'Linguistics' tag archive

David Sosa (ed.) Bad Words: Philosophical Perspectives on Slurs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 256pp., $60 hb., 978 01 98758 655. ‘Slurs’ – understood here to be particular words designed by convention to derogate targeted individuals or groups – are a puzzling category of speech, which raise a variety of philosophical questions pertaining to their […]

Timely Meditations Jonathan Ree Review Essay on Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, 201pp. £25 hb, £7.95 pb, 0521353815 hb, o 521 36781 6 pb. It is now some years since Richard Rorty broke with American analytic philosophy, for reasons he spelt out in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature […]

Noam Chomsky An Interview RP: In the 19S0s and ’60s, the bridge between your theoretical work and your political work seems to have been the attack on behaviourism, which then dominated not only psychology but the various social sciences as well, which were often used to justify capitalism and imperialism. But now, partly because of […]

But even given this and many other preconditions – of which the careful reading of one anothers’ texts must be the most important – it may be that there is a limit soon reached where nothing more can be yielded, and nothing more defined; and it would be plausible to conjecture that those very reasons […]

/ NOTIS Radical Llggulslic:s It is perhaps not immediately obvious how there could be a radical linguistics. After all, much linguistics, particularly grammatical theory, has no obvious political or social significance. Chomsky was recognizing this when he wrote some years ago that ‘I do not see any way to make my work as a linguist […]

REPORTS HEm ~!……Discussion Weekend at Universi t..L..£.f2 ent , ,?2::.?Z__ .:!..~e first, insofar as its ‘problems’ arc emplr ~~l’: _ l,rohlems (knowledge of the external world, causality, other minJ~, personal identity, etc.), and secondly, insofar as it retain the same ideological orientation as classical empiricism. Epistemology is by its very nature prescriptive; it is for […]

Nous sommes tous néokantiens.Michel Foucault1In the 1980s and early 1990s, when poststructuralism set the agenda in cultural theory and shaped the way in which theorists from other traditions were received, the work of the Bakhtin Circle was often seen as anticipating contemporary concerns to a quite uncanny extent. While some adopted Bakhtin as a poststructuralist […]

News Strategies for language? Being a modern linguist is a pretty rotten business. Applications to study modern languages in UK universities have fallen by over a third in the last decade. Whilst Spanish and to a lesser extent Italian have fared reasonably well, other languages are in rapid decline. University applications have directly reflected falling […]