Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science will Transform Neuroscience (Blackwell/Maryland Lectures in Language and Cognition)
By C. R. Gallistel, Adam Philip King
* Publisher:Wiley-Blackwell
* Number Of Pages:336
* Publication Date:2009-05-11
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:1405122870
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9781405122870
Product Description:
Memory and the Computational Brain offers a provocative argument that goes to the heart of neuroscience, proposing that the field can and should benefit from the recent advances of cognitive science and the development of information theory over the course of the last several decades.
* A provocative argument that impacts across the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and neuroscience, suggesting new perspectives on learning mechanisms in the brain
* Proposes that the field of neuroscience can and should benefit from the recent advances of cognitive science and the development of information theory
* Suggests that the architecture of the brain is structured precisely for learning and for memory, and integrates the concept of an addressable read/write memory mechanism into the foundations of neuroscience
* Based on lectures in the prestigious Blackwell-Maryland Lectures in Language and Cognition, and now significantly reworked and expanded to make it ideal for students and faculty
Conceptualizing Metaphors On Charles Peirce's Marginalia (Routledge Studies in Linguistics)
By Ivan Mladenov
* Publisher: Routledge
* Number Of Pages: 189
* Publication Date: 2006-01-20
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0415360471
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780415360470
* Binding: Hardcover
Book Description:
The enigmatic thought of Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), considered by many to be one of the great philosophers of all time, involves inquiry not only into virtually all branches and sources of modern semiotics, physics, cognitive sciences, and mathematics, but also logic, which he understood to be the only useful approach to the riddle of reality.
This book represents an attempt to outline an analytical method based on Charles Peirce's least explored branch of philosophy, which is his evolutionary cosmology, and his notion that the universe as made of an 'effete mind.' The chief argument conceives of human discourse as a giant metaphor in regard to outside reality. The metaphors arise in our imagination as lightning-fast schemes of acting, speaking, or thinking. To prove this, each chapter will present a well-known metaphor and explain how it is unfolded and conceptualized according to the new method for revealing meaning.
This original work will interest students and scholars in many fields including semiotics, linguistics and philosophy.
Child Language: The Parametric Approach (Oxford Linguistics)
By William Snyder
* Publisher:Oxford University Press, USA
* Number Of Pages:224
* Publication Date:2007-08-02
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0199296693
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780199296699
* Binding:Hardcover
Product Description:
This is a systematic presentation of the parametric approach to child language. Linguistic theory seeks to specify the range of grammars permitted by the human language faculty and thereby to specify the child's "hypothesis space" during language acquisition. Theories of language variation have central implications for the study of child language, and vice versa. Yet the acquisitional predictions of such theories are seldom tested against attested data. This book aims to redress this neglect. It considers the nature of the information the child must acquire according to the various linguistic theories. In doing so it sets out in detail the practical aspects of acquisitional research, addresses the challenges of working with children of different ages, and shows how the resulting data can be used to test theories of grammatical variation. Particular topics examined in depth include the acquisition of syllable structure, empty categories, and wh-movement. The data sets on which the book draws are freely available to students and researchers via a website maintained by the author.
The book is written for scholars and students of child language acquisition in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. It will be a valuable reference for researchers in child language acquisition in all fields.
Children's Comprehension Problems in Oral and Written Language: A Cognitive Perspective (Challenges in Language and Literacy)
By Kate Cain, Jane Oakhill
* Publisher:The Guilford Press
* Number Of Pages:302
* Publication Date:2007-03-02
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:1593854439
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9781593854430
* Binding:Hardcover
Product Description:
Comprehension is the ultimate aim of reading and listening. How do children develop the ability to comprehend written and spoken language, and what can be done to help those who are having difficulties? This book presents cutting-edge research on comprehension problems experienced by children without any formal diagnosis as well as those with specific language impairment, autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, hearing impairment, head injuries, and spina bifida. Providing in-depth information to guide research and practice, chapters describe innovative assessment strategies and identify important implications for intervention and classroom instruction. The book also sheds light on typical development and the key cognitive skills and processes that underlie successful comprehension.
Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers: Semantic Extension From the Ethnoscience Tradition (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics)
By David Kronenfeld
* Publisher:Oxford University Press, USA
* Number Of Pages:288
* Publication Date:1996-04-11
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0195094077
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780195094077
* Binding:Hardcover
Product Description:
Meaning seems to shift from context to context; how do we know when someone says "grab a chair" that an ottoman or orange crate will do, but when someone says "let's buy a chair," they won't? In Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers, Kronenfeld offers a theory that explains both the usefulness of language's variability of reference and the mechanisms which enable us to understand each other in spite of the variability. Kronenfeld's theory, rooted in the tradition of ethnoscience (or cognitive anthropology), accomplishes three things. First, it distinguishes prototypic referents from extended referents. Second, it describes the various bases of semantic extensions. Finally it details how we use the situational context of usage, the linguistic context of opposition and inclusion, and the conceptual context of knowledge about the world to interpret communicative events.
What Makes Grammaticalization?: A Look From Its Fringes And Its Components (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs)
By Walter Bisang, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Bjorn Wiemer
* Publisher:Walter de Gruyter
* Number Of Pages:354
* Publication Date:2004-12-30
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:3110181525
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9783110181524
* Binding:Hardcover
Product Description:
The status of grammaticalization has been the subject of many controversial discussions. The contributions to What makes Grammaticalization approach the prevalent phenomenon from the angle of language structure and focus on the interrelation between the levels of phonology, pragmatics (inference), discourse and the lexicon and some of them try to integrate the areal perspective. A wealth of data from Slavonic languages as well as from languages of other genetic and areal affiliation is discussed. The book is of interest to linguists specializing in grammaticalization, lexicalization and morphological typology, to language typologists as well as to functional, historical and cognitive linguists.
