This book, Contemporary Developments in Linguistics, presents that intellectual development as a movement from formal descriptions of linguistic structure toward increasingly dynamic accounts of language, cognition, meaning, and communication.
The discussion begins with grammatical models that seek to explain the syntactic component and the structural properties of the speech act. Transformational-generative grammar, categorial grammar, applicative grammar, American distributionalism, and relational grammar illustrate different attempts to formalize linguistic organization. Yet the limitations of purely structural explanations gradually encourage attention to information processing, semantic interpretation, functional relations, and communicative context.
