Grammatical Theory in the United States From Bloomfield to Chomsky [Paperback]

A history of linguistic theory in America, focusing on Chomsky and BloomfieldConcentrating on the influential ideas of Bloomfield and Chomsky, this history of the spread and growing dominance of North American linguistic theory provides an account of the development and continuity of linguistics in an invaluable survey.Concentrating on the influential ideas of Bloomfield and Chomsky, this history of the spread and growing dominance of North American linguistic theory provides an account of the development and continuity of linguistics in an invaluable survey.This is a history of the spread and dominance of North American linguistic theory, concentrating on the influential ideas of Bloomfield and Chomsky. It gives an account of the development and continuity of three dominant ideas in linguistics: the study of formal relations can and should be separated from that of meaning; sentences are composed of linear configurations of morphemes; many aspects of grammar are determined genetically. This is an invaluable survey for all linguists wishing to trace the origins of their discipline.Preface; Note on the text; Abbreviations; 1. Introduction; 2. Bloomfield's morphology and its successors; 3. Distributional syntax; 4. Chomsky's philosophy of grammar; References; Index.