Language, thought, and logic

"John M. Ellis's Against Deconstruction was hailed as the definitive critique of that complex movement. Now in Language, Thought and Logic Ellis surmounts the impasse and confusion in theory of language to develop a new and strikingly original view.". "In a field "which seems to tempt everyone to begin again conceptually at the beginning," Ellis observes, many of the initial assumptions made by people who talk and theorize about language are logical mistakes virtually impossible to recover from once made. From this reorientation, Ellis argues that categorization, not syntax, is the most fundamental aspect and process of language, and that neither anything else in language nor, indeed, its purposes can be properly understood until the nature of categorization has been grasped. In the same spirit, he analyzes the notion of grammar and the place of language in human thought. He examines some traditional problems of philosophy in an attempt to show both how they result from an inadequate theory of language and how the view of language developed here leads to a solution of these problems and thus to a redirection of inquiry in the field, and suggests that the process of inquiry in the discipline of linguistics has been fundamentally misdirected because of the logical errors discussed. Supporting these incisive arguments with lucid criticisms of Chomsky and demonstrations of common misreadings of Saussure and Whorf, Ellis establishes a new general picture of linguistic theory and suggests the major implications of that picture. Powerful, rigorous, and innovative, Language, Thought, and Logic makes an important contribution to the understanding of contemporary linguistics."--BOOK JACKET.