Talbot J. Taylor

Louise G T Cooley Professor of English and Linguistics Talbot J Taylor

John E Joseph, Professor

Is the study of language ideologically neutral? If so, is this study objective and autonomous? One of the most cherished assumptions of modern academic linguistics is that the study of language is, or should be, ideologically neutral. This professed ideological neutrality goes hand-in-hand with claims of scientific objectivity and explanatory autonomy. "Ideologies of Language" counters these claims and assumptions by demonstrating not only their descriptive inaccuracy but also their conceptual incoherence.

Ideologies of Language

Do others understand what we say or write? Do we understand them? Theorists of language and interpretation claim to be more concerned with questions about "what" we understand and "how" we understand, rather than with the logically prior question "whether" we understand each other. An affirmative answer to the latter question is apparently taken for granted. However, in Mutual Misunderstanding, Talbot J. Taylor shows that the sceptical doubts about communicational understanding do in fact have a profoundly important, if as yet unacknowledged, function in the construction of theories of language and interpretation. Mutual Misundertanding thus presents a strikingly original analysis of the rhetorical patterns underlying Western linguistic thought, as exemplified in the works of John Locke, Jacques Derrida, Gottlob Frege, Jonathan Culler, Noam Chomsky, Ferdinand de Saussure, H. Paul Grice, Michael Dummet, Stanley Fish, Alfred Schutz, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Harold Garfinkel, and others. This analysis reveals how, by the combined effect of appeals to "commonsense" and anxieties about implications of relativism, scepticism has a determining role in the discursive development of a number of the intellectual disciplines making up the "human sciences" today, including critical theory, literary hermeneutics, philosophy of language and logic, communication theory, discourse and conversation analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, and linguistics. Consequently, this provocative study will be of value to readers from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

Scepticism and the Theorizing of Language and Interpretation

Mutual Misunderstanding

John Earl Joseph

Nigel Love

Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II introduces the major issues and themes that have determined the development of Western thinking about language, meaning and communication in the twentieth century. Each chapter contains an extract from a 'landmark' text followed by a commentary, which places the ideas in their social and intellectual context. The book is written in an accessible and non-technical manner. The book summarizes the contribution of the key thinkers who have shaped modern linguistics: Austin, Chomsky, Derrida, Firth, Goffman, Harris, Jakobson, Labov, Orwell, Sapir, Whorf and Wittgenstein. This second volume follows on from Landmarks in Linguistic Thought I, which introduces the key thinkers up to the twentieth century. The series is ideal for anyone with an interest in the history of linguistics or of ideas.

Louise G T Cooley Professor of English and Linguistics Talbot J Taylor

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