Thomas Hobbes  

English Philosopher/Linguist
Born: 1588
Died: 1679

English philosopher, mathematician, and linguist. Hobbes was born of an impoverished clerical family in Malmesbury, Wiltshire. At school he quickly excelled, making a reputation as a linguist and fluent poet and translator. After Oxford he entered the the employment of William Cavendish, and except for a short interval remained secretary, tutor, and general advisor to the family for the rest of his career. His employment included several "Grand Tours" during which he met the leading European intellectuals of his time. As a spokesman for the royalist Devonshires, Hobbes was caught up in the turmoil preceding the Civil War, and fled to France in 1640, remaining there until 1651.

Hobbes developed a materialist and highly pessimistic philosophy that was denounced in his own day and later, but has had a continuing influence on Western political thought. His Leviathan (1651) presents a bleak picture of human beings in the state of nature, where life is "nasty, brutish, and short." Fear of violent death is the principal motive that causes people to create a state by contracting to surrender their natural rights and to submit to the absolute authority of a sovereign. Although the power of the sovereign derived originally from the people, Hobbes said-challenging the doctrine of the divine right of kings-the sovereign's power is absolute and not subject to review by either subjects or ecclesiastical powers. Hobbes's concept of the social contract led to investigations by other political theorists, notably Locke, Spinoza, and Rousseau, who formulated their own radically different theories of the social contract. Because of his writings, especially "Leviathan", Hobbes lived in serious danger of prosecution after the restoration of Charles II.

Hobbes's principal interests in his later years were translations, and he lived out his old age at the Devonshire's home.


Descriptive linguistics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Descriptive Linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing the actual language spoken now, or in the past, by any group of people. Accurate description of real speech is a very difficult problem and linguists have often been reduced to very inaccurate approximations.
Almost all linguistic theory had its origin in practical problems of descriptive linguistics. Phonetics (and its theoretical developments such as phonemes) has dealt with how to pronounce languages. Syntax has developed to describe what is going on once phonetics has reduced spoken language to a control level. Lexicography collects "words" and has not given rise to much theory.
An extreme mentalist viewpoint appears to deny that the linguistic description of a language can be done by anyone but a competent speaker. Such a speaker has internalized something called "linguistic competence" which gives them the ability to correctly extrapolate from their experience to new but correct expressions and to reject unacceptable expressions. Be that as it may be there are practical immediate needs for linguistic descriptions and we cannot wait for a full exploration of linguistic competence.
There are tens of thousands of linguistic descriptions of thousands of languages that were prepared by people without adequate linguistic training. With a few honorable exceptions all linguistic descriptions done before, say, 1900, are amateur productions.
A linguistic description would currently be considered good if it:
1. described the phonology of the language and established a practical orthography.
2. described the morphology of words.
3. described the syntax of sentences.
4. described the lexical derivations.
5. included a vocabulary with at least a thousand entries.
6. included a few genuine texts.
There are some bonus topics that might also be included, like an analysis of discourse and historical reconstructions.
Current work in syntax reexamines basic properties of movement. Under the minimalist assumptions of Chomsky (1995), movement is prohibited unless forced by grammatical considerations. From a set of comparable derivations, the one involving the least amount of moved material should therefore block other derivations. Within this framework, any cases of optional movement are problematic. We addressed this issue with experiments on stranding and pied-piping relative clauses in 115 English learners, aged 3;5 to 11;11, and an adult control group. All subjects participated in an elicited production experiment and a grammaticality judgement experiment. Our findings suggest that pied-piping is possible in young children's grammar only when stranding is ruled out, as predicted by minimalism. We claim that the children's responses represent the 'natural' grammar while adults' responses reflect a prescriptive artifact. We also found a discrepancy in all groups between production and judgements of the genitive pied-piping construction. We account for this finding with Kayne's (1994) analysis of relative clauses.
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Resumptive restrictive relatives: A crosslinguistic perspective
Margarita Suñer
Cornell University
One of the aims of linguistic theory is to account for language variation. This article contributes to that objective by examining resumptive relative clauses crosslinguistically. The major claims are (1) the core-grammar distinction between conventional and resumptive restrictive relative clauses is due to the feature composition of the relative complementizer; (2) the prohibition against pied-piping that some languages adhere to correlates with the lack of lexical relative pronouns; (3) particular grammars need to accommodate language-specific properties such as preferences for which elements may, must, or cannot acquire a phonological matrix; and (4) resumptive pronouns which appear in the absence of an island are inserted at LF for other than interpretive reasons.

The current controversial topics are usually morphology and syntax. For many years too much attention given was to English, which has a very meager morphology, over-emphasized syntax, but now morphology has revived as an active field of study.
The purpose of linguistic theory, so far as a practical linguist is concerned, is to make descriptions of morphology and syntax comprehensible. It is easy to see that the same data can often be described in different ways. For a while there was an active desire to find some measure which would allow some one description to be called the best. Today that goal seems to have been given up as chimerical.