representation of reality in 
literature is impossible, since writing depends on history and on 
personal beliefs and mythologies. Also influenced by Benveniste, 
Todorov has extensively used linguistics in his literary studies, by 
showing that the object of a literary text is its creation, in a way related 
to Blanchot's (1955) approach to literature. Influenced by Lacan, 
Derrida, Barthes, Kristeva is the author of the theory of intertextuality, 
as well as of the notions of genotext and phenotext; her work is 
underlied by Bakhtin's notion of dialogism.

Conversation and Discourse Analysis -- Sacks mainly exposed his 
views on linguistic interaction in his lectures 'on conversation', 
constitutive of the discipline; he was interested by the study of 
conversational turn taking, conversational units, conversational 
patterns, openings, closing, topic organisation, sequencing, repairs, 
use of pronouns and performatives. Tannen's main contribution is in 
gender studies and her idea is that men and women speak differently. 
Cameron criticizes Tannen for this approach, by arguing that in fact 
language ''calls the (gendered) identity of speakers into existence''.

The entries include an analysis of one or several aspects of the ideas 
and / or theories brought to light by each thinker and a 'See also' list 
of authors. This list provides names of other authors dealt with in the 
volume who have been concerned by the same issues and have 
contributed to deepening the ideas or theories belonging to each 
particular key thinker; it is worth mentioning the editors' wish to track 
significant relationships between the key thinkers: ''In addition, other 
key thinkers who have their own entries are indicated with an asterisk 
when first mentioned in an entry. These two types of cross-
referencing allow influences, commonalities and continuities in thinking 
to be traced to other contemporary work, and across the history of 
ideas.'' (p. ix) 

Biographical details are provided with reference to important contacts 
for the work of the authors dealt with: Jakobson ''established friendly 
relations with ... Boas, Whorf and Bloomfield'' in the US; during 
vacations, Daniel Jones, a mathematician and a lawyer by education, 
studied phonetics in France with ''Paul Passy, the leading phonetician 
of the time'', who convinced and helped the former ''to take up a 
career in phonetics''; Katz began his career under the influence of 
Chomsky; Kristeva worked with Lucien Goldmann, Barthes, Jacques 
Dubois, Claude Lévi-Strauss, she met Lacan, Derrida, Michel 
Foucault, and married Philippe Sollers; Labov was Uriel Weinreich's 
student and later they worked together; Quine had contacts with 
Dummett, Strawson, Grice, Geach, Davidson, Lewis, Carnap, Tarski; 
Ramsey visited Wittgenstein in Austria; the latter ''acknowledged 
Ramsey's role in helping him realise the errors in his own earlier 
philosophy ''.

