THE BOOK

This book has the optimistic goal of presenting an overview of some 2500 years of language (& culture) studies, stretching from ancient India to present day America, passing by Hebrew, Arabic, and European traditions. This is side by side with a prior definition of the major components of human language: phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and the overlap of language sciences with neighboring disciplines viz. psychology, history and philosophy. Less optimistic, John Lyons believes that advances in scientific research, have only shown us that we do not know LANGUAGE!