Geoffrey Sampson

Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century

a sequel to Schools of Linguistics

My new book, Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century, came out in September 2024. To quote from its Introduction:

This book is written to bring up to date a story which I began in a book I wrote in 1980, Schools of Linguistics. That book seemed to meet a need —it was translated into several foreign languages—and I have often been asked whether I was going to produce a new edition to cover the period, approaching half a century now, since it appeared. But when I looked into this, I realized that an extended Schools, discussing recent developments in the same style as that book, was not going to be possible. Linguistics, and the academic world more widely, have changed too much.

For most of the twentieth century, new ideas in humanities subjects such as linguistics emerged in particular places and were developed largely by their inventor and his colleagues in those places. Geography mattered. Academics would read publications from distant places in journals and books, and occasionally they might travel to a conference overseas; but there was nothing like the modern density of communication created first by cheap air travel and later, and more importantly, by e-mail and the World Wide Web. Hence, in the world as it was before 1980, it made good sense to describe linguistic developments under headings like “the Prague School”, “the London School”, and others.

That world is no more. Plenty of new things are happening in linguistics, but they are not happening within neatly-separated geographic silos. New work is popping up here, there, and everywhere. Academic collaborations are no longer heavily constrained by geography. (One of my own recent articles was co-authored with an academic I have never met and who lives on the far side of the Earth. Nowadays that is routine; fifty years ago it would barely have been possible.) All this is good, but it means that a picture of the linguistics of recent decades must be painted in a different style from that of Schools of Linguistics. What is needed now is a sampler, illustrating the diversity of the present-day discipline through miniature portraits of a wide variety of recent work (together with a few glances back at the twentieth century for contrast).

So that’s what I have done. Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century offers critical introductions to more than two dozen examples of the most promising new developments in the discipline, plus a few chapters linking the current scene to the approaches described in my earlier book.

For anyone who wants to know what is going on in today’s linguistics, Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century is the book to read!

Some media comment:

… could serve as a useful reading for the advanced undergraduate and for beginning graduate students because it deals with several issues they will face as professional linguists.

… The main object of [Sampson’s] curiosity is linguistic theory and the history of linguistic thought, such as the discovery of facts about a large variety of languages, English dialectology, and such distinct areas as literacy, writing systems, poetry, computational linguistics, and the structure of academia. … also reliable for two rare characteristics that are most welcome … The first one is [Sampson’s] deep knowledge of languages … The second characteristic is that he himself has contributed to many of the fields of linguistics. [These chapters] therefore have the authority of someone who worked on various areas discussed in the book and knows what effort goes into the scholarly work. …

Reading [Sampson’s] comments gave me much pleasure and an occasional smile … There are not many books in linguistics that have such effects

— The Linguist List

viii + 254 pp.

Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century is published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, who display a substantial extract on their website.

ISBN 978-1-0364-1259-3; e-book 978-1-0364-1260-9

Geoffrey Sampson

last changed 28 Apr 2025