The Genius of Language: Observations for Teachers: Six Lectures (With Added Notes)
By Rudolf Steiner
* Publisher:Anthroposophic Press
* Number Of Pages:144
* Publication Date:1995-05-01
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0880103868
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780880103862
Product Description:
During the first year of the first Waldorf school, Rudolf Steiner agreed to give a science course to the teachers, which was to be on the nature of light. At the last minute, he was asked to give an additional course on language, which he improvised. "The Genius of Language" is the result.
Steiner demonstrates how history and psychology together form the different languages and how ideas, images, and vocabulary travel through time within various cultural streams. He describes how the power to form language has declined, but that we can still recover the seed of language, the penetration of sound by meaning.
He also explains how consonants imitate outer phenomena, whereas vowels convey a more inner sense of events; he talks about the differentiation of language as it is influenced by geography; he speaks of the "folk soul" element and the possibility of "wordless thinking"; we hear about the capacity of language to transform us and of its importance to our spiritual lives.
This is not just a course on language for those who love words but demonstrates ways to teach children. This little book will prove tremendously valuable to both educators and parents-in fact, to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of language and its significance for our lives.
Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Study of Language: Research in the Tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin (Psychology Press Festschrift Series)
By Elena Lieven, Jiansheng Guo
* Publisher:Routledge
* Number Of Pages:584
* Publication Date:2008-12-22
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0805859993
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780805859997
Product Description:
Dan Isaac Slobin has been a major intellectual and creative force in the field of child language development, linguistics and psycholinguistics for the past 40 years. It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of his contribution. In this volume, conceived as a tribute to Slobin's enormous intellectual contribution, researchers take up the challenge of language differences to forward research in the major areas with which Slobin has been concerned throughout his career: (i) language learning from a crosslinguistic perspective (spoken and sign languages), (ii) the integration of language specific factors in narrative skill, (iii) theoretical issues in typology, language development and language change, and (iv) the relationship between language and cognition.
Words into Type (3rd Edition)
By Marjorie E. Skillin, Robert Malcolm Gay
* Publisher:Prentice Hall
* Number Of Pages:585
* Publication Date:1974-06
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0139642625
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780139642623
Amazon.com Review
This is the definitive text for questions of manuscript protocol, copyediting, style, grammar, and usage. For those who find The Chicago Manual of Style a bit cumbersome and sometimes ambigous, Words Into Type will be a welcome reference guide. With its easy-to-use index and definitive explanations, this third edition makes life simpler for writers, editors, and proofreaders. You may never need to know about frontispieces and imprimaturs, but if you deal with words, this is a wonderfully edifying, reassuring fount of clarity and wisdom.
From the Preface
In the years since its first publication, Words into Type has become a classic among style manuals, an invaluable reference source for many of the fine points of grammar, usage, style, and production methods. Writers, editors, copy editors, proofreaders, compositors, and printers have turned to Words into Type with the confidence that, whatever the problem, they would find help there.
The third edition of Words into Type provides an overview of the many processes of transforming the written word into type—from the preparation of the copy to the market-ready work.
For the writer, an understanding of the technical problems of copy-editing and typographical style may facilitate his preparation of the manuscript, while a knowledge of the various stages in production may explain what is happening during the seemingly interminable wait for the final printed and bound product.
For the editor, copy editor, compositor, proofreader, production writer, or printer, an understanding of the publishing processes outside his particular field may prove equally beneficial, while for the student this survey offers a practical introduction to the world of publishing.
Contents
Preface
Part I: Manuscript
Technicalities of Form
Physical Form
Final Reading of the Manuscript
Author's Alterations
Editorial Marks
Style
Topical Heads
Excerpts
Footnotes
Tables
Bibliographies
Illustrations
Special Responsibilities of the Book Writer
Front Matter
Back Matter
Legal Areas of Particular Concern to the Author
The Copyright Law
Libel
The Right of Privacy
Part II: Copy and Proof
Workers on Copy and Proof
The Editor
Editor or Copy Editor
The Copy Editor
The Production Department
Layout
Introduction
Front Matter
Back Matter
Work on Proof
Introduction
Galley Proofs
Page Proofs
Indexes
Introduction
Indexes by Names
Compiling a Dictionary-Style Index
Alphabetical Order
Typography of Indexes
Part III: Copy-Editing Style
Style
Abbreviations
Acronyms and shortened forms
Agencies and organizations