Constructional Approaches to English Grammar (Topics in English Linguistics)
By Trousdale, Graeme
* Publisher: Mouton de Gruyter
* Number Of Pages: 313
* Publication Date: 2008-07-15
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 3110196263
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9783110196269
* Binding: Hardcover
Product Description:
This collection of articles brings together new research from both established and emerging international experts in the study of English grammar, all of whom have engaged with the notion of 'construction' in their work.
Wh-Movement: Moving On (Current Studies in Linguistics)
By Noam Chomsky, Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng, Norbert Corver
* Publisher:The MIT Press
* Number Of Pages:369
* Publication Date:2006-06-01
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0262033461
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780262033466
Product Description:
Wh-movement—the phenomenon by which interrogative words appear at the beginning of interrogative sentences—is one of the central displacement operations of human language. Noam Chomsky's 1977 paper "On Wh-Movement," a landmark in the study of wh-movement (and movement in general), showed that this computational operation is the basis of a variety of syntactic constructions that had previously been described in terms of construction-specific rules. Taking Chomsky's article as a starting point, the contributors to this collection reconsider a number of the issues raised in "On Wh-Movement" from the perspective of contemporary Minimalist syntactic theory (which explores the thesis that human language is a system optimally designed to meet certain interface conditions imposed by other cognitive systems with which the language faculty interacts). They discuss such wh-movement issues as wh-phrases and pied-piping, the formation of A-bar chains and the copy theory of movement, cyclicity and locality of wh-movement, and the typology of wh-constructions. By reconsidering core characteristics of the wh-movement operation first systematically discussed by Chomsky from the Minimalist perspective, this volume contributes to the further development of the theory of wh-movement and to the general theory of movement.
Contributors:
Brian Agbayani, Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng, Sandra Chung, Norbert Corver, Caterina Donati, Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Toru Ishii, Heejeong Ko, Howard Lasnik, Philip LeSourd, Chris H. Reintges, Luigi Rizzi, Balázs Surányi, Akira Watanabe, Henrietta Yang
Bio-linguistics: The Santa Barbara Lectures
By Talmy Givon
* Publisher:John Benjamins Publishing Co
* Number Of Pages:395
* Publication Date:2002-08
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:9027225907
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9789027225900
Preface
Is mind a biological phenomenon? Has mind—spirit, soul—evolved, or is it
but a mysterious projection of the biological brain, a soft behavioral program
launched off the hardened genetic platform? And where exactly do language
and culture fit in the firmament of human existence? These questions may be
tackled from a variety of perspectives, each rooted in its own ancient philosophical
predilections. One may choose, treading in the well-worn footsteps of
Plato and Aristotle, to view mind, language and culture as our species’ most
conspicuous claim to uniqueness, an audacious saltation from our crude
merely-biological antecedence. From such a perspective, language, mind and
culture, transcendent extravagant flowers of the human soul, are neither
constrained by mundane adaptive (Darwinian) pressures nor explained by
plodding adaptively-guided (Darwinian) evolution.Whether the cause of this
radical departure in the primate line be attributed to a spark of the Divine, or
to a serendipitous mega-mutation, the humble explanatory parameters of
evolutionary biology do not apply. Between the biological and the cultural,
between the brain and the mind, the adaptive and the arbitrary, the constrained
and fancy-free, lies an unbridgeable chasm. And while some proponents
of this radical uniqueness of homo sapiens may concede a genetic basis to
the extraordinary—and thus presumably innate—linguistic capacities of our
species, they continue to view its unprecedented emergence as governed by
unique principles that transcend the mundane mechanics of evolutionary
biology.
A somewhat different perspective concedes that the human mind may be
the product of adaptive evolution, culminating in a genetically-configured real
organ, the brain. But language and culture merely fall out of, or emerge from,
the biologically-evolved mind-brain, requiring no further specific adaptations.
From such a perspective, the emergence of language in either ontogeny or
diachrony is fully predicted from the interaction between the adaptivelyconstrained
mind, on the one hand, and the free-ranging socio-cultural context,
on the other. Whatever universal features that may be observed in human
language(s) are but universals of mind-brain. Though such universals are surely
mitigated by the freely-construed socio-cultural environment. In other words,
the mind-brain may have evolved, but language and culture did not, or not yet.
They are, as of now, but ‘soft’ behavioral responses to serendipitous environmental
contingencies.
The perspective adopted in this book takes it for granted that a rigid
separation between biology and culture is compatible neither with the observed
facts nor with a mature theory of evolution. Human culture, however complex
and abstract it may be, is not diminished by conceding its ancient biological
roots.Nor is biology over-interpreted or softened by noting the old pre-human
lineage of sociality, culture and communication. Culture is, indeed, an unimpeachably
biological adaptation, a mechanism through which ‘soft-wired’ lifetime
behavioral experimentation serve as the pace-maker of ‘hard-wired’
generic evolution. Culture—the sharing of perspective among conspecifics—
is the adaptive foundation of social cooperation among members of the same
community of interest, be it in matters of reproduction, foraging, hunting,
defense or comfort. Adaptive pressures, the hallmark of biological evolution,
persist far beyond human culture’s hallowed gates, albeitmuch transformed by
the added complexity and its attendant explosion of diversity.
The rise of socially-shared cognition and communication makes the life of
bio-organisms—and of the scientist who studies them—more complex, less
predictable, more replete with a diversity of behavioral choices and adaptations.
The advent of self-consciousness, multiple perspectives and perspectives-uponperspectives
renders such complexity and diversity that much more explosive.
But it still does not alter the essentially-adaptive nature of the overall enterprise.
Cultural, linguistic and cognitive complexity, with their attendant intracommunal
and cross-communal diversity, do not in any way obviate the
adaptive nature of anything human. They only re-position the notion ‘adaptive’
in a more complex, multi-variant context. While doing science in such a
context is much harder, giving up because of complexity and variability is not
a rational option.
