Books
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41 - 47 of 47 results
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Origins of Language
More LessSverker Johansson has written an unusual book on language origins, with its emphasis on empirical evidence rather than theory-building. This is a book for the student or researcher who prefers solid data and well-supported conclusions, over speculative scenarios. Much that has been written on the origins of language is characterized by hypothesizing largely unconstrained by evidence. But empirical data do exist, and the purpose of this book is to integrate and review the available evidence from all relevant disciplines, not only linguistics but also, e.g., neurology, primatology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary biology. The evidence is then used to constrain the multitude of scenarios for language origins, demonstrating that many popular hypotheses are untenable. Among the issues covered: (1) Human evolutionary history, (2) Anatomical prerequisites for language, (3) Animal communication and ape "language", (4) Mind and language, (5) The role of gesture, (6) Innateness, (7) Selective advantage of language, (8) Proto-language.
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Orthography and Phonology
More LessCollected here are eleven papers devoted to various aspects of the orthography/phonology interface. Topics include spelling-to-sound correspondence for English, French, and Russian, the design of a generative phonology for orthography data-base access, the linguistic sign and orthographic and phonological error, the analysis of Greenlandic school children’s spelling errors, the orthographic representation of phonemic nasalization and its implications for prosodic theory, the psycholinguistics of phonological recoding in reading, orthography as a variable in psycholinguistic experiments, spelling and dialect, orthography and the typology of phonological rules, and orthography and historical phonology.
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Otto Jespersen
More LessThis is the first book to give a comprehensive view of the work of Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), the Danish linguist who is perhaps best known for his monumental work A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. The articles in this volume show the wide range of Jespersen's interests and discuss the influence of his contribution to the study of language.
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Outside the Clause
More LessThis volume brings together a number of articles on the form and function of extra-clausal constituents, a group of linguistic elements which have puzzled linguists by defying analysis in terms of ordinary sentence grammar. Given their high frequency and communicative importance, these elements can, however, no longer be dismissed as a marginal linguistic phenomenon. In recent years this awareness has resulted not only in more systematic treatments of extra-clausal constituents, but has also highlighted the need to account for them in grammatical theory. Based on (mainly English) corpus data, the volume investigates the discourse-pragmatic, semantic, syntactic and phonological features of a range of extra-clausal constituents, including discourse markers, free adjuncts, left dislocands, insubordinate clauses and various kinds of adverbials. The individual chapters adopt a number of different perspectives, investigating the diachronic development of extra-clausal constituents, their multi-functionality and their use in bilingual settings, also addressing the question of how they can be incorporated into existing models of grammar.
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Outside-In — Inside-Out
More LessThis fourth volume of the Iconicity series is like its predecessors devoted to the study of iconicity in language and literature in all its forms. Many of the papers turn the notion of iconicity ‘inside-out’, some suggesting that ‘less-is-more’; others focus on the cognitive factors ‘inside’ the brain that are important for the iconic phenomena that are produced in the ‘outside’ world. In addition this volume includes a paper related to iconicity in music and its interaction with language. Other papers range from the theoretical issues involved in the evolution of language, to those that offer many ‘inside-out’ claims, such as claiming that nouns are derived from pronouns, and as such should more properly be called ‘pro-pronouns’. Also, this volume includes perhaps the first English-language analysis of the iconic aspects of sound symbolism in a prayer from the Koran. This is a truly interdisciplinary collection that should turn some of the notions of iconicity in language and literature ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’.
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The Order of Prepositional Phrases in the Structure of the Clause
More LessFor a long time prepositions seemed to enjoy a clandestine status in linguistic research. This has changed with a novel path of inquiry into the inner structure of complex prepositional expressions. In a unique approach to the examination of the outer syntax of prepositions the author uses established and new syntactic and statistical tests to achieve a convincing hierarchy of thematic roles expressed by prepositional phrases. From an antisymmetric point of departure the author presents an overview of possible derivations that result in the observed different word orders of PPs in VO and OV languages. It leads to a refreshing new proposal of how to include morphology into syntax. The plausibility of this model is underscored by a wide range of explanatory data. This book is indispensable for linguists interested in the syntax of modifiers.
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The Organizing Property of Communication
More LessWhat is an organization? What are the building blocks that ultimately constitute this social form, so pervasive in our daily life? Like Augustine facing the problem of time, we all know what an organization is, but we seem unable to explain it. This book brings an original answer by mobilizing concepts traditionally reserved to linguistics, analytical philosophy, and semiotics. Based on Algirdas Julien Greimas’ semio-narrative model of action and Jacques Derrida’s concept of écriture, a reconceptualization of speech act theory is proposed in which communication is treated as an act of delegation where human and nonhuman agents are mobilized (texts, machines, employees, architectural elements, managers, etc.). Perfectly congruent with the last development of the sociology of translation developed by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, this perspective illustrates the organizing property of communication through a process called ‘interactoriality’. Jacques Lacan used to say that the unconscious is structured like a language. This book shows that a social organization is structured like a narrative.
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