Beginning a sentence
The Bible
Compass directions
Dates and time
Dialogue
Firm names
Geographical terms
Latin words and phrases
Latitude and longitude
Laws, constitutions, bylaws
Measures, weights, and other units
Medical terms
"Number"
Personal names
Philological terms
Plurals
References
"Saint"
Scholastic, military, and civil honors
Temperature and gravity
Time
Titles
"Versus"
Symbols and Signs
Book sizes
Chemical elements and compounds
Chess
Degree mark
Mathematical signs
Prime marks
Times sign
Trigonometry
Standard signs and symbols
Numbers
Large numbers
Small numbers
Numbers with abbreviations
Ages
Beginning a sentence
Use of commas
Dates
Decimals
Degrees
Dialogue
Dimensions
Divisions
Elision
End-of-line division
Fractions
House and room numbers
Money
Ordinals
Page numbers
Percentage
Roman numerals
Subscripts and superscripts
Time of day
Votes and scores
Italics
Book titles
Characters in books and plays
Differentiation
Emphasis
Foreign words
Legal citations
Letters
Musical compositions
Newspapers and periodicals
Plays, movies, television series
Resolutions and legislative acts
Scientific names
Sounds
Thoughts
Vessels, airplanes, spacecraft
Capitalization
Capitals to Mark Beginnings
Titles, Headings, Legends
Proper Nouns and Adjectives
Punctuation
Introduction
Period
Exclamation Point and Question Mark
Colon
Semicolon
Comma
Em Dash
En Dash
Two-Em Dash
Parentheses
Brackets
Quotation Marks
Apostrophe
Hyphen
Points of Ellipsis
Compound Words
Principles of compounding words
Temporary compounds
Form dependent upon meaning
Names of kindred
Two nouns of equal value
Noun and possessive
"Like"
"Self," "Half," "Quasi"
Adjective and noun
Verb and preposition or adverb
Number and noun
Fractions
Colors
Compounds with present participle
Compounds with noun plus "-d" or "-ed"
Compounds with the past participle
Adverb-and-adjective compounds
Suspended compounds
Phrases
Division of Words
General Rules
Part IV: Typographical Style
Elements of Typographical Style
Leading
Spacing
Indention
Problems of Typographical Style
Headings
Initials
Synopses
Epigraphical Quotations
Excerpts
Footnotes
Tables
Captions and Legends
Bibliographies
Details of Page Makeup
Folios
Front matter
Running heads
"Widows"
Long and short pages
Headings
Spacebreaks
Poetry
Columns
Ditto marks
"Continued"
Illustrations
Footnotes
Typography of Various Forms
Fiction
Poetry
Plays
Writings on Religion
Letters
Legal Writing
Mathematical and Scientific Writing
Composition of Foreign Languages
Danish
Dutch
French
German
Classic Creek
Hebrew
Italian
Latin
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Phonetics
Part V: Grammar
Verbs
Voice
Mood
Tense
Auxiliaries
Agreement
Nouns
Number
Possessive Case
Pronouns
Case
Antecedents
Adjectives and Adverbs
Predicate adjectives
Comparison
Adjectives misused for adverbs
Nouns as adjectives
"Above"
"Barely," "hardly," "scarcely"
"Different"
"Due to"
"Very," "very much"
Articles
Indefinite Articles
Definite Article
Conjunctions
Coordinating Conjunctions
Subordinating Conjunctions
Correlative Conjunctions
Prepositions
Terminal prepositions
Allowable omissions of prepositions
Incorrect omissions
Faulty use of prepositions
"Among," "between"
"In," "into," "in to"
"On," "onto," "on to"
Sentence Structure
Introduction
Position of Modifiers
Omissions
Glossary of Grammatical Terms
Part VI: Use Of Words
Wordiness
Redundancy and pleonasm
Tautology
Circumlocutions
Words and Phrases Often Used Superfluously
Trite Expressions
Appropriateness
The Right Preposition
Words Likely to be Misused or Confused
Spelling
The "EI" or "IE" Difficulty
Forming Derivatives by Adding Suffixes
Troublesome Suffixes
Formation of Plurals
Formation of the Possessive Case
Ordinary Words that Cause Trouble
Foreign Words and Phrases
Bibliography for Parts V and VI
Dictionaries
General Reference Works
Book Publishers
Part VII: Typography and Illustration
The Size of the Book
Casting Off
Trim Size
Type Page
The Mechanics of Composition
Hot Metal Composition
Type
Type Measurement
Classification of Typefaces
Choice of Size and Face
Computing the Length in Type
Typesetting
Cold Type Composition
Photocomposition or Phototypesetting
Sample Pages
Proofs
The Mechanics of Printing
Letterpress
Offset Lithography or Photo- Offset
Illustrations
Preparation
Sizing
Line cuts
Halftones
Benday screens
Two-color illustrations
Four-color illustrations
Proofs
Dummy
Layout
Paper
General characteristics
Texture
Color
Brightness
Opacity
Finish
Weight
Grain
Bulk
Permanence
Computation of paper needed
Book Sizes
Binding
Case-bound books
Paper-bound books
Mechanical-bound books
Binding processes
Bibliography
Dictionaries
General
Graphic Arts
Typographic Design
Type and Typography
Composition and Printing
Glossary of Printing and Allied Terms
Index
Summary: In Really Good Shape
Rating: 4
I didn't expect this used book to be in such good shape, and I received it a couple of days after I ordered it.
Summary: Technical writing book
Rating: 5
Essential book for any kind of editor. My 30-year old copy needed replacing. Where else to look but Amazon? It came in less time than predicted. A treasure to me.
Summary: apprecaite the opportunity to purchase item
Rating: 4
Thank you for the opportunity to purchase. Book answers many questions and is an assest in improving my abilities.
Summary: At home on any writer's shelf
Rating: 5
This is a great reference book for grammar and English rules in general.
For new writers, I recommend going through it front to back once, to familiarize yourself with what's inside - it really is of immense help if you are at all interested in writing cleanly and/or editing your own work (as far as THAT is possible!).