The biographical information also sheds light on: 
-- the authors' families: Ayer's mother ''came from the wealthy Dutch 
Jewish family that gave its name'' to the Citroën car company; Hegel 
had three children; Husserl's ''son Wolfgang was killed in the Western 
Front at Verdun'' (which caused him not writing for a long period of 
time); Katz was married twice and Russell four times; Ramsey's 
brother was archbishop of Canterbury while Ramsay himself was ''a 
staunch atheist''; 
-- their hobbies: Grice used to play bridge, chess and ''was a 
passionate fan of cricket''; Hockett had musical talents; Katz dreamed, 
in his youth, of a career in professional football; Rask travelled a lot 
during his life (his ''great voyage extended from 1816 to 1823, across 
Sweden, Finland, Russia, Persia, India) and he is supposed to ''have 
had relevant knowledge of about fifty-five languages'', besides 
English, Swedish and Icelandic; their vicious habits, peculiar way of 
being or some strange aspects of their lives: Grice was a ''heavy 
smoker''; Kant '' is said never to have left the area of Königsberg 
[where he was born] during his entire life''; Katz was ''such a dynamic 
character that a friend once said that talking to him was like talking to 
five people''; Ramsey had an ''infectious sense of humour'', just like 
Grice, who enjoyed discussions and whose examples have a ''bizarre 
humour''; 
-- their non linguistic or non philosophical career: during World War II, 
Austin ''was an intelligence officer at the Supreme Headquarters of the 
Allied Expeditionary Force, active in preparations for D-Day, and 
reached the rank of lieutenant colonel''; Barthes worked as a 
teacher and as a librarian; Grimm ''spent over a third of his working life 
as a librarian with light duties; Humboldt ''was also a lawyer and a 
statesman'', a minister of public instruction, later dismissed from the 
Prussian government because of political difference with other 
statesmen; Hume never got an academic post, working as ''a private 
tutor, as a law librarian, and as a secretary to various commanders 
and diplomats overseas; Ramsey lived as a ''reclusive school teacher''; 
Whorf was a fire prevention officer all his life;
-- the poor health condition of some of the authors: Barthes suffered 
with tuberculosis ''from the age of 10 until his early thirties''; 
Benveniste ''suffered a heart attack in 1956 and a stroke in 1969 that 
crippled him and robbed him of the ability to speak for the rest of his 
life''; Grice was ''increasingly affected by a chronic cough'', 
later ''diagnosed with emphysema and suffered deteriorating health''; 
Hume (aged 66) died ''after an illness lasting two years''; 
-- the cause or circumstances of their death: Austin (aged 49), Katz 
(70), Whorf (41), Wittgenstein (62) died of cancer, Hegel (61) of 
cholera, Skinner (86) of leukemia, Russell (98) of influenza, Husserl 
(79), ''apparently'', of pleurisy; Trubetzkoy (48) died of a heart 
attack ''after a brutal Gestapo raid on his home''; Barthes (65) ''was 
knocked down while crossing the road in Paris and died a month later 
from his injuries'', Lewis (60) ''died suddenly ... from complications 
arising from diabetes'', Sacks (40) died in a car accident, Berkeley 
(68) also died ''quite unexpectedly'', while Jones (86) died ''peacefully''.

The Index includes selected concepts, theories, disciplines, methods, 
approaches (such as 'analytic philosophy', 'causal 
semantics', 'distinctive features', 'intentionality', 'modality', 'proper 
names', 'semantics', 'truth theories', etc.) and names of authors either 
dealt with or referred to in the volume.

There are 30 contributors to the volume (including the editors), 
academics and researchers from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, 
Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, 
the UK, the USA. Siobhan Chapman contributed seven articles to the 
volume, 6 other contributors, among whom the second editor, 
Christopher Routledge, authored four articles, 8 -- three articles, 13 -- 
two articles, while 3 of the contributors wrote one article. The 
contributions are as follows: 
Baicchi, Annalisa: Russell; 
Baldwin, Jennifer A.: Arnauld, Boas, Piaget, Pike; 
Carr, Phillip: Popper; 
Chapman, Siobhan: Ayer, Grice, Leibniz, Morris, Ramsey, Ryle, 
Strawson; 
Clark, Billy: Davidson, Descartes; 
Cowie, Claire: Bourdieu, Kripke; 
Einheuser, Iris: Carnap, Putnam; 
Elhindi, Yousif: Greenberg, Saussure; 
Garcia-Alvarez, Ivan: Frege, Geach, Lewis, Montague; 
Gianto, Agustino: Aristotle, Hockett, Sacks;
Götzche, Hans: Dummett, Hjelmslev, Jakobson, Rask; 
Hermann-Kaliner, Eva: Goodman, Martinet; 
Honeybone, Patrick: Brugmann, Firth, Grimm, Trubetzkoy; 
Kasher, Asa: Austin, Moore; 
Kaye, Alan S.: Bopp, Humboldt, Pike; 
Kousta, Stavroula-Thaleia: Kristeva, Mill; 
Newman, Anthony: Fodor, Searle; 
Pietarinen, Ahti-Veikko: Peirce, Wittgenstein; 
Piller, Ingrid: Bakhtin, Cameron, Tannen; 
Poole, Geoffrey: Chomsky, Plato, Skinner; 
Rajagopalan, Kanavillil: Benveniste, Derrida, Katz; 
Routledge, Cristopher: Barthes, Berkeley, Hume, Todorov; 
Safarova, Marie: Lacan, Quine; 
Scott, Mike: Sapir, Sinclair, Whorf; 
Strässler, Jürg: Jones, Tarski;
Thompson, Geoffrey: Halliday; 
Watt, Dominic: Labov, Milroy; 
Willems, Klaas: Husserl, Kant; 
Williams, John: Bernstein, Greimas, Malinowski; 
Witkosky, David V.: Bloomfield, Hegel, Marx. 

