Language Science And Structure

Language, Science, and Structure

This work provides a new framework for understanding some of the most profound theories of human language. Ryan M. Nefdt touches on philosophical questions of what languages are, how they evolved and what the science of language should be. He takes insights and results from the natural and formal sciences and translates them into a new domain. His book offers the reader new ways of appreciating how the most unique of human traits--our ability to process and produce natural language--has been and can be studied from a scientific point of view.

Language, Science, and Structure

The Emergence of the Modern Language Sciences

Alongside considerable continuity, 20th-century diachronic linguistics has seen substantial shifts in outlook and procedure from the 19th-century paradigm. Our understanding of what is really new and what is recycled owes a great debt to E. F. K. Koerner's minutely researched interpretations of the work of the field's founders and key transitional figures. At the cusp of the 21st century, some of the best known scholars in the field explore how these methodological shifts have been and continue to be played out in historical Romance, Germanic and Indo-European linguistics, as well as in work outside these traditional areas. These 22 studies, honouring the founder of Diachronica and other publication ventures that have helped revitalize historical enquiry in recent decades, include examinations of Indo-European methodology and the reconstructions carried out by Bloomfield and Sapir; the search for relatives of Indo-European; comparative, structural and sociolinguistic analyses of the history of the Romance languages; regular vs. morpholexical approaches to OHG umlaut; and the synchrony and diachrony of gender affixes in Tsez.