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In a book with far-reaching implications, Edward S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi present a full exploration of a language in another mode--a language of the hands and of the eyes. They discuss the origin and development of American Sign Language, the internal structure of its basic units, the grammatical processes it employs, and its heightened use in poetry and wit. The authors draw on research, much of it by and with deaf people, to answer the crucial question of what is fundamental to language as language and what is determined by the mode (vocal or gestural) in which a language is produced.
The burgeoning of research on signed language during the last two decades has had a major influence on several disciplines concerned with mind and language, including linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, child language acquisition, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and deaf education. The genealogy of this research can be traced to a remarkable degree to a single pair of scholars, Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima, who have conducted their research on signed language and educated scores of scholars in the field since the early 1970s. The Signs of Language Revisited has three major objectives: * presenting the latest findings and theories of leading scientists in numerous specialties from language acquisition in children to literacy and deaf people; * taking stock of the distance scholarship has come in a given field, where we are now, and where we should be headed; and * acknowledging and articulating the intellectual debt of the authors to Bellugi and Klima--in some cases through personal reminiscences. Thus, this book is also a document in the sociology and history of science.
What the Hands Reveal About the Brain provides dramatic evidence that language is not limited to hearing and speech, that there are primary linguistic systems passed down from one generation of deaf people to the next, which have been forged into antonomous languages and are not derived front spoken languages.
Michael V. Fox, long-time professor in the Dept. of Hebrew and Semitic Studies at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, is known both for his scholarship and his teaching. As the editors of this volume in his honor note, the care and sensitivity of his reading of the Hebrew text are well known, and he lavishes equal attention on his own writing, to the benefit of all who read his work, which now includes the first of two volumes in the Anchor Bible commentary on Proverbs (the next volume is in preparation), as well as monographs on wisdom literature in ancient Israel and elsewhere, and many articles. The rigor that he brought to his own work he also inflicted on his students, and they and a ...
Only recently has linguistic research recognized sign languages as legitimate human languages with properties analogous to those cataloged for French or Navajo, for example. There are many different sign languages, which can be analyzed on a variety of levels—phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics—in the same way as spoken languages. Yet the recognition that not all of the principles established for spoken languages hold for sign languages has made sign languages a crucial testing ground for linguistic theory. Edited by Susan Fischer and Patricia Siple, this collection is divided into four sections, reflecting the traditional core areas of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Although most of the contributions consider American Sign Language (ASL), five treat sign languages unrelated to ASL, offering valuable perspectives on sign universals. Since some of these languages or systems are only recently established, they provide a window onto the evolution and growth of sign languages.
'Seeing Voices is both a history of the deaf and an account of the development of an extraordinary and expressive language' – Evening Standard Imaginative and insightful, Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks offers a way into a world that is, for many people, alien and unfamiliar – for to be profoundly deaf is not just to live in a world of silence, but also to live in a world where the visual is paramount. In this remarkable book, Sacks explores the consequences of this, including the different ways in which the deaf and the hearing impaired learn to categorize their respective worlds – and how they convey and communicate those experiences to others.
This work, first published in 1979, was a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. The first chapter of this thesis concerns the supposed complementarity of reflexives and ordinary anaphoric pronouns. In the second chapter a theory of reflexivisation is characterised which encompasses several other theories. The third chapter considers apparent counter-examples to the generalizations regarding reflexives that were established in Chapter Two. The fourth chapter concerns the meaning of reflexives. This book will be of interest of students of language and linguistics.
The Derivation of Anaphoric Relations resolves a conspicuous problem for Minimalist theory, the apparently representational nature of the binding conditions. Hicks adduces a broad variety of evidence against the binding conditions applying at LF and builds upon the insights of recent proposals by Hornstein, Kayne, and Reuland by reducing them to the core narrow-syntactic operations (specifically, Agree and Merge). Several novel and independently motivated claims about syntactic features and phases are made, not only explaining the previously stipulated roles played by c-command, reference, and locality, but furnishing the dervational binding theory with sufficient flexibility to capture some long-problematic empirical phenomena: These include connectivity effects, 'picture-noun' reflexives in English, and anaphor/pronoun non-complementarity. Specific proposals are also made for extending the derivational approach to accommodate structured crosslinguistic variation in binding, with thorough expositions and analyses of the Dutch, Norwegian, and Icelandic pronominal systems.
Since its inception in 1967, the Forum has provided an informal but critical setting for the presentation of new ideas and research on first language acquisition. The Forum itself is sponsored by the Linguistics Department at Stanford and is organised by graduate students. In this volume the contributors explore their findings in language acquisition in a variety of the world's languages. The papers presented here reflect the diversity of interests in the field and the range of languages being studied. This volume makes an empirical, as well as a theoretical, contribution to linguistic research.