Language: Communication and Human Behavior: The Linguistic Essays of William Diver

✍ Scribed by Alan Huffman, Joseph Davis

• Publisher: Brill
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 574
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

William Diver of Columbia University (1921-1995) critiqued the very roots of traditional and contemporary linguistics and founded a school of thought that aims for radical aposteriorism in accounting for the distribution of linguistic forms in authentic text. Grammatical and phonological analyses of Homeric Greek, Classical Latin, and Modern English reveal language to be an instrument whose structure is shaped by its communicative function and by the peculiarly human characteristics of its users. Diver's foundational works, many never before published, appear here newly edited and annotated, with introductions by the editors. The volume presents for the first time to a wide audience the depth and originality of Diver's iconoclastic thought.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction: The Enduring Legacy of William Diver
Part One Introduction to Diver's Thought
1 Substance and Value in Linguistic Analysis
2 The Nature of Linguistic Meaning
3 The Elements of a Science of Language
Part Two Greek
4 The Dual
5 Putting the Horse Before the Cart: Linguistic Analysis and Linguistic Theory
6 The System of Relevance of the Homeric Verb
7 Spheres of Interaction: Linguistic Analysis and Literary Analysis
Part Three Latin
8 The Subjunctive Without Syntax
9 Latin Voice and Case
10 Avoidance of the Obvious: The Pronoun as a Minimax Solution
11 The Latin Demonstratives
12 Latin se
Part Four Phonology
13 Phonology as Human Behavior
14 The Phonology of the Extremes Or, What is a Problem?
15 The Phonological Motivation for Verner’s Law and Grimm’s Law
Part Five Linguistic Theories
16 Traditional Grammar and Its Legacy in Twentieth-Century Linguistics
17 Theory
Recapitulation The History of Linguistics
18 The History of Linguistics in the West: How the Study of Language Went Wrong in the Western Tradition
Bibliography of William Diver
General Bibliography
Index