Product Description
--Voice Literary Supplement ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

This Is Not a Linguistics Textbook
While I agree with some of Dr. Trask's criticisms of this work, I think he is looking at this as a professor of linguistics might.I, too, was disappointed by some aspects of this book, but I must take issue with Dr. Trask describing such developments as semiotics as irrelevant to linguistics.If one wants an "initiation" into linguistics's place alongside of theory and literature, this work has at least some things to offer, especially Kristeva's exploration of language's status as an unknown since before the Socratics.

The work didn't go deeply enough and holds nothing near the fascination of her other superb works, such as "Revolution."To give it minus twelve stars is certainly an over-reaction, though.

Literature Ph.D. Student

Kristeva's sick joke
This book is a sick joke.In spite of her impressive-sounding title, the author knows nothing much about linguistics.The tiny amount of linguistics contained in this book is fragmented, antiquated, unintelligible, and copied out, apparently incomprehendingly, from other books.

There is nothing on sociolinguistics, nothing on psycholinguistics, nothing on historical linguistics, nothing on typology or universals, nothing on cognitive linguistics, nothing on semantics, nothing on pragmatics, nothing on language acquisition, nothing on computational linguistics, nothing on neurolinguistics or language disability, nothing on morphology, nothing on...well, you get the picture.There is nothing on any linguistics done since about 1960, and precious little on anything done earlier.

The few scraps on phonetics are copied from Saussure's 1916 Cours, for god's sake, and they are wrong.The few scraps on phonology are copied from a third-rate American textbook of the 1950s, and Kristeva has clearly not even understood what she has copied -- though, to be fair, the English translator has apparently introduced a blunder not present in the French original. The small amount of syntax is copied incomprehendingly from an ancient American book and from Noam Chomsky's first book, in 1957.

Nobody could possibly learn anything about linguistics from reading this book, which is a positive obstacle to understanding the subject.Most of the book consists of a potted history of linguistics -- there are far better histories available -- and of long chapters on irrelevancies like semiotics and psychoanalysis. There is also a good deal on writing, but Kristeva does not appear to know much about this topic, either.

The book is a disgrace, and I can't imagine why anybody thought an English translation was a good idea.Reading nothing at all is better than reading this mess.A proper rating would be about minus twelve stars, [...]

R. L. Trask
Professor of Linguistics

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