The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics

Book excerpt: The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics examines ancient, medieval, post-renaissance, and modern conceptions of linguistics (i.e. the study of language and languages). It identifies a classical tradition to which modern linguistics owes a very clear debt. For example, Aristotle takes language to be (A) a symbolic system that represents (B) the world of our experience as it is contained within the mind. He believed (C) the world is external to human beings, who are all capable of (D) perceiving the same things within it. Finally, (E) Aristotle was only interested in form as a corollary of function. (A-E) have given rise to different developments in linguistics. (A) is a premise for all linguists, but has been developed, perhaps to its limits, in post-Fregean semantics. From the last quarter of the 20th century, (B) has been pursued by cognitive linguists. (C) was taken up by the speculative grammarians of the late middle ages who looked to the structure of God's world as informing the structure of universal grammar. The rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took up (D), revising the interpretation of their speculative precursors to seek universal grammar in the God-given rational minds of the human beings perceiving the world around them. Chomsky reinterprets the rationalist doctrine to seek universal grammar in the human mind while eschewing the relevance of human perception of anything other than linguistic input. Functional linguistics has picked up on (E). So, today's formal linguists, cognitivists, functionalists, and Chomskyites may often be at odds with each other, but all tread in Aristotle's footprints within the western classical tradition. There havebeen times when linguists stepped outside of the tradition, but they nearly always borrowed from