Persistent Topics in Linguistic Theory

Diogenes, vol. 13, 1965. 8 pages.Among the topics of contemporary interest there are the following: the creative aspect of language use; systems of abstract structures that underlie the phenomena of performance; the universal conditions on underlying structures; models of perception and acquisition that incorporate an advance specification of general features of what is perceived or learned.The author comments on an earlier tradition in which topics of the same sort were intensively explored namely the seventeenth and eighteenth century tradition of "universal or philosophical grammar, and the essentially Cartesian philosophy of mind from which, in part, it developed.