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The Whorf Theory Complex : A critical reconstruction
Jun 1996
Book
At last — a comprehensive account of the ideas of Benjamin Lee Whorf which not only explains the nature and logic of the linguistic relativity principle but also situates it within a larger ‘theory complex’ delineated in fascinating detail. Whorf’s almost unknown unpublished writings (as well as his published papers) are drawn on to show how twelve elements of theory interweave in a sophisticated account of relations between language mind and experience. The role of language in cognition is revealed as a central concern some of his insights having interesting affinity with modern connectionism. Whorf’s gestaltic ‘isolates’ of experience and meaning crucial to understanding his reasoning about linguistic relativity are explained. A little known report written for the Yale anthropology department is used extensively and published for the first time as an appendix. With the Whorf centenary in 1997 this book provides a timely challenge to those who take pleasure in debunking his ideas without bothering to explore their subtlety or even reading them in their original form.
Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese
Dec 1995
Book
This edition has been replaced by a new edition and is no longer available for purchase.
Chinese Japanese South (and North) Koreans in East Asia have a long intertwined and distinguished cultural history and have achieved or are in the process of achieving spectacular economic success. Together these three peoples make up one quarter of the world population.
They use a variety of unique and fascinating writing systems: logographic Chinese characters of ancient origin as well as phonetic systems of syllabaries and alphabets. The book describes often in comparison with English how the Chinese Korean and Japanese writing systems originated and developed; how each relates to its spoken language; how it is learned or taught; how it can be computerized; and how it relates to the past and present literacy education and culture of its users.
Intimately familiar with the three East Asian cultures Insup Taylor with the assistance of Martin Taylor has written an accessible and highly readable book. Writing and Literacy in Chinese Korean and Japanese is intended for academic readers (students in East Asian Studies linguistics education psychology) as well as for the general public (parents business government). Readers of the book will learn about the interrelated cultural histories of China Korea and Japan but mainly about the various writing systems some exotic some familar some simple some complex but all fascinating.
Writings in General Linguistics : On Sound Alternation (1881) and Outline of Linguistic Science (1883)
Nov 1995
Book
This volume brings together the most important general linguistic writings by Mikołay Kruszewski (1851-1887) whom Roman Jakobson described as “one of the greatest theoreticians of language among the world linguists of the late nineteenth century”. Apart from reissuing a revised version of the late Robert Austerlitz’ translation of the theoretical introduction of Kruszewski’s Master’s thesis on morphophonemic alternation in Old Slavic first published in German in 1881 the bulk of the present volume consists of the first translation ever by Gregory M. Eramian of Kruszewski’s doctoral thesis Outline of Linguistic Science supervised by J. Baudouin de Courtenay and submitted in Russian at the University of Kazan in 1883 which until now has been available only in German translation published in Techmer’s “Zeitschrift” (Leipzig 1884-1890; reprinted Amsterdam 1973). Together with a detailed introduction a full list of Kruszewski’s writings a bibliography of secondary sources including a reconstruction of the major works consulted by Kruszewski and detailed indexes of biographical names subjects & terms and languages cited for examples the present volume provides Western scholars with a solid textual and contextual basis for a proper reassessment of the ideas of arguably the most outstanding 19th-century linguistic thinker.
Word Order in Discourse
Jun 1995
Book
This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers dealing with the problem of word order variation in discourse. Word order variation has often been treated as an essentially unpredictable phenomenon a matter of selecting randomly one of the set of possible orders generated by the grammar. However as the papers in this collection show word order variation is not random but rather governed by principles which can be subjected to scientific investigation and are common to all languages.The papers in this volume discuss word order variation in a diverse collection of languages and from a number of perspectives including experimental and quantitative text based studies. A number of papers address the problem of deciding which order is 'basic' among the alternatives. The volume will be of interest to typologists to other linguists interested in problems of word order variation and to those interested in discourse syntax.
The Wedding Report : A prototypical approach to the study of traditional text types
Sept 1993
Book
Traditional text types (or genres) are complex linguistic sociocultural and cognitive phenomena that can only be analysed in flexible interdisciplinary frameworks fusing structural and process-oriented approaches and combining quantitative description with qualitative interpretation and evaluation. The theoretical and methodological implications of the prototypical text type concept which is developed in this book are explored in an exhaustive case study of a representative (ie prototypical) genre: the wedding report a conventional type of news report published in local English newspapers. The distinctive contextual and textual features — situational context text production processes function thematic structure and form on the macro- and microlevel — are analysed synchronically and diachronically. The linguistic findings are integrated into a comprehensive view of the interplay between the genre as a linguistic frame and its sociocultural context. The study puts special emphasis on addressing the methodological problems arising from the inherent fuzziness of traditional text types and can thus serve as a detailed working model of genre analysis designed to be adapted to the specific requirements of similar studies.
Writing History as a Prophet : Postmodernist innovations of the historical novel
Dec 1991
Book
This is a postmodernist history of the historical novel with special attention to the political implications of the postmodernist attitude toward the past.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Beginning with the poetics of Sir Walter Scott Wesseling moves via a global survey of 19th century historical fiction to modernist innovations in the genre.<br/>Noting how the self-reflexive strategy enables a novelist to represent an episode from the past alongside the process of gathering and formulating historical knowledge the author discusses the elaboration of this strategy introduced by novelists such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner in the work of among others Julian Barnes Jay Cantor Robert Coover and Graham Swift. Wesseling also shows how postmodernist writers attempt to envisage alternative sequences for historical events. Deliberately distorting historical facts authors of such uchronian fiction like Thomas Pynchon Ishmael R. Read Salman Rushdie and Gunter Grass imagine what history looks like from the perspective of the losers rather than the winners.
