Skeptical Linguistic Essays

Paul Postal is a distinguished linguist at New York University. This volume consists of two parts. The first contains five studies of English syntax which cumulatively argue that it is impossible for a natural language to have a generative grammar due to a variety of theoretically neglected phomena. The second part of the volume contains seven articles that argue that contemporary theoretical linguistics is contaminated by what Postal calls "junk linguistics" - a pervasive lack of scholarly standards.