Books

Agents of Translation contains thirteen case studies by internationally recognized scholars in which translation has been used as a way of influencing the target culture and furthering literary, political and personal interests.

The articles describe Francisco Miranda, the “precursor” of Venezuelan independence, who promoted translations of works on the French Revolution and American independence; 19th century Brazilian translations of articles taken from the Révue Britannique about England; Ahmed Midhat, a late 19th century Turkish journalist who widely translated from Western languages; Henry Vizetelly , who (unsuccessfully) attempted to introduce the works of Zola to a wider public in Victorian Britain; and Henry Bohn, who, also in Victorian Britain, (successfully) published a series of works from the classics, many of which were expurgated; Yukichi Fukuzawa, whose adaptation of a North American geography textbook in the Meiji period promoted the concept of the superiority of the Japanese over their Asian neighbours; Samuli Suomalainen and Juhani Konkka, whose translations helped establish Finnish as a literary language; Hasan Alî Yücel, the Turkish Minister of Education, who set up the Turkish Translation Bureau in 1939; the Senegalese intellectual, Cheikh Anta Diop, whose work showed that the Ancient Egyptians had African rather than Indo-European roots; the Centro Cultural de Évora theatre group, which introduced Brecht and other contemporary drama into Portugal after the 1974 Carnation Revolution; 20^th century Argentine translators of poetry; Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, who have brought translation to the forefront of literary activity in Brazil; and, finally, translators of Bosnian poetry, many of whom work in exile.

Gender in English changed dramatically from the elaborate system found in Old English to the very simple he/she/it-alternation in use from (late) Middle English onwards. While either system is well described and understood, the change from one to the other is anything but: more than 120 years of research into the matter provided no prevailing opinion – let alone a consensus – regarding how it proceeded or why it occurred. The present study is the first to address this issue in the context of language contact with Old Norse, assessing this contact influence in relation to both language-formal and semantico-cognitive factors. This empirical, functional account uses rigorous, innovative methodology, interdisciplinary evidence, and well-established models of synchronic variation in diachronic application to draw a fine-grained picture of the variation, change, and loss of gender from Old to Middle English and its underlying mainsprings. The resulting plausible and parsimonious explanations will prove relevant to students and scholars of historical linguistics, morpho-syntax, language variation and change, or language contact, to name but a few.

This book is a collection of articles based on a lecture series about Kant's philosophy. The contributions present an excellent overview of Kant's work – the subjects range from metaphysical, ethical, aesthetical, teleological, historical and political aspects to questions of mind, nature and education.

The common topic of all articles is the examination of Kant's current relevance in the context of modern philosophy and society. Each author gives various arguments why a close reading of Kant is still worthwhile and can make important contributions to present philosophical and social discussions.

The lecture series from which the book developed was conceived as an introduction of Kant for students but some of the articles are very profound. Therefore while students and Kant-beginners may find the texts helpful as introductory reading, philosophers and Kant-experts will also appreciate the book for opening up new perspectives on their specific field of interest.

Dieser Sammelband basiert auf einer einführenden Ringvorlesung zur Philosophie Kants. Die Beiträge behandeln sowohl metaphysische, ethische, ästhetische, teleologische und politische Aspekte als auch Fragen zu Natur, Geist und Erziehung und bieten damit einen ausgezeichneten Überblick über Kants Werk.

Der Schwerpunkt liegt in allen Artikeln auf der aktuellen Bedeutung Kants im Kontext der modernen Philosophie und Gesellschaft. Den Autoren gelingt es zu zeigen, dass die Auseinandersetzung mit Kant nicht nur immer noch lohnenswert ist, sondern auch wichtige Beiträge zu den philosophischen und gesellschaftlichen Diskussionen der Gegenwart – von bioethischen und neurophilosophischen Fragen bis hin zu Problemen von Krieg und Frieden – liefern kann.

Die Texte sind nicht nur als Einstieg in die Kantlektüre für Studenten und Kant-Neulinge wertvoll, auch Philosophen und Kant-Experten werden darin zahlreiche neue Gesichtspunkte für eine fruchtbare Auseinandersetzung mit Kant finden.