When language is viewed as a biological phenomenon, then the study of
diversity—both within the individual speaker or speech community and across
languages — becomes enormously relevant. Variation is aptly treated by
empirically-inclined linguists as a vital methodological issue. In such a context
one may point out, following W. Labov, to the utter empirical untenability of
Chomsky’s idealized competence and its Siamese twin, generativity. But variation
is also an indispensable theoretical construct in any biologically-rooted domain.
It is both the end-product of emergence and the very mechanism via which
extant — synchronic — structures come into being diachronically. As in
biology, one may observe that today’s cross-speaker, cross-dialect or crosslanguage
variants are but the manifest end-points of the diachronic pathways
that gave them rise. As in biology, today’s pool of intra-speaker or cross-speaker
variants within the speech community are but the inventory of potential
diachronic changes, i.e. of tomorrow’s emergent types.
If the diachronic emergence of language is at the core of our theoretical
explanation of synchronic typological diversity, as Joseph Greenberg noted,
then the site of explanatory universals of language must be re-positioned.
Rather than being an inductive summary of the extant synchronic variants,
universals of language, much like those of biology, are the set of (presumably
adaptive) principles that constrain and explain the emergence of extant
diversity. Ultimately therefore, the real locus where language universals exert
their adaptive pressure is the developmental mechanism itself. But since
development is nothing but the protracted accretion of on-line behaviors of
the communicating individual, language universals exert their formative
pressure during on-line linguistic performance.Much like biological universals,
which exert their adaptive pressure on the ongoing processes of ontogenesis
and phylogenesis.
Many of those who follow Joseph Greenberg’s work and count him as their
inspiration have taken it for granted that his notion of universals was strictly
inductive, statistical, implicational. I think this reading is perhaps less than fully
insightful, given Greenberg’s adaptively-oriented work on markedness, and
given his profoundly diachronic view of extant synchronic types. In choosing to
dedicate this book to Joe, I have elected to interpret his approach to the balance
between universality and diversity more comprehensively.
At the methodological level first, JosephGreenberg’s pairing of typology-cumuniversals
was guided by a mundane Aristotelian insistence that if one were to
propound a theory of language universals, it would be somewhat irresponsible to
do so without first consulting a representative sample of cross-language diversity.
The fact that Aristotle practiced this empirical caution in his work on Biology
and Politics but not on language is of course curious, but a non sequitur.
At the theoretical level, Greenberg was a hardy survivor of two successive
waves of American structuralism, one strictly empiricist and unabashedly
atheoretical, the other emphatically rationalist, theoretical with a vengeance, but
disdainful of the burdens of empirical science. A man of abiding curiosity and
driven by the need to explain, Greenberg was inclined to insist on both an
explanatory theory and an empirical methodology.
To many of us who never took a single class from Joseph Greenberg, he was
a generous mentor who nevertheless cast his young associates adrift to do their
own thing; who taught by example and corrected with a gentle smile and a
tentative suggestion; who never tired of reaching for the elusive balance
between the diversity of human languages and the universality of human
language. Requiescat in pace.
Networks and Knowledge in Roget's Thesaurus
By Werner Hullen
* Publisher:Oxford University Press, USA
* Number Of Pages:256
* Publication Date:2009-01-15
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0199553238
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780199553235
Product Description:
In this book Werner Hullen examines Roget's Thesaurus in relation to linguistics, philosophy and history. He explores the influence of Roget's Thesaurus abroad (Germany and the Romance countries). He epitomizes its history and compares the various editions of the book. In lexical case studies he evaluates some entries with pertinence to their cultural and political implications. He discusses the didactic potential of thesauri in general and considers the implications of the Thesaurus for the study of scholarly linguistics and psychology. He discusses how Roget's Thesaurus prepared the way for the more recent idea of network semantics. By analyzing retrieval techniques one can show, he claims, how the words of languages were (and are) stored in the minds of those who speak them. Professor Hullen concludes by considering the role of synonymy in language from a perspective of cognitive linguistics showing that it is indispensable for communication.
Cognitive Foundations of Grammar
by: Bernd Heine
By
* Publisher:Oxford University Press, USA
* Number Of Pages:196
* Publication Date:1997-10-31
* Sales Rank:1628203
* ISBN / ASIN:0195102525
* EAN:9780195102529
* Binding:Paperback
* Manufacturer:Oxford University Press, USA
* Studio:Oxford University Press, USA
* Average Rating:
* Total Reviews:
Book Description:
The main function of language is to convey meaning. The question of why language is structured the way it is, Heine here argues, has therefore to be answered first of all with reference to this function. Linguistic explanations in terms of other exponents of language structure, e.g. of syntax, are likely to highlight peripheral or epi-phenomenal rather than central characteristics of language structure. This book uses basic findings on grammaticalization processes to describe the role of cognitive forces in shaping grammar. It provides students with an introductory treatment of a field of linguistics that has developed recently and is rapidly expanding.
Language and Number: The Emergence of a Cognitive System
By James R. Hurford
* Publisher:Blackwell Pub
* Number Of Pages:344
* Publication Date:1987-11
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0631155686
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780631155683
Product Description:
This book is intended as a contribution to linguistic theory in the broadest sense. It offers a view of language - illustrated through an examination of the linguistics of number - which brings together considerations of individual psychology and of communication within a speech community. These two strands, the psychological and the social, are put together to give an evolutionary perspective on language. The psychological considerations relate both to the invention and to the ordinary acquisition of language; the social considerations relate to the ways individuals negotiate common standard expressions for their meanings. Languages, the author argues, grow through the interaction of individual minds on the forms invented and socially negotiated by their predecessors. The book also makes a contribution to the philosophy of numbers; arguing that our knowledge of numbers is akin to our possession of language, and that both emerge from a faculty for constructing collections from aggregates. An account is given of the rise of the number sequence and of constructions expressing the basic arithmetical operations of addition and multiplication, the latter by turning the techniques of denotational semantics onto numerals. While it may be convenient to talk about numbers as abstract Platonic objects, the account here shows a way of explaining the possibility of inventing and knowing such objects through linguistic devices. This in its turn could be fed back into arguments that languages, like numbers, are abstract objects, such as Katz has put forward. Once numbers, the Platonist's paradigm example of abstract objects, have been shown to develop through language, the argument that a language is a Platonic object becomes much harder to sustain. Nevertheless, the author claims that languages are in some sense abstract objects, the results of the historical interaction of both psychological and social factors. But, unlike Chomsky, who also believes that that is what languages are, he believes that it is possible to say something interesting about the interplay of factors that gives rise to them, and thereby to begin to explain their form. A computational model of the social negotiation of standardized expressions is developed in the final chapter.
