Pieter Seuren

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Pieter Albertus Maria Seuren (born 9 July 1934 in

As a linguist, Seuren took an independent position, opposing not only the linguistic ideas of Noam Chomsky but also possible-world semantics and cognitivist linguistics, all of which he considered to be empirically and methodologically inadequate—the former two because they are overformalized and fail to take into account the natural ecological environment of human language, the third because of its ideologically motivated aversion to any explanation involving underlying rule-governed causal mechanisms. In his view, a grammar was an algorithmic top-down rule system transforming logico-semantic mental (propositional) structures into well-formed surface structures (1996). In a wider methodological perspective, he supported the view that in the study of language a balance should be kept between precise but informal analyses and descriptions on the one hand and full formalization on the other: formalize where you can but be content with less formal theorizing when full formalization is (as yet) impossible (2009).

His special fields of research were: the theory of grammar and meaning and their interrelations (1969, 1975, 1996, 2009); the role of

Besides his work in

• Operators and Nucleus. A Contribution to the Theory of Grammar. (diss. Univ. Utrecht) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969.
• Discourse Semantics. Blackwell, Oxford, 1985.
• Semantic Syntax. Blackwell, Oxford, 1996.
• Western Linguistics. An Historical Introduction. Blackwell, Oxford, 1998.
• A View of Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001.
• Chomsky's Minimalism. Oxford University Press, New York/Oxford, 2004.
• Language in Cognition. (= Language from Within Vol. I) Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009.
• The Logic of Language. (= Language from Within Vol. II) Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010.
• From Whorf to Montague: Explorations in the Theory of Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013.
• Semantic Syntax. Revised 2nd Edition. Brill, Leiden, 2017.
• Saussure and Sechehaye: Myth and Genius. Brill, Leiden, 2018.
• A Refutation of Positivism in the Philosophy of Mind: Thinking, Reality, and Language. Routledge, New York, 2023.

References

External links

• Profile at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics