Meaning and the Structure of Language

by Wallace Chafe

This book breaks once and for the linguists traditional distrust of meaning and approaches language deliberately and provocatively from the semantic direction. The work has grown out of the author's conviction that at the present time, as the shortcomings of transformational theory have become increasingly apparent, linguistics needs some new alternatives.

Genres: Linguistics

360 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Wallace Chafe was one of the foremost original scholars of the functional theoretical approach to linguistics. He was involved in ongoing work with several communities of North American Indians, most notably the Seneca of New York. He also wrote extensively about discourse, language and consciousness, laughter, prosody, and other topics.
At the end of his life he was Professor Emeritus of the University of California, Santa Barbara.