Contents Preface
Acknowledgments
1 The Object of Study
2 Explaining Linguistic Universals
3 A Continuous Sequence of Counting Words
4 Numbers: the Meanings of Numerals
5 Syntactic Integration of Counting Words
6 Standardization of Complex Numerals to a Fixed Base
7 Denouement and Prospect
References
Index
Meaning and Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Converging Evidence in Language & Communication Research)
By Liliana Albertazzi
* Publisher:John Benjamins Publishing Co
* Number Of Pages:266
* Publication Date:2000-09
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:9027238871
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9789027238870
* Hardcover: 269 pages
* Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co (December 2000)
* ISBN-10: 1556196814
* ISBN-13: 978-1556196812
e-Book
978902729972
Description
The aim of this book is to present significant aspects of cognitive grammar by adopting an interdisciplinary approach. The book provides an interplay of contributions by some exponents of cognitive grammar (Langacker, Croft, Wood, Geeraerts, K鰒ecses, Wildgen), and philosophers of language (Albertazzi, Marconi, Peruzzi, Violi) who, in most cases, share a phenomenological and Gestalt approach to the problem of semantics.
The topics covered include themes that are central to the debate in cognitive grammar, such as, metaphor, construal operations, prototypicality, Gestalt schemes and field semantics. The book offers evidence to support the cognitive hypothesis in semantics and the existence of a close connection between the structures of perception and the categories of natural language.
Because of the approach employed, with its consideration of borderline aspects among semantics, linguistics, theoretical reflection and historical analysis, the book marks out a route for a philosophical inquiry complementary to a cognitive approach to the semantics of natural language.
Table of contents
Which semantics?Liliana Albertazzi 1–24
Why a mind is necessary: Conceptualization, grammar and linguistic semantics Ronald W. Langacker 25–38
What is Montague semantics? Diego Marconi 39–49
Construal operations in linguistics and artificial intelligence William Croft and Esther J. Wood 51–78
Salience phenomena in the lexicon: A typology Dirk Geeraerts 79–101
Prototypicality, typicality, and context Patrizia Violi 103–122
Directions and perspective points in spatial perception Liliana Albertazzi 123–143
Force and emotion Zoltán K鰒ecses 145–168
The geometric roots of semantics Alberto Peruzzi 169–201
The history and future of field semantics: From Giordano Bruno to dynamic semantics Wolfgang Wildgen 203–226
Notes 227–234
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
By Steven Pinker
* Publisher:Viking Adult
* Number Of Pages:512
* Publication Date:2007-09-11
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0670063274
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780670063277
* Binding:Hardcover
Product Description:
New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books—including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate—have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today’s most important and popular science writers.
Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society.
With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life—why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
Summary: Always Educational
Rating: 4
Steven Pinker is one of the greatest minds we have. The Blank Slate is on my top 20 lifetime list for books and I've enjoyed seeing him in interviews (and one outstanding debate) online. The Stuff of Thought unfortunately is fairly pedestrian by his standards. To me, this book was far more about language than it was human nature or psychology. As far as linguistics is concerned readers learn much but the same cannot be said in terms of it providing a window into our souls. Some of the wordplay was entertaining and he is insightful concerning speech but not enough psychology was illuminated here in my view to warrant opening it again.
Summary: Lacks 'stuff' on the physiological and cognitive origins of language
Rating: 3
Although Pinker is renown in the field of linguistics, I was a bit disappointed with the single sidedness of this book. In it, he examines the origins of the English language, but to a large degree fails to introduce the factors attributing to the physiological and cognitive results from the birth of language. I anticipated a book with more in-depth research on the origins and effects of language on the formation of consciousness and cognition. An example of such book is Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's "Genes, Peoples, and Language,' which I highly recommend.
Summary: Excellent
Rating: 4
Take One: Steven Pinker is the premier purveyor of the parsed poesy of plain prose.
No, that won't do. No matter how accurate that statement is, its excessive alliteration is bound to sound too cutesy for such an engaging read as his latest foray into the way mankind thinks and speaks.
Take Two: In his previous bestselling books, such as The Blank Slate, How The Mind Works, and The Language Instinct (to name just the most influential), Pinker- a Harvard cognitive psychologist, has emerged as the premier science researcher and writer on the human mind and language. Yes, there are people who would point to philosopher Daniel Dennett as being a greater expert in the way the mind arose and works, and linguists and cognitive psychologists would likely point to Noam Chomsky as the granddaddy of all language theory, but as well theorized and as influential as the ideas of the other two men have been (not to mention the controversial natures of their ideas and personae) it is Pinker who has emerged as the public's foremost educator in the field. He is to language and the mind what Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould were to astronomy and evolutionary science, respectively.
His latest book is The Stuff Of Thought: Language As A Window Into Human Nature, although a more accurate title might be The Stuff Of Language, since the book focuses far more on language, and parsing it down into its constituent elements. Yes, language represents thoughts we communicate, but when one views the word thought one is led to think that Pinker might be writing of the biochemical firings of neurons, and how one that zigs left results in memories of the smell of Aunt Bea's cherry pies when a child, and when one zigs right a memory of losing your first fistfight is dredged up.
