This volume offers eighty encyclopedia-style entries on the ideas that editors Siobhan Chapman and Christopher Routledge identify as the most influential in the Western study of language from antiquity to the present. Appropriately, the contributors, most of whom are affiliated with European institutions, span philosophy, linguistics, communication, English, and psychology departments. In identifying key ideas, the entries focus on concepts and theoretical frameworks rather than on scholars and methodologies. The entries are alphabetized to emphasize coverage across both time and contemporary linguistic subfields, and thorough cross-referencing and indexing provides insight into the significant relationships between these concepts and theories. In fact, the cross-references include other entries in this book as well as those in Key thinkers in linguistics and the philosophy of language (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), which organizes the same history and similar material in terms of major figures. This book can be used effectively as a stand-alone text, however, with the cross-referenced names of thinkers serving as breadcrumbs leading to further reading.

The choice of entries reflect the editors' admitted bias toward early to mid-twentieth-century work and Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, H. Paul Grice, and Noam Chomsky in particular. The theoretical frameworks presented in this book include ordinary language philosophy, speech act theory, structuralism, transformational-generative grammar, and universal grammar, but critical discourse analysis, deconstruction, feminism, integrationism, and psychoanalysis, among others, also appear. The concepts covered include grammaticality, implicature, language games, langue/parole, performative, phoneme, and sense and reference, as well as corpora, emic/etic, names, political correctness, truth value, and so on. The linguistic subfields of semantics, pragmatics, and syntax do receive more attention than phonology and sociolinguistics. However, the advantages of this volume go beyond conceptual and theoretical coverage.

Each entry begins with a short definition or description, followed by appropriate cross-references, brief historical context and development, and bibliographic information for cited “Primary sources” and suggested “Further reading.” Ordinary language philosophy, as an example of a longer entry, is introduced as “a philosophical movement that developed in England during the years between two World Wars” and whose “adherents saw ordinary, everyday language as the starting point for their philosophical inquiries” (149). After cross-referencing with analytic philosophy, implicature, speech act theory, and truth theories—as well as Austin, Jacques Derrida, Grice, Bertrand Russell, Gilbert Ryle, John Searle, Galen Strawson, and Wittgenstein—the entry contrasts ordinary language philosophy with Oxford philosophy and linguistic philosophy and notes how it departed from the prevailing approach of analytic philosophy. The remainder of the entry traces the development of ordinary language philosophy from Wittgenstein's Philosophical investigations (Blackwell, 1953) and Austin's body of work to Searle and Derrida's exchange to current notions of performativity.

This book will be an excellent, accessible reference for both undergraduate and graduate students who are new to linguistics and the philosophy of language. Though any student undertaking further study will quickly read beyond the bibliographies that conclude each entry, this volume's coverage, rather than depth, will still provide a helpful refresher.