Overview

James D. McCawley was not only, as William Safire once wrote, the only man in linguistics whose reputation challenges Noam Chomsky's, he was also an inspiring accumulator of knowledge of every kind, with a remarkably holistic view of language and its relation to the other subjects of his erudition. This book collects twenty of his last papers, selected by McCawley himself prior to his untimely death in 1999. Against Virtue in Syntax and Semantics, the title he chose, underscores his disdain for virtuous scientific behavior and blind adherence to established canons, a stance that informs each of these seminal papers, which cover a range of topics central to theoretical linguistics. Like previous collections of McCawley's writings, this book displays an astoundingly broad intelligence - that of a man with a panoramic view of the nature of language and an abiding delight in all of its complexities and inconsistencies. This is a book no linguist can afford to be without.

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9780226556093

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In my entire thirty years of association with [McCawley], I rarely told him anything he didn't know. He had thought about everything and he knew everything. - Jerrold Sadock, University of Chicago; McCawley was truly a great linguist. We may never see anyone quite like him again. Certainly, scholars of his talents are incredibly rare. His passion for linguistic facts was combined with a deep interest and expertise in theoretical issues. His breadth of learning (with polyglot accomplishments to marvel at) was combined with penetrating attention to large bodies of difficult material in specific languages. He was an awesome linguistic scholar. - Geoffrey Pullum, University of California, Santa Cruz

Author Information

James D. McCawley (1938-1999) was the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and East Asian Languages at the University of Chicago.

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