Lesson plan

Language (journal)

Language is a peer-reviewed quarterly academic journal published by the Linguistic Society of America since 1925. It covers all aspects of linguistics, focusing on the area of theoretical linguistics. Its current editor-in-chief is Andries Coetzee (University of Michigan). Under the editorship of Yale linguist Bernard Bloch, Language was the vehicle for publication of many of the important articles of American structural linguistics during the second quarter of the 20th century, and was the journal in which many of the most important subsequent developments in linguistics played themselves out. One of the most famous articles to appear in Language was the young Noam Chomsky's scathing 1959 review of the book Verbal Behavior by the behaviorist cognitive psychologist B. F. Skinner. This article argued that behaviorist psychology, then a dominant paradigm in linguistics (as in psychology at large), had no hope of explaining complex phenomena like language. It was followed two years later by another book review that is almost as famous—Robert B. Lees's glowingly positive assessment of Chomsky's own 1957 book Syntactic Structures, which put Chomsky and his generative grammar on the intellectual map as the successor to American structuralism.…

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Article summary

Language is a peer-reviewed quarterly academic journal published by the Linguistic Society of America since 1925. It covers all aspects of linguistics, focusing on the area of theoretical linguistics. Its current editor-in-chief is Andries Coetzee (University of Michigan). Under the editorship of Yale linguist Bernard Bloch, Language was the vehicle for publication of many of the important articles of American structural linguistics during the second quarter of the 20th century, and was the journal in which many of the most important subsequent developments in linguistics played themselves out. One of the most famous articles to appear in Language was the young Noam Chomsky's scathing 1959 review of the book Verbal Behavior by the behaviorist cognitive psychologist B. F. Skinner. This article argued that behaviorist psychology, then a dominant paradigm in linguistics (as in psychology at large), had no hope of explaining complex phenomena like language. It was followed two years later by another book review that is almost as famous—Robert B. Lees's glowingly positive assessment of Chomsky's own 1957 book Syntactic Structures, which put Chomsky and his generative grammar on the intellectual map as the successor to American structuralism.…

Key claims

  1. publication date: 1925 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95

Discussion questions

  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. The record states that the publication date is "1925". What evidence would count against this claim?
  3. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  4. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

  1. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1321290284

Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.