Noam Chomsky's current theory, published in 1995, is known as The Minimalist Program and has been presented as his crowning achievement. It argues, familiarly, that there exists a universal grammar that is hardwired, and that, like an efficient machine, this grammar will tend to use the least possible number of constraints (phonetically and syntactically) to produce an utterance. Minimalism has spawned in linguistics an entire research program, despite being fundamentally misguided, according to distinguished linguist and philosopher of language Pieter Seuren.

Seuren's accessible...

This book contains a collection of twenty-two papers written by the author between 1972 and 1999, reflecting the development of his highly independent ideas over this period. The papers, which are still topical today, are divided into four sections: General Theory, Syntax, Semantics, and Creole Linguistics.

This book provides a vital student resource - a single-volume critical survey of the complete history of Western theoretical linguistics (grammar and semantics, including logic) from Plato till today.

The volume concentrates on those issues that are of central concern to present-day theoretical linguistics, but also draws attention to episodes and issues that have unjustifiably slid into oblivion, such as the 18th century French grammarians or the great subject-predicate debate between 1850 and 1930. An effort has also been made to interpret events and developments in linguistic...

The Logic of Language opens a new perspective on logic. Pieter Seuren argues that the logic of language derives from the lexical meanings of the logical operators. These meanings, however, prove not to be consistent. Seuren solves this problem through an indepth analysis of the functional adequacy of natural predicate logic and standard modern logic for natural linguistic interaction. He then develops a general theory of discourse-bound interpretation, covering discourse incrementation, anaphora, presupposition and topic-comment structure, all of which, the author claims, form the 'cement' of...

This book presents and exemplifies the theory of grammar called Semantic Syntax. The grammar, which offers a syntactic theory closely connected with semantic analyses, is a direct continuation of Generative Semantics; it will re-ignite interest in that framework which flourished and promised so much in the 1960s and 1970s.

Dr Seuren's study deals with the problem of presenting an adequate model of grammatical description.

This book explores the relations between language, the world, the minds of individual speakers, and the collective minds of particular language communities. Pieter Seuren examines the status of abstract rule systems underlying speech and considers how much computational power may be attributed to the human mind. The book opens with chapters on the social reality of language, the ancient question of the primacy of language or thought, and the relation between universal and language-specific features. Professor Seuren then considers links between language, logic, and mathematics: he suggests...