Nonetheless, at 439 pages, with over 40 pages of footnotes, the book is not a difficult read, and this is because Pinker, aside from being a gifted thinker, possesses an even rarer quality- he is a gifted writer. No, his gift is not in the creative field. I cannot speculate on how he would guide a fictive narrative nor end a poem. But, he has an elemental grasp of how to use words to sell ideas. First, he will elucidate the terms of what he is attacking or explaining, by using a lucid metaphor or analogy, and that is further heightened by his very apt use of pop cultural detritus- from the obscure to the profane, and back again, and then he will usually contrast this to a pre-formed idea. That notion can be one that is put forth by another thinker, or rival, or may just be common knowledge, or even mythos....The Stuff Of Thought is an excellent book, and while it may not be as groundbreaking and controversial as some of his earlier works, it is easily his most accessible and fun book to read, as it is so suffused in pop culturata. Yet, on a scientific level, the book does something quite amazing: it bridges the chasm that many Academics have over language itself. Postmodernists believe language is a circular self-referential trap, while pragmatists believe it lends insight into what reality is. Pinker's book seems to posit that that is a false dichotomy, not because both claims are false, but because both are fundamentally true. And in the gullies created by the force of this remarkable fact lie the careers of men like Pinker, ever the Lokis of language to the obtuse, but the Prometheuses of polysemy to those in the know.
Now, about that beginning: Steven Pinker is the premier purveyor of the parsed poesy of plain prose....fire from strange gods, indeed!
Summary: Still a Good Read in Spite of its Flaws
Rating: 4
I confess to being an unabashed fan of Steven Pinker's books on language (I am a multilingual life-long student of linguistics with time to read and study in retirement), which is why I bought this book.
I agree it has some serious flaws that have been mentioned in negative reviews, such as political and social beliefs intruding where they do not really belong. (Well, he's a psychologist, not a linguist, so I don't expect anything different.)
Still, the book is quite fascinating and contains some very compelling analysis. In particular, I find his dissection of political (or perhaps better, politically correct) speech of various groups to be well worth reading.
But what is most fascinating to me is the analysis of what I think of as "subconscious grammar." My personal favorite example of what Pinker is explaining here is when my Russian-born cleaning lady scares my cat with the vacuum and says "He is scary." (I answer, "No, the vacuum is scary, Tashi is scared.") What is there in our brains that figures out that "scary" is what emanates from elsewhere, but "scared" is what we feel?
Why is it that in German I would say "She came back to her home town" (even though I am not in her home town and never have been, but for her it is "homecoming"), but in English I am supposed to say "She went back to her home town" because she moved somewhere other than towards me?
For anyone fascinated by this sort of linguistic analysis, this book is valuable and interesting.
I also enjoyed the analysis of "slow evolution" -- the fact that we humans change our environment much faster than our brains can evolve to cope with current circumstances. He says nothing new and startling here, I think, but as always with Steven Pinker, his detailed examples and apt analogies make the subject matter come alive.
If, like me, you don't need the political stuff or the overly explicit analysis of cursing, just skim over that.
Summary: Good but dense
Rating: 4
I am a Pinker fan and I enjoyed this book but it is closely written with much detailed linguistic background to support Pinker's ideas on the relation between cognition and language. Entertaining sections include the one on dirty words and his critique of Fodor's "Extreme Nativism":
"Fodor is a brilliant, witty, and pugnacious scholar who, among other things, helped to lay the conceptual foundations for cognitive science and to develop the scientific study of sentence comprehension.5 His notorious theory that we are born with some fifty thousand innate concepts (a conventional estimate of the number of words in a typical English speaker's vocabulary) makes an appearance here not as a player in the nature-nurture debate but as a player in the debate over how the meanings of words are represented in people's minds. In the preceding chapter, I proposed that the human mind contains representations of the meanings of words which are composed of more basic concepts like "cause," "means," "event," and "place." Fodor begs to differ. He believes that the meanings of words are atoms, in the original sense of things that cannot be split. ......"
The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning, and Cognition
By Andrea Tyler, Vyvyan Evans
* Publisher: Cambridge University Press
* Number Of Pages: 266
* Publication Date: 2003-06-30
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0521814308
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780521814300
* Binding: Hardcover
Book Description:
Using a cognitive linguistics perspective, this work provides the most comprehensive, theoretical analysis of the semantics of English prepositions available. All English prepositions are originally coded as spatial relations between two physical entities. While retaining their original meaning, prepositions have also developed a rich set of non-spatial meanings. Andrea Tyler and Vyvyan Evans argue that all the meanings are systematically related through a set of cognitive principles, emphasizing the importance of human experience with the world as the foundation for lexical meaning.
The Proper Treatment of Events (Explorations in Semantics)
By Michiel Van Lambalgen, Fritz Hamm
* Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
* Number Of Pages: 264
* Publication Date: 2005-02-04
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 1405112123
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9781405112123
* Binding: Paperback
Product Description:
The Proper Treatment of Events offers a novel approach to the semantics of tense and aspect motivated by cognitive considerations.
offers a new theory of the semantics of tense aspect and nominalizations that combines formal semantics and cognitive approaches written accessibly for students and scholars in theoretical linguists, as well as in philosophy of language, logic, cognitive science, and computer science accompanied by a website at (http://staff.science.uva.nl/~michiell/) that provides slides for instructors and background material for students
Summary: The chicken is crossing the road, but will it get across?
Rating: 5
The temporal notions of natural languages are notoriously difficult to analyze. For the tenses of the English language, many different, incompatible approaches have been tried, and the general impression is that things get worse if one looks at the phenomenon of aspect, roughly corresponding to the simple vs. progressive verb forms. One of the most vexing riddles is the so-called "imperfective paradox": If somebody is doing something, we expect, but cannot quite deduce, that that action will be finished. If the chicken is crossing the road, it will normally get to the other side -- but it may be correct to say that the chicken is crossing the road even though a runaway truck (or a falling piano, for that matter) puts an end to that a little later.
