Linguistics at Large: The Fourteen Linguistic Lectures Presented by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 1969-70

A critical review of a series of lectures which may be viewed as the formal capitulation of independent British linguistics. They provide a sort of elementary textbook of linguistics and border fields for nonlinguists. Most of the lectures are models of clarity and present the state of the art well. They include: R. H. Robins on fundamentals, E. Henderson on phonology, John Lyons on transformational syntax, S. Ullmann on semantics, P. F. Strawson on "Meaning, truth and communication," G. Steiner on "Linguistics and literature," E. Leach on culture and language, the Russells on animal communication, M. M. Lewis on child language acquisition, O. L. Zangwill on the brain, B. Bernstein on his "restricted code" and "elaborated code," F. Palmer on English, C. Cherry on "Language and extra-linguistic communication," and R. Quirk on "Linguistics, usage, and the user." Strawson concludes that Grice, Austin, and the late Wittgenstein are correct in basing the notion of "meaning" on a primitive notion of communication, rather than Chomsky, Frege, and early Wittgenstein in regarding language as an abstract formal system. Bernstein's lecture offers no more clarity than his earlier discussions; in fact, his two different codes seem to be clearly just one code. Rather, two sets of users prefer different options available in the same code. Bernstein seems to have perceived an interesting fact, but failed to interpret it correctly. Quirk gives help in the evaluation of sentences marked grammatical or ungrammatical as evidence in linguistic disputes. This is a book which can be given to a layman or undergraduate without serious danger. Modified AA