While certainly no substitute for a good editor, this book is one of my most-used references. It has a pretty decent index, and is organized in a useful manner that makes most "rules" easy to find.
Summary: Nearly indispensable, yet thirty years old!
Rating: 5
Somebody who had read my review of Bryan A Garner's Modern American Usage, 2nd ed. (2003)--IMHO, the preeminent book on usage, per se--wrote me the other day asking about a good book on typographical style. I recommended Words into Type which I have used for many years. But as I prepared to write a review, I was amazed to learn that a new edition of this outstanding reference work is lacking.
What we have here is the Third Edition from 1974, the same book I have in front of me. Yet, so much has changed since 1974--including the invention and phenomenal growth of a little thing called the Internet--that a new and updated work is sorely needed. On the other hand, so much in terms of what is appropriate style in the publishing world has not changed, which means that this venerable and authoritative work remains a most valuable addition to anyone's library.
First, a note on "style" as used here and as understood in the publishing business. Style does not refer to what should more properly be called the writer's "mode of expression," nor does it refer to such things as elegance or flair in wordsmithing; and yet it does have something to do with "fashion" in terms of how words, numbers, and symbols appear on the pages of books, magazines, and newspapers. In this sense "style" refers to "the rules or customs of spelling, punctuation, and the like..." (from Random House Webster's College Dictionary).
Style should therefore be contrasted with and compared to usage and grammar. Indeed Words into Type includes in its pages plenty of advice on grammar and usage. Part V is devoted to "Use of Words" and Part VI to "Grammar." Still, most of the book is about how characters appear on pages and how pages should be laid out and how various sections of books--introductions, indices, appendices, footnotes, typographical style for tables and headings, etc.--should be ordered. Also included is guidance on the various responsibilities of writers, editors and copyreaders. To put it simply, I know of no book that gives anywhere near as much guidance on how words are transformed into type than this very appropriately named, Words into Type.
I have by way of comparison in front of me a copy of my old The Associated Press Stylebook, which I used when I was a newspaper reporter years ago. The AP stylebook tells us which words to capitalize for example and which words to leave lower case. It covers abbreviations, punctuation, whether numbers should be spelled out or not, conventions to follow in the reporting of sports, and various other matters related strictly to newspaper reporting.
Words into Type does all this and, as indicated above, much, much more. The AP stylebook is fifty-some pages long; Words into Type is nearly six hundred. I do not have the Chicago Manual of Style in front of me, but it is the only book that I know of that can compete with Words into Type in terms of inclusiveness. Perhaps it is a better book today. But when I compared them some years ago it wasn't even close. Words into Type was more comprehensive while being at the same time easier to use and understand. Still the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style is from 2003.
Publishers, even if they use the Chicago Manual of Style, should have a copy of Words into Type at the ready. And any writer who wants to look professional and furthermore wants to understand the process of turning words into type--and indeed would like an education in "style"--should also own this book. With self-publishing and Web-based publishing growing by leaps and bounds everyday, I think it would be a good idea to update this book.
Maybe the people at Prentice-Hall or whoever now owns the copyright are working on such an edition. I hope so. Until such an edition or its equivalent comes out, I cannot recommend this book too highly as indispensable to serious writers, editors and publishers.
Lexical and Semantic Change: Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21-25 ... IV: Current Issues in Linguistic Theory)
By Richard Dury, Maurizio Gotti, Marina Dossena
* Publisher:John Benjamins Publishing Company
* Number Of Pages:264
* Publication Date:2008-07-15
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:9027248117
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9789027248114
17th century able adjectives adverb agonist alliteration Amsterdam & Philadelphia analysis Ancrene Riwle antonymic Bergamo Biber bloody drunk borrowing British English British National Corpus Burnley Buxhall calques Cambridge Cambridge University Canterbury Tales Chaucer clauses code-switching Cognitive Linguistics collocates complex predicates conceptual metaphors context Corpus Linguistics definite article desire Diachronic dimension diminutive disseisin Dossena Early Modern Britain Early Modern English EModE English Dictionary English Language English Studies epistemic ette etymologies etymon example expressions female Force Dynamics forces formations forms free morpheme French frequency function genre Geoffrey Leech German grammaticalisation Grammaticalization Hans Kurath Helsinki Corpus Historical Linguistics history of English Hooke2 hope However illocutionary force Innsbruck intensifying John Benjamins Jucker ladette language Latin lexemes lexical Lexicology Linguistic Typology LModE loanwords lollard majorette Manfred Krug marker meaning metaphorical metatextual metonymy Middle English Middle English Dictionary Middle French modal ModF morphology multidimensional analysis need v.2 negative politeness Nevalainen Normalised Norman Conquest noun noun respect OED3 Old French Oxford Oxford English Dictionary passive pattern perfect aspect period periphrastic person pronoun phrases pied piping Pipe Roll positive politeness Pragmatics prepositional relative clause Robert Boyle Robert Hooke Romance Languages Santiago de Compostela second half seisin Selected papers semantic semantic change semantic feature sense Sociolinguistics speech acts subjunctive subordinate clauses suffix suffragette suffragist syntactic Taavitsainen Table text type to-infinitive transubstantiation University of Helsinki University Press v.1 and need verb wish word-formation words yeomanette Zellig Harris
Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Approaches
By Judith F. Kroll, Annette M. B. De Groot
* Publisher:Oxford University Press, USA
* Number Of Pages:610
* Publication Date:2009-02-16
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0195151771
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780195151770
Product Description:
How is language acquired when infants are exposed to multiple language input from birth and when adults are required to learn a second language after early childhood? How do adult bilinguals comprehend and produce words and sentences when their two languages are potentially always active and in competition with one another? What are the neural mechanisms that underlie proficient bilingualism? What are the general consequences of bilingualism for cognition and for language and thought? This handbook will be essential reading for cognitive psychologists, linguists, applied linguists, and educators who wish to better understand the cognitive basis of bilingualism and the logic of experimental and formal approaches to language science.
