System, order, creativity : models of the human in twentieth-century linguistic theories

Zhou’s thesis demonstrates how the image of “man” is represented in twentieth-century linguistic theories. She analyzes several of the field’s canonical works with a focus on three themes: linguistic system and the individual speaker, social order, and linguistic creativity. Through an investigation of landmark linguistics theories and methodologies including structural linguistics, generative linguistics, psycholinguistics, and discourse analysis, she demonstrates that more open-ended approaches (that study corpus and discourse), by emphasizing human creativity and reflexivity, prove better in capturing situated language use.