Subject collection: Psychology (246 titles, 1978–2015)

This is the first serious and extensive examination of American cursing from a psycholinguistic-contextual point of view. Several field studies and numerous laboratory-based experiments focus on the relationship between cursing and language acquisitions, anger expresssion, gender stereotypes, semantics, and offensiveness. Censorship, language content of motion pictures, First-Amendment fighting words, sexual harassment, obscene phone calls, and cursing at public schools are analyzed and related to sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic data. Many tables of word-by-word data provide empirical evidence of frequency of occurrence, degree of offensiveness, gender of speaker and age of speaker influences on obscene language usage in America. A "must" for language reference collections.

The subject of this two part work is the acquisition of language structure in which the development of syntax and morphology is examined by investigations on children without language problems and on children with developmental dysphasia. The author uses a comparative acquisition study to provide insights into the structure and development of the language acquisition device, which cannot be obtained by isolated analysis of only one type of learning. The theoretical framework used for the investigations is the learnability theory, in which acquisition models are proposed which are heavily influenced by theoretical linguistics. Part I shows how child grammar acquisition can be explained in the framework of learnability theory and Part II deals with deficiencies in normal grammar acquisition using the learnability theory.

Point Counterpoint offers a series of papers and replies originally presented at a special session of the Second Language Research Forum, UCLA, March 1989. The focus of the papers is primarily the role of Universal Grammar in second language acquisition, though the agenda also includes discussion of other fundamental questions, viz., the explanatory potential of linguistic theory in native-language development. It may come as no surprise that the contributors and their respondents often present very different perspectives on the issues, for most of the authors were known in advance to hold contrasting points of view. Contributors (c) and Respondents (r) are: Wolfgang Klein (c)/Nina Hyams (r); Sascha Felix (c)/Jacquelyn Schachter (r); Suzanne Flynn & Sharon Manuel (c)/David Birdsong (r); Lydia White (c)/Robert Bley-Vroman (r); Peter Jordens (c)/Lynn Eubank (r); Jurgen Meisel (c)/Bonnie Schwartz (r); Sharon Hilles (c)/William O'Grady (r); Daniel Finer (c)/Margaret Thomas (r); Usha Lakshmanan (c)/Nina Hymans & Ken Safir (r).

Errors are information. In contrastive linguistics, they are thought to be caused by unconscious transfer of mother tongue structures to the system of the target language and give information about both systems. In the interlanguage hypothesis of second language acquisition, errors are indicative of the different intermediate learning levels and are useful pedagogical feedback. In both cases error analysis is an essential methodological tool for diagnosis and evaluation of the language acquisition process. Errors, too, give information in psychoanalysis (e.g., the Freudian slip), in language universal research, and in other fields of linguistics, such as linguistic change.This bibliography is intended to stimulate study into cross-language, cross-discipline and cross-theoretical, as well as for language universal, use of the numerous, but sometimes hard to come by, error analysis studies. 5398 titles covering the period 1578 up to 1990 (with work in more than 144 languages and language families) are cited, cross-referenced, and described. The subject areas covered are numerous. For example: Theoretical Linguistics (Linguistic Typology, Cognitive Linguistics), Historical Linguistics (Language Change), Applied Linguistics (e.g. Speech Disorders), Translation, Mother Tongue Acquisition, Foreign Language Learning (Negative Transfer, Intralingual and Interlingual Errors), Psychoanalysis (Slips of the Tongue), Typography, Shorthand, Clinical Linguistics and Speech Pathology, Reading Research, Automatic Error Detection, Contact Linguistics (Code-switching, Interference), etc.

This volume contains selected papers from the Eight World Congress of Applied Linguistics held in Sydney in 1987. Volume I starts off with an overview of the field by G. Richard Tucker in which he identifies two areas: innovative language education and language education policy. The overal focus of the papers to follow focus on the individual language learner, how that individual, in given contexts or in interaction with specific others, develops a command of a first language, of two or more first languages, or of a second language, in home and in classroom settings. At the same time, cutting across these variables, there is a gradual shifting of attention from investigations of the language learning process to proposals for language teaching curricula and syllabuses.

This major reference work fills a need long recognized in neurolinguistics: a source for analyzable speech transcripts from agrammatic aphasic patients that provides detailed grammatical descriptions and distributional analyses. This 3-volume set is unique in that it presents narrative speech from carefully selected clinically comparable patients, speakers of 14 languages, and parallel narratives by normal speakers. For each of the 14 languages there is a case presentation chapter analyzing and discussing the language of agrammatic patients, followed by primary data, which are organized as follows: running text of speech by two patients; interlinear morphemic translations of those texts; running text of speech elicited from two normal control subjects (plus interlinear translations); tables and figures analyzing distributional properties of the patients' speech; results of comprehension tests of the patients; transcriptions of patients' oral reading and writing samples. Neurological information is included with the case presentations, and a short grammatical sketch of each language is added to make the work on all languages accessible even to those who only read English. Language findings are presented for English, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Swedish, French, Italian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Hindi, Finnish, Hebrew, Chinese and Japanese.The book is an indispensable reference work for all linguists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists who wish to test their theories against a massive body of data.

Ekstein's book brings together papers on a number of themes which have occupied his thinking during the last 40 years. In the Wiener Kreis, the Vienna circle of philosophers, he studied, together with his professor Moritz Schlick, the philosophy of science, the analysis of language, and the clarification of meaning. Throughout his life he has always been inspired by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute his interest in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis was reinforced, and he established for himself a bridge between the kind of thinking that looks for philosophical clarification and that which searches for psychological meaning. The psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic methods of psychological clarification depend on the language tools of the thinking process. But these language tools, referring now to different theories of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the various schools, have their usefulness as well as their limitations. Ekstein's chronological assessment allows us to arrive at a philosophical and psychological clarification of present psycho-therapeutic and psychoanalytic schools.

Although Richard Gätschenberger can be regarded as one of the important sign theorists in the first third of the 20^th century, nothing much about the man and his works is currently known. Long before there was a widespread philosophical interest in language, Gätschenberger had already laid the foundations of a semiotic turn although the linguistic turn had not even happened; but his role as a pioneer is one reason for the comparatively small response to his sematology. This volume contains a facsimile reprint of the Regensburger 1901 edition of Richard Gätschenberger’s dissertation Grundzüge einer Psychologie des Zeichens, and is preceded by a preface ‘Sematology as a Basic Science’ by Achim Eschbach.

An in-depth investigation of constraints on error variables in grammar with special reference to bilingual misspelling orthographies. A corpus of errors is examined in minute detail. In the course of this analysis, received categories and standard assumptions about linguistic errors are critically scrutinized; some are sharpened, and others are abandoned. Many conceptual snarls having to do with the notion of error in linguistic performance are untangled in this book.