Reviews for Views On Phrase Structure

The average rating for Views On Phrase Structure based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-11-11 00:00:00 John Wagner My rating of this book is a bit biased, I give it full marks because Michael H. Long basically saved my research proposal at an Applied Linguistics program, I wont go into detail but it changed my perspective quite a bit. Both this book and other publications of his opened my eyes into what a Second Language Acquisition theory should cover and how theory proliferation is affecting the field. It takes its title from Laudan's idea of science being a "problem-solving activity" and tries to place the same rigor to this linguistic area. I read the first two chapters fully and skipped through the parts of Part II: Research I was interested in, this lead me to seek other authors and distracted me into other publications on the Critical Period Hypothesis, I will probably have to either buy or take out this book from the library again soon.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-06-11 00:00:00 Krysta Bruynson Looking at (socio)linguistic questions thru a more cultural studies lens. Hard to get into. Influenced by Foucault and Bakhtin but they don't pop up a lot in the text. Update: finished reading/skimming. An interesting historical look at evolving concepts of 'standard English' from the 18th century to the late 20th in Great Britain. I don't know if I missed something, but it looks like early on, linguists and philologists were OK with saying "it's just what educated people use" which somehow became reified by the 20th century, where 'regular people' were content to see it as an objective reality. I could be misreading it though. Linguists still see it as a problematic concept but it has great currency in popular political and media discourse.