It seems fair to say that there is no definite theory of the semantics of tense and aspect yet. In their book "The Proper Treatment of Events", Michiel van Lambalgen, a philosopher and cognitive scientist, and Fritz Hamm, a linguist, propose a new theory that, as far as I can tell, does remarkably well. Focussing on the central notion of an event and a corresponding formal notion of an eventuality, the theory uses a computational approach to semantics to explain the meaning of temporal talk. The main slogan here is "the sense of an expression is the algorithm needed to compute its denotation" -- quite a modern, but, as it turns out, fruitful reading of Frege's sense/denotation distinction. Thus the senses of temporal expressions turn out to be constraint logic programs, and the books contains quite a few of them, always in close connection with concrete applications. The wealth of examples provides a welcome balance to the technical details of van Lambalgen and Hamm's theory.
The book can be read from a number of different perspectives. For a cognitive scientist, the detailed models of the computational structure of temporal information will be extremely valuable. From a linguistic point of view, there are fresh approaches to many vexing problems of tense and aspect. And last but not least, many philosophical insights are to be gained. The book gives a bold and lucid picture of the phenomenon of temporal perspective. Its most important contribution, though, may be the careful and detailed introduction of computational semantics, applied to one of the most difficult areas of natural language semantics.
This book is not an easy read, but it is well written, and technicalities are explained clearly. Judging by the amount of new, interesting and useful information, this has certainly been one of the most rewarding books I have read lately. If you are interested in linguistics, cognitive science, or philosophy of mind and language, this is a book for you.
Knowledge of Meaning: An Introduction to Semantic Theory
By Richard Larson, Gabriel Segal
* Publisher: The MIT Press
* Number Of Pages: 659
* Publication Date: 1995-09-23
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0262621002
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780262621007
* Binding: Paperback
Book Description:
Current textbooks in formal semantics are all versions of, or introductions to, the same paradigm in semantic theory: Montague Grammar. Knowledge of Meaning is based on different assumptions and a different history. It provides the only introduction to truth- theoretic semantics for natural languages, fully integrating semantic theory into the modern Chomskyan program in linguistic theory and connecting linguistic semantics to research elsewhere in cognitive psychology and philosophy. As such, it better fits into a modern graduate or undergraduate program in linguistics, cognitive science, or philosophy. Furthermore, since the technical tools it employs are much simpler to teach and to master, Knowledge of Meaning can be taught by someone who is not primarily a semanticist.
Linguistic semantics cannot be studied as a stand-alone subject but only as part of cognitive psychology, the authors assert. It is the study of a particular human cognitive competence governing the meanings of words and phrases. Larson and Segal argue that speakers have unconscious knowledge of the semantic rules of their language, and they present concrete, empirically motivated proposals about a formal theory of this competence based on the work of Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson. The theory is extended to a wide range of constructions occurring in natural language, including predicates, proper nouns, pronouns and demonstratives, quantifiers, definite descriptions, anaphoric expressions, clausal complements, and adverbs.
Knowledge of Meaning gives equal weight to philosophical, empirical, and formal discussions. It addresses not only the empirical issues of linguistic semantics but also its fundamental conceptual questions, including the relation of truth to meaning and the methodology of semantic theorizing. Numerous exercises are included in the book.
Summary: Review of Larson & Segal, _Knowledge of Meaning_
Rating: 3
L&S's theory might be termed a "cognitivized" version of more or less standard truth-conditional semantics - more properly, a series of versions, or T-theories. The authors' strategy is first to present the basic principles; then, beginning with a model that can handle only very simple data, to add more and more structure to accommodate more and more data, and along the way, to entertain departures which are later shown to be inadequate and discarded. Thus we go through PC+ (propositional calculus plus names and predicates), PCset (in which names are singletons), PCprop (in which predicates are properties), PC+DN (in which names are descriptions), VRT (which can handle pronouns and demonstratives), PredC (which can handle quantification), GQ (replacing quantification as done in PredC with generalized quantifiers, and bringing in definite descriptions). After anaphora and tense are introduced, a final version of the theory emerges. This is a formal approach to meaning; L&S's method of imparting it makes it easier to absorb than many textbooks do. Even so, a complete truth derivation for such a sentence as "Every woman loves her car" in GQ, for example, runs to about three typed pages.
The central claim, and at the same time the central problem, with this book - aiming as it does at a cognitive theory - has to do with the concept "interpretivity." A T-theory is interpretive, according to L&S, if the connective "is true iff" yields the same pairings of object-language sentences and metalanguage sentences as the connective "means that." At first they say for example that PC+, PCset and PCprop are all interpretive; later they qualify this, because of ontological commitments. PCset commits us to the existence of sets and PCprop to the existence of Platonic forms: by using these on the right-hand sides of T-theorems, it could be argued, we lose interpretivity. We are saying, for example, that "John sings" means that "the individual named John is a member of the set of singers." We are attributing implicit knowledge of sets to speakers. L&S do not resolve the issue, but suggest that these ontological commitments are not so bad. We cannot formally discuss the meanings of quantifiers, or even develop PC+, without sets. The authors go on to argue that people talk, at least, as if they also assumed the existence of properties & relations. Ultimately, the ontological commitments made by a semantic theory do not clearly provide grounds for accepting or rejecting it.
Since L&S want to make their approach relevant to cognitive science, the problems of coextensive proper nouns and empty proper nouns have to be dealt with; names are assigned "dossiers" which contain what speakers believe about their referents, and dossiers are connected to "concepts." The issue of what a concept is, is not resolved, but by the middle of the book we are assured that "what appears on the right-hand side of an axiom for a proper noun is an individual concept." (Taken literally, of course, this would mean that the meaning of "Socrates jumped over the moon" is "The concept of Socrates jumped over the concept of the moon.")
