Linguistic Speculations [Paperback]

This 1974 book is a personal survey by an eminent linguist, testing the adequacy of descriptive theories.This 1974 book is a personal survey by an eminent linguist, setting out the position of linguistics, questioning some underlying assumptions, and testing the adequacy of descriptive theories. The problems chosen are those which have forced themselves on Professor Householder during a lifetime of reading, teaching and writing about linguistics.This 1974 book is a personal survey by an eminent linguist, setting out the position of linguistics, questioning some underlying assumptions, and testing the adequacy of descriptive theories. The problems chosen are those which have forced themselves on Professor Householder during a lifetime of reading, teaching and writing about linguistics.This 1974 book is a personal survey by an eminent linguist of most branches of linguistics, setting out its position, questioning some underlying assumptions, and in general testing the adequacy of descriptive theories. Though the underlying theory is basically that of transformational-generative linguistics, there are many queries and disagreements, some of which might be called structuralist in a broad sense, or even taxonomic. The particular problems chosen are those which have forced themselves on Professor Householder during a lifetime of reading, teaching and writing about linguistics, including the justification of linguistic research itself.Preface; 1. The ultimate goals; 2. Remembering and talking; 3. What must a language be like?; 4. Sounds; 5. Sameness, similarity, analogy, rules and features; 6. Mood, modality and illocution; 7. On rules of grammar, ordered and unordered; 8. Subgrammars, planes, levels and components; 9. Phonemes and distinctive features: I; 10. Phonemes and distinctive features: II; 11. Discovery and testing: I phonology; 12. Discovery and testing: II morphology, syntax, semantics; 13. The primacy of writing; 14. Accent, stress, prosodies and tonal featuresló-