EVALUATION

The 'Primary works' section in each article is of great value mainly to 
students and young researchers willing to study an author's most 
important contributions to the development of ideas in the field. This 
section also provides in the case of the Tannen entry (p. 261) a 
reference to the web page of the author dealt with. The 'Further 
reading' section is also of great help: it provides a bibliographical list 
of approaches to the work and theories of the author. In some cases, 
it may contain a reference to web pages providing bibliographical 
support (Austin, Peirce, Ramsey entries). The 'See also' section 
provides an overview The entries are not meant to provide a critical 
perspective on the authors. They help to situate the author's work, his 
or her influence in the evolvement and development of the philosophy 
of language and / or linguistics. Yet, there are some indirect critical 
considerations in various entries, such as: Bernstein's work ''has been 
criticised ... however, his original research on language codes has 
been developed into models ... [and] influenced a wide range of 
researchers and policy makers around the world'' (one is not told who 
these are and in what respect their achievements are significant) (p. 
34); many of Chomsky's admirers in the area of the radical liberal 
left ''are hardly even aware of his huge stature in linguistics and the 
philosophy of language'' (p. 53).

The Index is particularly helpful in facilitating the reader's task of 
finding notions and concepts and of identifying other possible 
approaches to the same topics throughout the book. Personally, 
taking into account the existence of the Index, I would have found it 
appropriate in the entries to use a particular typographical marking for 
the names and concepts listed in the Index so as to facilitate cross-
referencing ('logic', occurring on 24 different pages, according to the 
index, or 'Chomsky', occurring on 31 pages beside those specially 
concerned with him). This would have ensured the readers' 
awareness of the possibility of skimming through other entries to 
enhance their knowledge or representation of some concept, theory, 
investigation method or author (it may also be possible that the editors 
have considered such a marking unpleasant for the reader since the 
entries contain many occurrences of notions and concepts). A 
branching presentation of the notions and concepts in the Index is 
also judged more appropriate; for instance, 'knowledge' is found in the 
Index only under 'knowledge by acquaintance v. knowledge by 
description' (pages 231-2) and 'knowledge, philosophy of' (pages 1-3, 
74, 76, 102, 135, 154-158, 272), while one can also list 'empirical 
knowledge' (page 2), 'knowledge in sciences' (page 6), 'elements of 
knowledge' (page 8), 'system of knowledge' (page 72), 'knowledge' 
(pages 73, 76), 'scientific and non-scientific knowledge' (page 
214), 'objective knowledge' (page 215), 'linguistic knowledge', 
'knowledge of language', 'knowledge of the world' (page 216). 

I also consider that the Index could ensure, by subsequent extension 
in the next editions of the volume, a wider and more convenient 
treatment of the topics approached: notions (such as 'argument', 
'falsifiability', 'meaning', 'mental image'), parts of speech (such as 
'noun', 'adjective', etc.) should be included in the Index, even if 
they occur only once in the entries, since other terms or names 
occurring only once are presently included in the Index as it is. Being 
particularly interested in argumentation, I found it frustrating 
that 'argument' is not indexed, although it is present in the entries (p. 
74), and that 'argumentation' is cross-referenced to 'reasoning' in the 
Index, although the notion is also present on other pages (p. 8). Many 
other concepts, notions, theories or approaches need mentioning in 
the Index -- a few examples will suffice: 'grammeme', 'tagmeme' (p. 
206), 'truthfulness' (p. 215), 'philosophy of science' (p. 215) possible 
worlds. I hope that subsequent editions of the book will improve the 
presentation of the Index, which can be in itself a more than precious 
tool for the insights it gives to issues of linguistics and the philosophy 
of language. Such a presentation would ensure the volume a 
remarkable quality. 

