This vintage paperback book is a must-have for any language enthusiast. Written by Neil Smith and Deirdre Wilson, "Modern Linguistics: The Results of Chomsky's Revolution" is a general survey of Chomsky‘s impact and an assessment of the implications of his theory on the human sciences. The book opens with a chapter entitled “What Is a Language?” and proceeds to explore various types of linguistic knowledge: arguments for and against Chomsky‘s postulate of “deep structure,” phonetics and phonology, semantics and meaning, language variation and change, the evaluation of grammars, and many other topics. It concludes with a discussion of the intrinsic nature of language, including linguistic universals and language acquisition. The usefulness of Modern Linguistics as a general introduction to contemporary linguistics is enhanced by the author’s suggestions for the reading, an extensive glossary, and a key to phonetic symbols and commonly used abbreviations.