The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention
By Guy Deutscher
* Publisher:Holt Paperbacks
* Number Of Pages:368
* Publication Date:2006-05-01
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0805080120
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780805080124
Product Description:
Blending the spirit of Eats, Shoots & Leaves with the science of The Language Instinct, an original inquiry into the development of that most essential-and mysterious-of human creations: Language
Language is mankind's greatest invention-except, of course, that it was never invented." So begins linguist Guy Deutscher's enthralling investigation into the genesis and evolution of language. If we started off with rudimentary utterances on the level of "man throw spear," how did we end up with sophisticated grammars, enormous vocabularies, and intricately nuanced degrees of meaning?
Drawing on recent groundbreaking discoveries in modern linguistics, Deutscher exposes the elusive forces of creation at work in human communication, giving us fresh insight into how language emerges, evolves, and decays. He traces the evolution of linguistic complexity from an early "Me Tarzan" stage to such elaborate single-word constructions as the Turkish sehirlilestiremediklerimizdensiniz ("you are one of those whom we couldn't turn into a town dweller"). Arguing that destruction and creation in language are intimately entwined, Deutscher shows how these processes are continuously in operation, generating new words, new structures, and new meanings.
As entertaining as it is erudite, The Unfolding of Language moves nimbly from ancient Babylonian to American idiom, from the central role of metaphor to the staggering triumph of design that is the Semitic verb, to tell the dramatic story and explain the genius behind a uniquely human faculty.
From Publishers Weekly
Using language himself in a lively and engaging way, Deutscher, an expert in Semitic languages at the University of Leiden in Holland, identifies two principles—the desire to create order out of chaotic reality, and the urge to vary the sounds of words and their meanings—providing the direction by which language developed and continues to develop. Rather than search for the prehistoric moment when speech originated, Deutscher says we can most profitably understand the phenomenon by taking the present as the key to the past. Using a wide array of examples, he delves into the back-formation of words (making a noun into a verb), the evolution of relative clauses from simple pointing words (that, this) and the turning of objects into nouns. On the question of whether language is innate, Deutscher takes a middle path, asserting that our brains are wired for basic language, but that linguistic complexity is brought about by cultural evolution. Deutscher's entertaining writing and his knack for telling a good tale about how words develop offer a delightful and charming story of language.
From Booklist
The linguistic chain that connects the boasts of an ancient Sumerian monarch to the jests of Groucho Marx is long and convoluted, but Deutscher retraces it, fascinating link by fascinating link, identifying the dynamic processes that have continuously transformed and renewed the world's diverse languages. Even when delving deeply into ancient manuscripts and temple engravings, Deutscher interprets every linguistic mutation as the consequence of evolutionary forces still observable in today's living languages. Readers see in linguistic fossils from Mesopotamia traces of the same conversion of living metaphor into conceptual lattice still taking place in modern English, German, and Indonesian. What Deutscher demonstrates most clearly is how linguistic structures that look like the product of deliberate artifice can emerge from entirely natural processes.
Reviews
“A lively and thought-provoking exploration of why language change appears to be haphazard yet is fundamentally orderly. Exciting, witty, and a masterpiece of contemporary scholarship.”
—Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and English, Stanford University
“At last, an entertaining and readable book that presents the most current views on language and its evolution.”
—Joan Bybee, Professor of Linguistics, University of New Mexico
“Thoroughly enjoyable... Guy Deutscher is an erudite and entertaining guide through the paradoxes and complexities of language evolution.”
—Gene Gragg, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, University of Chicago
A Career in foreign languages : translating, interpreting
by:
en | Institute for Career Research
A Career in foreign languages : translating, interpreting
36 pages
WHERE WOULD WE BE WITHOUT translators and interpreters? We wouldn’t be
able to read Aristotle or Marguerite Duras; movies by such notable
filmmakers as Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa would be inaccessible;
traveling abroad would be a daunting prospect; international trade
couldn’t exist; world peace would be even harder to sustain than it is now.
This report introduces you to the work of two types of
foreign-language specialists, the translator and the interpreter. The terms
are sometimes used interchangeably, but that’s a mistake. Translation
involves rendering written material from one language into another, and
interpretation is doing the same with spoken words. And although they
both take something that’s in one language and communicate it to people
who understand another language, translators and interpreters face very
different tasks in their daily work.
