Words

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!

THE AUTHOR El Mouatamid Ben Rochd was born in Fez (Morocco). He graduated from Fez University in 1978, obtained his Masters in French linguistics from York University in 1982 and his PhD in theoretical linguistics and the structure of Arabic from the National University of Ireland in 1990. He spent one year as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington. He has written numerous books and articles published at home and aboard. He is currently teaching at CERHSO (Morocco) a course entitled Langues Vivantes et Linguistique Américaine.