Written Language Revisited
Jan 1989
Book
Josef Vachek one of the last living exponents of the Prague School has dedicated 50 years of his life to the study of written language in all its aspects. This volume is a tribute to him on the occasion of his 80th birthday. It contains a selection of his papers written between 1945 and 1987. Contents Writing and phonetic transcription; Written language and printed language; The linguistic status of written utterances; The primacy of writing?; Segmentation of the flow of speech and written language; The stylistics of written language; Glossematics and written language; Paralinguistic sounds written language and language development; Written language as a heterogenous system; The 1929 Praguian Theses internal speech and written language; Written language seen from the functionalist angle; On the problem of written language; The development of the written norm of English; Puristic tendencies in written language; Redundancy in written language with special regard to capitalization of graphemes; Spelling as an important linguistic concept; Pluridimensionality of written utterances and its consequences; Revaluations of redundant graphemes; Thoughts on some fifty years of research in written language.
William Bathe, S.J., 1564–1614 : A pioneer in linguistics. English translation from the Irish edition, Dublin, 1981
Jan 1986
Book
William Bathe S.J. (1564-1614) was a pioneer in linguistics. The present book deals with Bathe's family background his life and service as a courtier diplomat and finally Jesuit educator and in particular his contribution to the study of language and his most important publication Ianua Linguarum (1611).
Women, Feminist Identity and Society in the 1980s : Selected papers
Jan 1985
Book
The general objective of this volume is to present and discuss different modes of existence in women’s texts and feminist identity in political and poetic discourse on the one hand and to analyze the factors which determine differing relationships between women and society and which result in specific forms of identity on the other. The essays in this volume explore language gender mass media sexuality class and social change women’s identity as Blacks and in the Third World as well as the nature of domination feminine criticism and female creativity. The volume opens with a challenging question by the feminist poet Adrienne Rich ‘Who is We?’
Whose Language? : A study in Linguistic Pragmatics
Jan 1985
Book
"For the colonized person objectivity is always directed against him" (Frantz Fanon). Colonized persons do not live on what we call (or used to call) the "colonies" alone. In general objective reality or the "facts of life" are very different depending on the kind of life you can afford. This goes for language as well; and it explains both the title of this book and gives it its "raison d'être". It deals with power in language and asks: Who is really in command when we use "our" language? And why does it make sense to talk about a language of power (or lack of it)? The powerful are the colonizers the colonized are the powerless in language as in geopolitics. Colonizers and colonized alike however are subject to the social and economic conditions prevailing in society and therefore a thorough analysis of these conditions is a must for any socially-oriented theory of language use.
Word Order Typology and Comparative Constructions
Jan 1983
Book
This monograph discussing various aspects involved with a typology of word order strives to take a next step towards a better understanding of the profound unity underlying languages. The volume is divided into five sections: 1) Word order typology; 2) A critical analysis of word order typology; 3) Word order within comparative constructions; 4) Word order in the comparative construction in the Rigveda; 5) Diachronic aspects of word order withing comparative constructions.
What is Meaning? : Studies in the Development of Significance (1903)
Jan 1983
Book
In "What is Meaning" (1903) the author elaborates on the fundamental tenets of her theory of sign to which she gave the overall term ‘significs’. One of the main obstacles to an adequate theory of meaning in Lady Welby’s opinion is the unfounded assumption of fixed sign meaning. "There is strictly speaking no such thing as the Sense of a word but only the sense in which it is used – the circumstances state of mind reference ‘universe of discourse’ belonging to it. The Meaning of a word is the intent which it is desired to convey – the intention of the user. The Significance is always manifold and intensifies its sense as well as its meaning by expressing its importance its appeal to us its moment for us its emotional force its ideal value its moral aspect its universal or at least social range."<br/>This facsimile of the 1903 edition of "What is Meaning" is accompanied by an essay on "Significs as a Fundamental Science" by Achim Eschbach and "A Concise History of Significs" by G. Mannoury.
What Do We Talk About When We Talk? : Speculative grammar and the semantics and pragmatics of focus
Jan 1981
Book
This monograph deals with the ‘aboutness’ of language. First the sense in which language ‘is about’ or ‘reflects’ both reality and a mental picture of reality is turned into a cornerstone of a reflectionist or ‘Speculative Grammarian’ semantics and pragmatics. Second the ‘Speculative Grammar’ idea is made concrete in a logico-linguistic account of the way language ‘is about’ the whole of reality as well as about certain fractions of it. Third the reflectionist perspective is used for a universalist account of the way speech acts ‘are about’ their subjects topics and foci.
The (w)hole of the doughnut : Syntax and its boundaries
Jan 1979
Book
From the author’s preface: "I once facetiously stated: 'Syntax is to semantics as the hole of the doughnut is to the whole of the doughnut.' Semantics without syntax thus is like a doughnut without a hole. This was in the heyday of generative semantics and having heard that my major interest was syntax someone was able perhaps also facetiously to respond: 'Does it exist?' Most of the papers collected here originated in those days and previously appeared in various linguistic journals and anthologies. The reader may note that the topics dealt with in these papers all have their roots in syntax but in most cases relate to its boundary areas. The boundary areas are not restricted to semantics but the above analogy of the doughnut might still apply to what syntax is to those boundary areas. Hence the title of the book."
Western Histories of Linguistic Thought : An annotated chronological bibliography, 1822–1976
Jan 1978
Book
The present bibliography suggests that there has been a constant flow of publications which survey the discipline of linguistics in its various stages of development. It attempts to offer a comprehensive coverage of general accounts of the history of linguistic thought in the western world over the last 150 years.