Representing Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality
By Kasia M. Jaszczolt
* Publisher:Oxford University Press, USA
* Number Of Pages:320
* Publication Date:2009-05-15
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0199214441
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780199214440
Product Description:
Thinking and speaking about time is ridden with puzzles and paradoxes. How do human beings conceptualize time? Why, for example, does the availability of tense vary in different languages? How do the lines of information from tense, aspect, temporal adverbs, and context interact in the mind? Does time describe events? If real time does not flow, where do the concepts of the past, present and future come from? Are they basic concepts or are they composed out of more primitive constituents? And, finally, what is the semantics of expressions with temporal reference? This book offers a new approach to the representation of meaning of temporally-located utterances and discourses. Temporality, the author suggests, should be taken to mean degrees of certainty, understood in turn as degrees of acceptability concerning the eventuality referred to in the speaker's utterance. She presents theoretical arguments and empirical evidence from Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages to show that speakers represent the past, present, and future as degrees of epistemic modality. She argues that temporality can be subsumed under the general label of acceptability or attitude and, rather like the semantic category of evidentiality, founded on the strength of evidence. In the approach she develops, modality provides basic conceptual building blocks for the concept of time and at the same time semantic building blocks for representing temporal expressions in her framework of Default Semantics. Dr Jaszczolt sets the results of her research in the context of linguistic and philosophical work in semantics and pragmatics.
Preface
In 2000 I still thought that propositional attitude constructions and in
particular the semantics of belief attributions would occupy me for the rest
of my working life. I owe my thinking about time entirely and exclusively to a
Cambridge atheistic idealist John McTaggart and his mind-boggling argument
that time is unreal. Published exactly one century ago (1908), his paper
‘The unreality of time’ still triggers passionate discussions, most of them
objecting to his way of thinking about the problem and yet using his concepts.
McTaggart distinguished two possible discourses about time: one in terms of
the past, present, and future, and one in terms of precedence, simultaneity,
and following. As he says, without the past, present, and future, there would
be no change and, since time involves change, the past, present, and future are
necessary concepts; precedence, simultaneity, and following will not suffice.
So, he tried to assume that the latter discourse presupposes the first, in that if
A precedes B, then at some moment in time A must be past and B present. But
this reasoning led him to argue that the first kind of discourse is flawed
because it would have to entail that every event has to have the three
properties: past, present, and future and they are obviously incompatible.
Of course, we can get out of the problem by stipulating that events are past,
present, and future at different times rather than having these properties all at
once. But then, we presuppose the very notion of time which we are trying to
explain and we end up in infinite regress. Time, he concludes, is not real.
But the concept of time is real: we have the impression of the flow of time,
we are born and die, our lives consist of a sequence of events to which we can
assign temporal location. We experience time, as even McTaggart himself was
forced to admit. The problem that attracted me is precisely this concept of
time, as well as its linguistic expression. In order to explore it, I explored the
question of the relation between ‘real’ time of space-time and our internal
time, the concept which we use in everyday thought and parlance. I also
explored the question as to whether this concept is primitive or rather
founded on some more basic component or components of thoughts. After
about seven years of thinking about McTaggart and about the views his
paradox (or, as many would say, pseudo-paradox) generated, I came to the
conclusion that the concept of time humans use and the concept of evidence
humans have for different states and events in the world surrounding them
are intrinsically connected. We locate events in time just as we locate them in
space; in short, we locate them in space-time. We do so because we have
evidence or strong beliefs that they are happening, did happen, or are likely to
happen. This cognition of reality is not accidental but rather is affected by the
very nature of time itself: events have the potentiality to happen and some of
them did happen, are happening, or will happen, while others remain in the
realm of more or less distant probabilities. They are probable symmetrically
into the past and into the future: just as future is uncertain, so the past
survives only as far as our memories of past events survive. In other words,
both time in the world and time in the mind are modal through and through.
Naturally, conveying time in language also utilizes expressions whose semantics
reveals them as modal through and through.
Representation of time as modality is a broad philosophical topic which
requires arguments from the metaphysics and epistemology of time before we
can reach a territory more familiar for linguists, that of semantic representations.
The broad framework adopted in the first two chapters of this essay
would not have been achievable without the discussions I had with various
knowledgeable colleagues from different disciplines. To Rachel Padman I owe
instilling in me the, however fundamental, understanding of space-time as a
property of the universe. She patiently answered my questions concerning the
theories of relativity, space and time dimensions of contemporary mathematical
models of the universe, and, most importantly perhaps, calmed down my
unnecessary excitement on reading that according to one famous Nobel Prize
winner the universe has many different histories all of which are equally real!
All beˆtises that remain in my divagations on relativity and multiple dimensions
of the universe are entirely my own responsibility. To David Cram I am
grateful for his helpful feedback on the manuscript. Frank Brisard made me
aware that time as modality is not an extravagant notion in some areas of
linguistics, no matter how extravagant it sounds to truth-conditional semanticists.
