From the publication of Noam Chomsky's revolutionary Syntactic Structures in 1957, to the counter-revolutions that followed, linguistics has seen many fashions over the years. With new ideas and discoveries constantly challenging the ways we look at language, Ronald Macaulay provides a brief and lively introduction to some of the different approaches linguists have taken to the study of language in all its complexity.
Considering language as Meaning, Sound, Form, Communication, Identity, History and Symbol, Macaulay examines the main issues, debates and ideas that have emerged in...