Download or read book The Practice of Language written by M. Gustafsson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows that philosophers and linguists of quite different brands have tended to give undue priority to their own favorite theoretical framework, and have presupposed that the descriptive scheme invoked by that framework constitutes a pattern to which any linguistic practice somehow has to conform. United by a critical attitude towards such essentialist aspirations, the authors collectively manage to cast doubt on the very attempt to fit the whole of linguistic practice into a general theoretical mould.