His, and Ronald Langacker’s, insightful analyses of the concept of time
assume the perspective which is akin to mine, albeit using a very different
framework and kind of explanation. To Jiranthara Srioutai and to the many
years of our collaboration I owe my understanding of how expressing time
works in a language where neither tense nor aspect markers are obligatory. In
Thai, ‘rain fall’ stands for a wide array of propositions, from It is raining to It
might rain, to no detriment of the clarity of communication. John C. Chang
collected and discussed with me a wide range of examples of how time is
conceptualized in Mandarin Chinese, including not only the standard ‘the
future is in front’ and ‘the past is behind us’ horizontal axis but also vertical,
cyclical, as well as variations on the relationship between the state of affairs
and the agent. My basic understanding of the consecutive tense in Swahili
I owe to Lutz Marten and Andrew Smith. To Helen Engemann I owe thanks
for her very careful reading of the draft. I also thank Anja Sysoeva, Luna
Filipovic
Existence: Semantics and Syntax (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy)
By Ileana Comorovski, Klaus von Heusinger
* Publisher:Springer
* Number Of Pages:332
* Publication Date:2008-08-13
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:1402061986
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9781402061981
Product Description:
This collection is an important contribution to the semantic and syntactic analysis of the expression of existence. The volume focuses on the three main linguistic constructions expressing existence: copular clauses, existential sentences, and (in)definiteness. The papers analyze the interaction between the basic notion of existence and pervasive phenomena of natural language, such as quantification and presupposition. The contributions represent state of the art research on theoretical and comparative issues related to the expression of existence, and make extensive reference to the semantic and syntactic facts of English and of various other languages. The richness of new data and the juxtaposition of different theoretical stances bring a number of new questions into focus.
Language in Cognition: Language From Within Volume I (v. 1)
By Pieter A. M. Seuren
* Publisher:Oxford University Press, USA
* Number Of Pages:418
* Publication Date:2009-05-15
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0199559473
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780199559473
Product Description:
Language in Cognition argues that language is based on the human construal of reality. Humans refer to and quantify over virtual entities with the same ease as they do over actual entities: the natural ontology of language, the author argues, must therefore comprise both actual and virtual entities and situations. He reformulates speech act theory, suggesting that the primary function of language is less the transfer of information than the establishing of socially binding commitments or appeals based on the proposition expressed. This leads him first to a new analysis of the systems and structures of cognitive language machinery and their ecological embedding, and finally to a reformulation of the notion of meaning, in which sentence meaning is distinguished from lexical meaning and the vagaries and multifarious applications of lexical meanings may be explained and understood.
This is the first of a two-volume foundational study of language, published under the title, Language from Within. Pieter Seuren discusses and analyses such apparently diverse issues as the ontology underlying the semantics of language, speech act theory, intensionality phenomena, the machinery and ecology of language, sentential and lexical meaning, the natural logic of language and cognition, and the intrinsically context-sensitive nature of language - and shows them to be intimately linked. Throughout his ambitious enterprise, he maintains a constant dialogue with established views, reflecting on their development from Ancient Greece to the present. The resulting synthesis concerns central aspects of research and theory in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.
Asymmetry in Grammar: Syntax and Semantics v. 1 (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today)
By Anna-Maria Di Sciullo
* Publisher:John Benjamins Publishing Co
* Number Of Pages:397
* Publication Date:2002-12
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:9027227780
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9789027227782
Product Description:
This volume brings to fore the centrality of asymmetry in DP, VP and CP. A finer grained articulation of the DP is proposed, and further functional projections for restrictive relatives, as well as a refined analyses of case identification and presumptive pronouns. The papers on VP discuss further asymmetries among arguments, and between arguments and adjuncts. Double-object constructions, specificational copula sentences, secondary predicates, and the scope properties of adjuncts are discussed in this perspective. The papers on CP propose a further articulation of the phrasal projection, justifications for Remnant IP movement, and an analysis of variation in clause structure asymmetries. The papers in semantics support the hypothesis that interpretation is a function of configurational asymmetry. The type/token information difference is further argued to correspond to the partition between the upper and lower level of the phrase. It is also proposed that Point of View Roles are not primitives of the pragmatic component, but are head-dependent categories. Configurationality is further argued to be required to distinguish contrastive from non-contrastive Topic. Compositionality is proposed to explain cross-linguistic variations in the selectional behaviour of typologically different languages.
Critical Reflection and the Foreign Language Classroom (Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series)
By Terry A. Osborn
* Publisher:Bergin & Garvey
* Number Of Pages:160
* Publication Date:2000-02-28
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0897896815
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780897896818
Product Description:
Challenges pre-service and in-service teachers to think about foreign language education and its societal context in terms of power and equality. Helps teachers develop skills in analysis and proposes possibilities for instructional reform.
Asymmetry in Grammar: Morphology, Phonology, Acquisition v. 2 (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today)
By Anna-Maria Di Sciullo
* Publisher:John Benjamins Publishing Co
* Number Of Pages:311
* Publication Date:2002-11
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:9027227799
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9789027227799
Product Description:
This volume presents evidence that asymmetry, as a property of linguistic relations, is salient in grammar. The papers in morphology bring further evidence for the centrality of asymmetry in word-structure. It is shown that asymmetry is part of the internal structure of functional constructs such as determiners and complementizers, as it is the case for lexical constructs. Further evidence is presented for the asymmetry of prefixes in verb structure. A typology of formal objects based on the distinction between maximal and minimal categories is formulated. It is proposed that Formal Complexity drives the change from synthetic to analytic expressions. The papers in phonology point to the fact that asymmetry is part of that linguistic dimension in terms of processes that eliminates symmetric relations, in terms of head-dependency relations, in terms of relative scope of the distinctive features in any inventory, in terms of universal principles in combination with certain language specific choices. Moreover, the papers on acquisition bring to fore experimental data that point to the same direction. The asymmetry of grammatical relations provides the form of the initial state of language that enables the child to cope with the poverty of the stimulus.
