Ebook: Linguistic Theory: The Discourse of Fundamental Works

This series is intended for students at both postgraduate and undergraduate levels, and aims at providing a broad view of the subject such as is difficult to obtain exclusively from scholarly journals and monographs. "Linguistic Theory" is a survey of the leading work of the most important 20th-century linguisticians, including de Saussure, Firth, Chomsky, Halliday and Van Dijk. An understanding of past theories is crucial to studying modern linguistics and this text presents both the range of theories in themselves as they developed chronologically and a historical perspective on that development. To do this the author employs the unusual strategy of a close reading of these works as discourse performances and strives to uncover their main points and characteristics in the linguists' own words. The author uses the historical perspective to assess the future prospects for linguistic study and special scrutiny is made of how far the linguists followed their own theories.