The biographical sketch is important in more than one way: it gives 
details on the historical background in which some of the key thinkers 
lived and developed their thought; it relates the personality of the 
author to his or her family, social background, education, contacts, 
scientific and / or professional and social activity; it sheds light upon 
less obvious or known aspects of his or her life having influenced his 
or her work. One characteristic of most entries is that they provide 
anecdotical information on the 'key thinkers', which is valuable and 
interesting, since reading their works does not tell us anything about 
their personal and social lives and interactions. Unlike other 
personalities, political or artistic, linguists are rarely viewed from this 
perspective. Personally, I consider it enriching and rewarding to find 
biographical details on the authors, especially when this relates to the 
evolvement of new thought.

Nevertheless, for some of the authors dealt with, I find that there is 
much more biographical information than information on their work 
and contribution to Linguistics and / or the Philosophy of Language. 
This is the case with Benveniste, Hegel, whose contributions to the 
field are overviewed in a little more or less than half a page, compared 
to that of Todorov, for instance, which is described over two pages. 
This is probably the result of the volume being the work of several 
authors, whose information and way of approaching it is necessarily 
distinct. 

Who is missing from the book? Hard to tell, taking into account the 
somewhat non-homogenous selection criteria. A very tentative, and of 
course subjective, alphabetical list could include, of course, among 
others: Anscombre, Bal, Comrie, Coseriu (considered a few years 
ago, before his death, the greatest linguist alive), Crawshay-Williams, 
Crystal, Ducrot, Eemeren, Fleischman, Goffman, Guillaume (whose 
work is almost unknown to readers of English), Jespersen, Kerbrat-
Orecchioni, Naess, Nolke, Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca (whose 
treatise on argumentation is meaningful in many respects to research 
in philosophy and linguistics), Wierzbicka.

One typo in the Index: D. Wilson's first name is misspelt 'Dierdre' 
for 'Deirdre', under the entry Sperber ... (p. 282). I also identified other 
typos: title of French volume, whose correct spelling is ''Grammaire 
générale et raisonnée'' (p.8), ''determine's'' is misspelt for ''determines'' 
(p. 130), a hardspace is missing between ''p'' and ''is'' (p. 141).

On the whole, the volume is of good quality, a valuable endeavour for 
bringing together linguistics and the philosophy of language. 

Some of its greatest merits could be summarized as follows: 
-- the perspective it proposes does not take for granted the readers' 
familiarity with the subjects and topics dealt with, by thus making it 
equally accessible and a precious tool for students, academics and 
researchers; 
-- it brings together in one single book significant thought 
developments; 
-- it can be used as a very useful and handy reference resource; 
-- it provides an updated list of the most important readings in one 
specific domain, as recent as 2003 (the latest is 2005, in the entry for 
Grice, p. 114); 
-- it provides biographical insight, which is very likely to be very difficult 
to find elsewhere; this is of much use especially in pedagogical 
approaches, since students are often willing to know. 

I find the volume very useful, quite easy to consult and use in teaching 
and research, especially valuable for under and postgraduates and I 
really believe that it filled a gap when this was really needed.

REFERENCE

Blanchot, Maurice (1955) L'espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Anca Gata is a Professor of French language and of Linguistics at 
Dunarea de Jos University in Galati, Romania. She also coordinates 
the group of Argumentation and Rhetoric Studies within the Center of 
Discourse Theory and Practice at the same university. Her research 
interests include the relationship between tenses and illocutionary 
force of the utterance, speech act theory, discourse analysis, theory 
of argumentation (pragma-dialectical approach; strategy of 
dissociation). She has published a volume on the French future and 
one on the act of prediction. She is presently carrying out research on 
argumentative strategies in media, public and electronic forum 
discourse in French within the CNRS Laboratory "Communication et 
Politique" in Paris.





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