Books and Beyond: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading
By Kenneth Womack
* Publisher:Greenwood
* Number Of Pages:1352
* Publication Date:2008-10-30
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0313337381
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780313337383
Product Description:
There's a strong interest in reading for pleasure or self-improvement in America, as shown by the popularity of Harry Potter, and book clubs, including Oprah Winfrey's. Although recent government reports show a decline in recreational reading, the same reports show a strong correlation between interest in reading and academic acheivement. This set provides a snapshot of the current state of popular American literature, including various types and genres. The volume presents alphabetically arranged entries on more than 70 diverse literary categories, such as cyberpunk, fantasy literature, flash fiction, GLBTQ literature, graphic novels, manga and anime, and zines. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a definition of the genre, an overview of its history, a look at trends and themes, a discussion of how the literary form engages contemporary issues, a review of the genre's reception, a discussion of authors and works, and suggestions for further reading. Sidebars provide fascinating details, and the set closes with a selected, general bibliography.
Reading in America for pleasure and knowledge continues to be popular, even while other media compete for attention. While students continue to read many of the standard classics, new genres have emerged. These have captured the attention of general readers and are also playing a critical role in the language arts classroom. This book maps the state of popular literature and reading in America today, including the growth of new genres, such as cyberpunk, zines, flash fiction, GLBTQ literature, and other topics.
Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a definition of the genre, an overview of its history, a look at trends and themes, a discussion of how the literary form engages contemporary issues, a review of the genre's critical reception, a discussion of authors and works, and suggestions for further reading. Sidebars provide fascinating details, and the set closes with a selected, general bibliography. Students will find this book a valuable guide to what they're reading today and will appreciate its illumination of popular culture and contemporary social issues.
Private Speech, Executive Functioning, and the Development of Verbal Self-Regulation
By Adam Winsler, Charles Fernyhough, Ignacio Montero
* Publisher:Cambridge University Press
* Number Of Pages:272
* Publication Date:2009-04-27
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0521866073
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780521866071
Product Description:
Seventy-five years after Vygotsky's death, scholarship exploring developmental relations between language and thought continues to be strong. This timely edited volume compiles contributions from international leaders in the field on the roles of language and private speech (self-talk) in the development of self-regulation and executive functioning in children and adults. New theoretical insights, empirical research, and potential clinical and educational applications of scholarship on private speech are presented. Relevant for undergraduate and graduate students and scholars of psychology, education, linguistics, and cognitive science, this text will be an essential volume for those interested in the interface between language, cognition, and behavior, and the development of regulatory or cognitive control over behavior.
On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse
By Aristotle
* Publisher:Oxford University Press, USA
* Number Of Pages:352
* Publication Date:2006-06-13
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0195305094
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780195305098
Product Description:
This new edition of George A. Kennedy's highly acclaimed translation and commentary offers the most faithful English version ever published of On Rhetoric. Based on careful study of the Greek text and informed by the best modern scholarship, the second edition has been fully revised and updated. As in the first edition, Kennedy makes the work readily accessible to modern students by providing an insightful general introduction, helpful section introductions, a detailed outline, extensive explanatory notes, and a glossary of Aristotle's rhetorical terms. Striving to convey a sense of Aristotle's distinctive way of thinking, Kennedy preserves the meaning and technical language of the original text, explaining it in detail as opposed to simplifying it as other translations do.
Updated and expanded in light of recent scholarship, the second edition features:
* A revised introduction with two new sections: "The Strengths and Limitations of On Rhetoric" and "Aristotle's Original Audience and His Audience Today"
* A more user-friendly format: running heads now include book and chapter numbers
* An updated bibliography
* Revised appendices that provide translations of new supplementary texts--Socrates' Critique of Sophistic Rhetoric; Lysias' Speech Against the Grain Dealers; two selections from Isocrates (from Against the Sophists and from the Antidosis); selections from Rhetoric for Alexander; and Demosthenes' Third Philippic--and an extensive revision of George A. Kennedy's essay "The Earliest Rhetorical Handbooks"
Summary: Great footnotes
Rating: 5
The footnotes on this text are great. A lot of the wording can be heavy for a first read-through of Aristotle, and Kennedy does his best to make Aristotle more accessible to people who are new to Rhetoric.
Summary: The Capacity of Persuasion
Rating: 5
I read these works for a graduate seminar on Aristotle.