The book proceeds at an even pace, has good exercises and very good notes, and presents the material clearly. The fundamental papers by Alfred Tarksi and Donald Davidson should ideally be read and discussed before beginning the book.
Ken Miner
The Language Instinct
By Steven Pinker
* Publisher:Perennial (HarperCollins)
* Number Of Pages:496
* Publication Date:1995-02
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0060976519
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780060976514
* Binding:Paperback
Product Description:
In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, well-known for his revolutionary theory of how children acquire language, lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, how it evolved. With wit, education, and deft use of everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web spinning in spiders or sonar in bats.
Summary: A Thorough and Entertaining Introduction to Language
Rating: 5
As someone who has had a fascination about languages, this book was the perfect choice for my undergraduate neuroscience class--it's objective is to elucidate how the mind creates language. The prose is extremely well-written and complex ideas clearly explained. Pinker takes the reader on a very fun and thought-provoking journey, providing fascinating insights for both the casually-interested reader and linguists alike. I will highlight on some key points presented throughout.
The first sections illustrate the key themes that Pinker will elaborate on throughout the rest of the book. He presents language as being an evolutionary adaptation that is unique to humans, just as much as a trunk is an adaptation for elephants or sonar for a bat. It is an instinct that we innately are born with. One of the myths about language is the notion that language is taught or transmitted, whether from mother to baby, or from one civilization to another. In actuality, children seem to be born with "Universal Grammar," a blueprint for all grammars on earth. "Virtually every sentence is a brand new combination of words. Therefore a language cannot be a repertoire of responses; the brain must contain a recipe or program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words (9)." Likewise, there has yet to be a civilization found that is devoid of language. For example, a group of a million people had inhabited an area isolated from the rest of the world in New Guinea for forty thousand years, yet had independently developed their own language, as discovered when first contact was made in the 1920s.
Another important concept presented is "mentalese", a euphemism for a theory of thinking known as "computational/representational theory of mind." It essentially negates the common myth that thought is dependent on language and its corollary, that since people of different backgrounds than us have different languages, they must think differently. There is thought to be a universal "mentalese," and to "know a language" is simply being able to translate mentalese into strings of words in that language.
The second section of the book is a comprehensive summary of the basic parts of language, with plentiful information regarding syntax, phrase structure, morphemes, and more. A key point made is the recent discovery of a common anatomy in all the world's languages, called "X-bar theory." With the general set of rules, children do not have to "learn" lists and lists of rules for each language via rote memorization, but are born knowing the linguistic framework. They are then able to go from speaking a few isolated words to complex yet grammatically coherent sentences in a matter of months.
In the next section, Pinker introduces the concept of the "parser", which is the mental program that analyzes sentence structure during language comprehension. Grammar is simply a protocol, which does not necessitate understanding. In a nutshell, as the person reads a sentence, the parser will group phrases, building "phrase trees", consistent with linguistic rules (for example, a noun phrase is followed by a verb phrase). It is interesting that grammatically correct yet poorly constructed sentences can cause a person great difficulty in comprehension--the rationale is that the parser will not present the person with the correct phrase tree, among copious possible combinations.
Pinker goes on to describe the differences between languages. Despite grammatical difference between languages, such as subject(S)/verb(V)/object(O) order (SVO, SOV, etc), fixed-word-order/free-word-order (if phrase order can vary or not), there are striking similarities. The most prominent are implications--if a language has X, it will have Y. For example, if the basic order of a language is SOV, it will have question words at the beginning of the sentence (234).
Pinker cites three processes that act on languages that result in the differences that we see evident in languages today: innovation, learning, and migration. For example in the case of migration, though the roots of English are from Northern Germany, the existence of thousands of French words in English is the legacy of the invasion of Britain by the Normans in 1066. One of the most broad-reaching relationships between current modern languages can be traced back to the possible existence of a proto-Indo-European language, whose modern-day descendents span from Western Europe to the Indian subcontinent.
Over the final chapters, Pinker elaborates on the amazing explosion of language acquisition in children during their first three years. He explains the significance of Broca's and Wernicke's in language, by examining different cases of aphasia with patients having damage to those areas. Our current understanding of the brain does not allow us to be able to predict what the impact of damage to these areas are from patient to patient--it is frequently witnessed that patients with damage in identical places to these areas have different types of aphasia.
As a final note, Pinker makes a distinction between prescriptive rules, such as grammatical rules that we are taught in school, and descriptive rules, the way people actually talk. In response to the former, he makes a claim that using non-standard English such as "I can't get no satisfaction" versus the standard English "I can't get any satisfaction" is not wrong linguistically, as it is simply a different dialect with an internally consistent grammar. The evident double-negative (which is "wrong" in standard English) is simply a remnant of Middle English, where double-negatives were ubiquitous. As long as the grammatical rules of any language are consistent and systematic, as in the seemingly wrong non-standard English, they follow the descriptive rules and are linguistically correct.
Overall, The Language Instinct is a great read for anyone even remotely interested in the topic. The scope is immense, from basic linguistics, to language development, to language evolution, to genetics, to overall mind design. In addition to being introduced to very important linguistic concepts, you will have an amazing amount of entertaining examples to share in any setting.
Summary: Great book
Rating: 5
I found this book to be an interesting and informative read. While I am interested in linguistics (and thus was probably a bit more excited about the topic than the average person), I think this book would also be enjoyable for anyone. Pinker writes in an understandable manner, mostly avoiding linguistic jargon and always explaining complex topics in a generally understandable way.
Additionally, the latest edition includes a "P.S." addition at the end that incudes Q&A with Pinker as well as a summary for each chapter of new advances that have been made since the book was originally written--a nice addition to an already great book.