La classification des signes de C.S. Peirce en icones, indices et symboles est universellement reconnue. Est-ce le resultat d'une heureuse rencontre ou la preuve de la pertinence du système de pensée qui l'a produite? Est-ce l'absence d'une présentation scientifique de la sémiotique de Peirce qui autorise cette interrogation? Cet essai montre précisément, au moyen d'une formalisation qui épouse au plus près le contenu des manuscrits de Peirce, la possibilité d'approcher scientifiquement les phénomènes sémiotiques. Partant d'une formalisation de la perception en termes de structures relationnelles, l'auteur réconstruit l'ensemble des conceptions phénoménologiques et sémiotiques de C.S. Peirce, retrouve et discute toutes ses taxinomies et va au-delà en montrant l'existence de structures d'ordre naturelles (treillis) sur les ensembles de classes de signes. Une méthodologie d'analyse des signes complexes en découle et est appliquée notamment a la théâtrologie, l'idéologie, l'épistémologie, l'ethnométhodologie...La semiosis est décrite comme un processus impliquant des communautés humaines par le biais des institutions et des habitus. Une annexe rassemble 76 textes de Peirce définissant le signe dont un grand nombre sont inedits.

This book provides a view of where the field of morphology has been and where it is today within a particular theoretical framework, gathering up new and representative work in morphology by both eminent and emerging scholars, and touching on a very wide range of topics, approaches, and theoretical points of view. These seemingly disparate articles have a common touchstone in their focus on a word-based, paradigmatic approach to morphology.

The chapters in this book elaborate on these basic themes, from the further exploration of paradigms, to studies involving words, stems, and affixes, to examinations of competition, inheritance, and defaults, to investigations of morphomes, to ways that morphology interacts with other parts of the language from phonology to sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.

The editors and contributors dedicate this volume to Prof. Mark Aronoff for his profound influence on the field.

The authors present a comprehensive overview of past research in ambiguity in the field of psycholinguistics. Experimental results have often been equivocal in allowing a choice between the single-reading hypothesis and the multiple-reading hypothesis of processing of ambiguous sentences. This text reviews the arguments and experimental results in support of each of these views, and further investigates the contributions of context and thematic constraints in the process of ambiguity resolution. Commentary is also made on the possible hierarchical ordering of difficulty in the treatment of ambiguity, as well as critically related considerations like bias, individual differences, general cognitive strategies for dealing with multiphase representations, and the inherent differences between lexical and syntactic ambiguity.

This is a revised version of Theory Groups and the Study of Language in North America (1994), the post-World-War-II history of the emergence of sociolinguistics in North America that was described in Language in Society as “a heady combination of detailed scholarship, mordant wit, and sustained narrative designed to persuade even the skeptical reader that these myriad, often simultaneously emergent, ways of thinking about language are indeed interrelated. . . . This is an outspoken, engaging, rollicking, occasionally aggravating adventure in the history of these sciences as related to their practice. . . not to be missed by anyone who cares about the intellectual underpinnings of the study of language in society,” in Language as providing “the closest approximation” to how sociolinguists came together and developed the field, and in Lingua as providing “the most comprehensive overviews of the various and varied approaches to [American] linguistic research.” American Sociolinguistics examines both theory groups (such as the ethnography of speaking and ethnoscience), and sociolinguistic scholars (such as William Labov, Einar Haugen, and Erving Goffman) whose widely-known and often-emulated work was not pursued by organized groups.

This basic bibliography of analogy aims to be a useful tool for linguistic research. The compilers have emphasized the years from 1868 onwards, starting with Scherer’s statement, but a few important premonitory works have been included as well.

The concept of analogy is of central concern to modern cognitive scientists, whereas it has been largely neglected in linguistics in the past four decades. The goal of this thought-provoking book is (1) to introduce a cognitively and linguistically viable notion of analogy; and (2) to re-establish and build on traditional linguistic analogy-based research.

As a starting point, a general definition of analogy is offered that makes the distinction between analogy-as-structure and analogy-as-process.

Chapter 2 deals with analogy as used in traditional linguistics. It demonstrates how phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and diachronic linguistics make use of analogy and discusses linguistic domains in which analogy does or did not work. The appendix gives a description of a computer program, which performs such instances of analogy-based syntactic analysis as have long been claimed impossible.

Chapter 3 supports the ultimate (non-modular) ‘unity of the mind’ and discusses the existence of pervasive analogies between language and such cognitive domains as vision, music, and logic.

The final chapter presents evidence for the view that the cosmology of every culture is based on analogy.

At a more abstract level, the role of analogy in scientific change is scrutinized, resulting in a meta-analogy between myth and science.