LIMITING THE ARBITRARY -- Editorial page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- FOREWORD -- Table of contents -- INTRODUCTION NATURAL AND UNNATURAL LANGUAGE -- "La limitation de l'arbitraire" -- Before reading further, -- Recent versions of naturalness and the paradox they pose -- Guide to the following chapters -- Plato and the Cratylus -- Part One Cratylus -- CHAPTER 1. NATURE AND CONVENTION CRATYLUS 383A1-391D1 -- Greek language theory before the Cratylus -- The correctness of words -- Hermogenes: Words are conventional products of individual will -- Socrates: What about truth and falsehood? -- Protagoras' relativist view of truth -- Things have a natural reality of their own -- The word as an instrument -- Teaching and discriminating -- The establisher of customs and laws -- The ideal form of the word -- The dialectician as overseer -- CHAPTER 2. WORDS AND TRUTH CRATYLUS 391D2-422E1 -- The study of truth? -- Homer on the words used by gods and mortals -- The names Astyanax and Skamandrios -- Parents and their offspring -- Further etymologies -- The original words as elements of later ones -- CHAPTER 3. IMITATION AND ESSENCE CRATYLUS 422E1-440E7 -- The word as imitation -- Imitation and essence -- Alternative explanations -- the meanings of individual sounds -- The return of Cratylus -- The impossibility of speaking falsely -- Pictorial and verbal representation -- The image of Cratylus, or two Cratyli? -- Imitation by sounds (revisited) -- The meaning of r and l -- Habit and convention -- Words and the knowledge of reality -- The consistency of etymology -- Learning about things through words -- Socrates' dream -- Summary -- Part Two After Cratylus -- CHAPTER 4. NATURAL GRAMMAR AND CONVENTIONAL WORDS FROM ARISTOTLE TO PINKER -- Signifying by convention: Aristotle and Plato -- Breathing ethnicity into the language-making body: Epicurus.

Varro's compromise: nature versus will -- Medieval variations: Pater Nomen (Noun the Father) -- Developments in the languages themselves -- Nature v. convention reborn: from ideas and experience to usage and genius -- Convention as nature: Condillac and Rousseau -- What linguistics might have been: Bentham -- 'Reflexion ' and language structure: from Herder and Schlegel to Renan -- Saussure and the sham of arbitrariness -- Chomsky's fix -- Pinker's fix -- The past as roadmap to the future -- CHAPTER 5. NATURAL DIALECT AND ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGE FROM VARRO TO CHOMSKY -- The ideal language and the language of the masses -- Separate rules for poets: Varro -- The nobility of the vernacular: Dante's De vulgari eloquentia -- Political approaches to the standard: Nebrija, Du Bellay -- The realization of standard languages as language standards -- Saussure on 'literary language' -- The unnaturalness of the standard language: Orwell -- Chomsky on 'E-language' and 'I-language' -- The naturalness of artificiality -- CHAPTER 6. INVISIBLE HIERARCHIES FROM JAKOBSON TO OPTIMALITY THEORY -- Worlds within words -- Jakobson and the beginnings of structuralism -- Jakobson's and Trubetzkoy's dissatisfaction with Saussurean phonology -- 'A certain mark' -- Chomsky: 'Core' and 'periphery' -- Greenberg's search for universals and its aftermath -- Iconicity studies -- Optimality Theory -- AFTERWORD LINGUISTICS AFTER NATURALISM -- REFERENCES -- INDEX.