Summary: A fascinating, but somewhat thickly written story
Rating: 4
We all talk. (Some of us more than others). But all humans -- barring a problem such as deafness -- talk. Even our deaf friends talk by means of a complicated language of visual signs.
And Steven Pinker tells this story, the story of human language, and why it's so essential a part of our humanity, well. Following Chomsky, he posits a universal language structure, an innate part of our being who we are, and how small children grow quickly into complex grammatical and syntactical structures.
And for the most part, this is a good read. My only complaint is that on occasions, Dr. Pinker waxes a bit too eloquent, telling more information than is needed for the argument, giving pages and pages of examples when one or 2 would do. But this is a good introduction to the whole question of why and how we talk, and by inference how we think.
Summary: enjoyable
Rating: 4
i liked this book better than pinker's "how the mind works." it was a little more focused, obviously, and i feel that pinker had better explanations for his ideas re language and linguistics than for the mind as a whole (tho he did use examples from the "mind" book here, and vice versa). it got a little thick thru the parts discussing grammar rules, but on the whole a good read that kept my interest. less dense than "how the mind works" and on the whole more intriguing.
Summary: Just plain fun.
Rating: 5
I give this book five stars not because its reasoning is impeccable, or its writing everywhere beautiful, or its theme always engaging and irresistible. In none of these dimensions is it flawless. But I would nonetheless recommend it without reservation to all readers, so I feel I must give it five stars.
This book is great because of its fascinating subject, and the myriad of relevant ideas and examples it reveals. The book is more of in interesting discussion on a topic than an orderly defense of a thesis. But so many of the examples are utterly fascinating that, were there no attempt to patch them together into a single narrative, this book would still be intriguing and enjoyable. To give you a sense of why I love this book I must mention a few of these here.
Pinker discusses:
>how children, in a single generation, can transform a pidgin (an awkward combination of two languages created by the mingling of two populations with different native languages) into a creole (a composite language that is no longer awkward but instead melds the parent languages into a new one with all of the richness and complexity of any other natural language). He further describes how deaf children creolized artificially constructed sign languages into a natural language with all of the features and depth of expression that extant languages have.
>in depth, the concept that language defines the boundaries of thought and expression.
>how varieties of brain injuries and genetic mutations can alter very specific language abilities while leaving other general cognitive functioning unharmed.
>efforts to teach other animals language.
>how languages change over time and what rules the changes preserve and what aspects of language are up for grabs.
I will force myself to stop. As I flip through the pages of the book I find countless other examples and frequently get caught up in them all over again and have to tear myself away.
Now, I must warn you, that if you are not interested in theories of linguistics and cognition and computer science then there are, here and there, some more nuts and bolts discussions of how language works that you will find to be a bit dry. They're really not bad, and if you ARE interested in the above they're actually quite fascinating. But if you find your interest waning as you encounter these rougher patches, never fear, they are a relatively minor component of the book, and there are many more vigorous discussions yet to come.
If you are interested in language, how it works, how we learn it, and how it affects us, then you will love this book. I find Pinker's arguments in favor of the view that language is innate in humans to be compelling, and I think that most people would find the suggestion to be pretty intuitive. But don't let your feelings about the outcome of this argument obscure the many simpler pleasures available to the reader who innocently enjoys the many vistas afforded by this excellent tour of the world of linguistics.
Foreign Language and Mother Tongue
By Istvan Kecskes, T耼de Papp, Tunde Papp
* Publisher:Lawrence Erlbaum
* Number Of Pages:176
* Publication Date:2000-06-01
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0805827595
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780805827590
* Binding:Hardcover
Product Description:
This is the first book that discusses the effect of foreign language learning on first language processing. The authors argue that multilingual development is a dynamic and cumulative process characterized by transfer of different nature, and results in a common underlying conceptual base with two or more language channels that constantly interact with each other.
Language representation and processing are discussed from a cognitive-pragmatic rather than a lexical-syntactic perspective. This required the review of several crucial issues of L2 acquisition, such as transfer, vocabulary development, conceptual fluency, and pragmatic skills. The authors also reviewed a large body of literature touching on cognitive psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, SLA, philosophy, and education in order to explain multilingual development and the positive effect of foreign language learning on the first language.
An important read for linguists and language educators alike, this volume:
* attempts to explain multilingual development from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective,
* argues that foreign language learning has a positive effect on the development and use of mother tongue skills,
* relies on research findings of several different disciplines,
* builds on the results of quantitative research conducted by the authors, and
touches on a wide range of literature.
Summary: Learning foreign languages is the best tonic for the mind
Rating: 5
Every once in a while a book comes along that opens up completely new perspectives in a field. Kecskes & Papp's highly original book is a fine example of this. While most research on bilingualism and applied linguistics has concentrated on the effects of the mother tongue on the foreign language, Kecskes & Papp look for transfer in the other direction, i.e. L2 => L1. Using a cognitive-pragmatic-cultural perspective, the authors show that the acquisition of a second language not only broadens a person's conceptual base but that it also enhances performance in the first language. In other words, learning a foreign language is the best possible tonic for the mind !
Conceptual Representation
By Helen Moss
* Publisher:Psychology Press
* Number Of Pages:288
* Publication Date:2004-05-07
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:1841699586
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9781841699585
* Binding:Hardcover
Product Description:
Concepts lie at the heart of our mental life, supporting a myriad of cognitive functions - including thinking and reasoning, object recognition, memory, and language comprehension and production. The nature of concepts and their representation in the mind and brain has been studied from many different perspectives and so provides valuable opportunities for integrative, interdisciplinary discussions.
This special issue on conceptual representation contains invited papers from leading researchers across the range of cognitive science disciplines, addressing the nature of semantic and conceptual representation in the mind and brain. Contributions include both empirical reports and theoretical reviews, from the fields of cognitive and developmental psychology, neuropsychology, philosophy and linguistics.