THE BOOK This book has the optimistic goal of presenting an overview of
some 2500 years of language (& culture) studies, stretching from ancient
India to present day America, passing by Hebrew, Arabic, and European
traditions. This is side by side with a prior definition of the major
components of human language: phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics
and pragmatics, and the overlap of language sciences with neighboring
disciplines viz. psychology, history and philosophy. Less optimistic,
John Lyons believes that advances in scientific research, have only
shown us that we do not know LANGUAGE!