Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies from Cambridge University, UK. After completing his graduate study in linguistics and informatics at Yale University, USA, and a research fellowship at Queen’s College, Oxford, UK, he held teaching appointments at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and other British institutions, interspersed with sabbaticals at universities in Switzerland and South Africa and secondments to industrial research. After retiring from his chair at Sussex University, UK, where he had headed its AI department, he spent several years as research fellow in linguistics at the University of South Africa. Sampson has published books and articles on most branches of linguistics, as well as on literary, political, and philosophical subjects; he is particularly known for identifying the fallacies in Noam Chomsky’s theories. Sampson’s books include Schools of Linguistics (1980), The “Language Instinct” Debate (revised edition 2005), Writing Systems (second edition 2015), and Voices from Early China (2020).