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This book deals with the need to rethink the aims and methods of contemporary linguistics. Orthodox linguists' discussions of linguistic form fail to exemplify how language users become language makers. Integrationist theory is used here as a solution to this basic problem within general linguistics. The book is aimed at an interdisciplinary readership, comprising those engaged in study, teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences, including linguistics, philosophy, sociology and psychology.
The basic claim of this book is that for 2000 years and more the western tradition has relied on two very dubious assumptions about human communication: that each national language is a unique code and that linguistic communication consists in the utilization of such codes to transfer messages from mind to mind.
In recent years integrationist theory has mounted a radical challenge to the traditional notion of 'languages' as possible objects of inquiry. This volume develops the integrationist critique of orthodox linguistics.
David Alan Black has been one of the leading voices in New Testament studies over the last forty years. His contributions to Greek grammar, textual criticism, the Synoptic problem, the authorship of Hebrews, and many more have challenged scholars and students to get into the text of the New Testament like never before and to rethink the status quo based on all the evidence. The present volume consists of thirteen studies, written by some of Black's colleagues, friends, and former students, on a number of New Testament topics in honor of his successful research and teaching career. Not only do they address issues that have garnered his attention over the years, they also extend the scholarly discussion with up-to-date research and fresh evaluations of the evidence, making this book a valuable contribution in itself to the field that Black has devoted himself to since he began his career.
Drawing on usage-based theory, neurocognition, and complex systems, Languaging Beyond Languages elaborates an elegant model accommodating accumulated insights into human language even as it frees linguistics from its two-thousand-year-old, ideological attachment to reified grammatical systems. Idiolects are redefined as continually emergent collections of context specific, probabilistic memories entrenched as a result of domain-general cognitive processes that create and consolidate linguistic experience. Also continually emergent, conventionalization and vernacularization operate across individuals producing the illusion of shared grammatical systems. Conventionalization results from the emergence of parallel expectations for the use of linguistic elements organized into syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships. In parallel, vernacularization indexes linguistic forms to sociocultural identities and stances. Evidence implying entrenchment and conventionalization is provided in asymmetrical frequency distributions.
"In the world history of writing, Japan presents an unusually detailed record of transition to literacy. Extant materials attest to the social, cultural, and political contexts and consequences of the advent of writing and reading, from the earliest appearance of imported artifacts with Chinese inscriptions in the first century BCE, through the production of texts within the Japanese archipelago in the fifth century, to the widespread literacies and the simultaneous rise of a full-fledged state in the late seventh and eighth centuries. David B. Lurie explores the complex processes of adaptation and invention that defined the early Japanese transition from orality to textuality. Drawing on ar...
Linguists usually discuss language or dialects in terms of groups of speakers. Believing that patterns can be seen more clearly in the group than the individual, researchers often present group scores with no indication of the variation within the group. Even though linguists acknowledge that no two individuals speak alike, few study individual variation and voice. Barbara Johnstone makes a case for the individual's importance and idiosyncrasies in language and linguistics. Using theoretical arguments and discourse analysis, along with linguistic examples from a variety of speakers and settings, Johnstone illustrates how speakers draw on linguistic models associated with class, ethnicity, gender, and region, among others, to construct an individual voice. In doing so Johnstone shows that certain important questions in sociolinguistics and pragmatics can only be answered with reference to individual speakers. Johnstone's study is important both for the understanding of speech as expressive of self, and for the study of variation and mechanisms of linguistic choice and change.
In this handbook, scholars from around the world offer an up-to-date account of the state of the art in different areas of onomastics, in a format that is both useful to specialists in related fields and accessible to the general reader. Since Ancient Greece, names have been regarded as central to the study of language, and this has continued to be a major theme of both philosophical and linguistic enquiry throughout the history of Western thought. The investigation of name origins is more recent, as is the study of names in literature. Relatively new is the study of names in society, which draws on techniques from sociolinguistics and has gradually been gathering momentum over the last few ...
This is an introduction to linguistics, the study of human language. The author provides a succinct but lucid outline of the ways in which language has been defined, described, and explored, and guides readers towards further exploration of their own.
About fifty years ago, Stephen Ullmann wrote that polysemy is 'the pivot of semantic analysis'. Fifty years on, polysemy has become one of the hottest topics in linguistics and in the cognitive sciences at large. The book deals with the topic from a wide variety of viewpoints. The cognitive approach is supplemented and supported by diachronic, psycholinguistic, developmental, comparative, and computational perspectives. The chapters, written by some of the most eminent specialists in the field, are all underpinned by detailed discussions of methodology and theory.