Definition of Rhetoric- capacity of persuasion. Plato is critical of the Rhetoric and the tragic poetry. Rhetoric is approach to political public speeches in the forum. Plato thought that they clouded the mind and thus created a part of his critique of democracy in general. Plato thinks Socrates was killed by rhetoric used by the Athenian democracy. Plato feared the danger of democracy. Poetry appeals to the base human emotions rhetoric, and poetry block rational truth according to Plato. Rhetoric is psychological force of language vs. logical force of language. Psychology leads people to believe things based on emotions. Speech must appeal to the masses in a democracy. Psychology is persuasion, logic is truth. Deduction and induction is arguing logically. Plato says rhetoric is not a techn
Accentuation and Active Interpretation (Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Languages and Cognition)
By Hans-Christian Schmitz
* Publisher:Palgrave Macmillan
* Number Of Pages:260
* Publication Date:2008-03-15
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0230002536
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780230002531
Product Description:
Hans-Christian Schmitz argues that a speaker has to utter a sentence in a way that makes the hearer perceive at least those words that are sufficient for understanding the entire sentence. In spoken language the speaker has to accentuate these words. Semantics effects of accentuation appear as epi-phenomena of their pragmatic function. The author defines a formal model for the interpretation of incompletely recognized sentences and derives a context-sensitive rule of accentuation. The rule of accentuation is experimentally evaluated.
Locality: A Theory and Some of Its Empirical Consequences (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)
By Maria Rita Manzini
* Publisher:The MIT Press
* Number Of Pages:185
* Publication Date:1992-05-15
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0262631407
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780262631402
Product Description:
In this ambitious monograph, Manzini organizes and clarifies the voluminous evidence that exists on local dependencies according to a single, unified theory of Locality. Locality is a simpler and more comprehensive alternative to the barriers approach, the antecedent-based approach, and the connectedness approach, subsuming all the major locality principles (Subjacency, ECP, and binding theory) invoked in the other approaches and explaining a set of islands that remain refractory to those approaches. The first chapter defines the empirical problem and provides an overview of the solution; it also introduces the three main alternatives to Locality theory. The second chapter presents Manzini's theory in detail and includes a unification of Subjacency and the antecedent-government clause of the ECP and a unification of the ECP internal disjunction between the antecedent-government and the head-government clause. In chapter 3, Manzini argues for the empirical superiority of Locality, offering data predicting that Complex NP islands, Tense islands, and Definiteness islands all belong to the same fundamental type while multiple WH-islands reflect the fact that at most two overlapping extraction paths are available at any given point in a derivation. The final chapter looks at binding, showing that it can be accounted for under the same Locality principle as movement but without the need for anaphors to move at any level of representation. Maria Rita Manzini is Lecturer in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College, London.
Systematic Lexicography
By Juri Derenick Apresjan
* Publisher:Oxford University Press, USA
* Number Of Pages:306
* Publication Date:2008-10-15
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0199554250
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780199554256
Product Description:
This book unites lexicography with theoretical linguistics. The two fields tend to ignore each other: lexicographers produce dictionaries, linguists grammars. As a result grammars and dictionaries are often discordant and sometimes glaringly incompatible. In Systematic Lexicography Juri Apresjan shows the insights linguistics has to offer lexicography, and equally that the achievements and challenges of lexicography provide a rewarding field for linguistic inquiry.
The author presents the vocabulary of a language as a complicated system reflecting a specific view of the world. He does so within an integrated theory of language, in which grammatical and lexical meanings, and the conceptualizations underlying them, blend and interact. Each lexeme, he argues, is a point of intersection of various lexicographic types classes of lexemes with shared semantic, syntactic, pragmatic or mental properties, that are sensitive to the same rules, and which should thus be uniformly described in the dictionary. When any lexeme is viewed against the whole set of linguistic rules, new facets emerge, and these reveal, he shows, key characteristics of words that dictionaries do not currently record.
Professor Apresjan not only presents an original, unified theory of language, inspired by the Moscow school of semantics. He also works out its consequences and describes the problems he faced in applying it to the description of Russian. The reader will find that travelling with the author through Russian semantic space is both enlightening and entertaining. The books wealth of lexical facts, illuminated by systematic thought, give it unique character and importance: it will be of great interest to theoretical linguists and to all concerned with writing of dictionaries as well as to semanticists and students of Russian.
Multiple Wh-Fronting (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today)
By Cedric Boeckx
* Publisher:John Benjamins Pub Co
* Number Of Pages:302
* Publication Date:2003-08
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:902722787X
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9789027227874
Product Description:
Typological differences in the formation of multiple Wh-questions are well-known. One option is fronting all Wh-phrases to the sentence periphery. The contributions to this volume all explore this option from a number of perspectives. Topics covered include finer investigations of the "classic" multiple Wh-fronting languages (such as the South Slavic languages Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian), extensions to less well studied languages (Basque, Malagasy, Persian, Yiddish), explorations for languages that don't obviously fall into this category (German, Hungarian), peripheral effects (optionality of fronting, Superiority vs. Anti-Superiority etc.), interface issues (with semantics, pragmatics, and phonology), and simply theoretical approaches aiming to capture the mechanisms involved in multiple Wh-fronting strategies. The theoretical framework adopted throughout is the Minimalist Program, viewed from different angles. This volume brings together some of the leading experts on the syntax of Wh-questions and offers up-to-date analyses of the topic. It will be indispensable for scholars investigating multiple Wh -questions, and will find an appropriate audience in advanced students and faculty alike.