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High level linguistic theory monograph looking at the interaction between language and the environment.
Moving beyond a more traditional view of language as a discrete sociocultural and cognitive entity that distorts our understanding of surrounding ecologies, this book argues that the starting point for ecolinguistics is an appreciation of language as not just about nature, but of nature. Exploring this conceptual change in the field, the book presents a process view in which language is substituted by languaging, emphasising the bioecologies that we cohabit with numerous other species. It puts forward this perspective by looking at the theoretical considerations behind the understanding of languaging as bioecological, and through examining languaging in various contexts and places. Drawing on examples from across the world, it addresses topics such as climate catastrophes, corporate narratives, questions of ecological leadership, the bioecological implications of the COVID pandemic, and relational landscapes. It also makes use of data from across multiple bioecological settings, including the dairy and agricultural industries.
The volume presents language as fully integrated with human existence. On this view, language is not essentially ‘symbolic’, not represented inside minds or brains, and most certainly not determined by micro-social rules and norms. Rather, language is part of our ecology. It emerges when bodies co-ordinate vocal and visible gesture to integrate events with different histories. Enacting feeling, expression and wordings, language permeates the collective, individual and affective life of living beings. It is a profoundly distributed, multi-centric activity that binds people together as they go about their lives. Distributed Language pursues this perspective both theoretically and in relati...
The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics provides a comprehensive introduction and essential reference work to cognitive linguistics. It encompasses a wide range of perspectives and approaches, covering all the key areas of cognitive linguistics and drawing on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in pragmatics, discourse analysis, biolinguistics, ecolinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, neuroscience, language pedagogy, and translation studies. The forty-three chapters, written by international specialists in the field, cover four major areas: • Basic theories and hypotheses, including cognitive semantics, cognitive grammar, construction grammar, frame semantics, natural...
Research on insight problem solving examines how new ideas are generated to solve problems that initially resist the application of prior knowledge or analogue solutions. In the laboratory, insight problems are designed to create an impasse; overcoming the impasse is sometimes accompanied by a distinctive phenomenological experience, the so-called Aha! moment. Insight: On the Origins of New Ideas presents research that captures these episodes of insight under laboratory conditions and informs models that account for their emergence. Descriptions and analyses of episodes of discovery both in and out of the laboratory are included to provide a general overview of insight. Featuring contributio...
This volume emphasizes the emergence of linguistic development through children's and learners' interactions with their environment - spatial, social, cultural, educational - bringing to light commonalities between primary language development, child and adult second-language learning, and language acquisition by robots. The studies presented here challenge a number of dominant ideas in language acquisition theory. It is of interest to language acquisition researchers and professionals.
'This is an outstanding collection of papers by top scholars in a range of disciplines who shed stimulating, complementary insights into the social, cognitive and semiotic frameworks that shape both the acquisition of language, and the constitution of social actors through that process. The intentionally loose ecological framing of the volume provides an arena within which a range of perspectives, all united by their opposition to a mechanistic view of language acquisition, can enter into dialogue with each other. This is a most stimulating collection, with a range of insightful investigations of settings as diverse as an autistic child learning to interact with others on the playing field, ...
The increasingly rapid destruction of the ecological systems that support life is calling into question some of the fundamental stories that we live by: stories of unlimited economic growth, of consumerism, progress, individualism, success, and the human domination of nature. Ecolinguistics shows how linguistic analysis can help reveal the stories we live by, open them up to question, and contribute to the search for new stories. Bringing together the latest ecolinguistic studies with new theoretical insights and practical analyses, this book charts a new course for ecolinguistics as an engaged form of critical enquiry. Featuring: A framework for understanding the theory of ecolinguistics an...
In Relationship Thinking, N. J. Enfield outlines a framework for analyzing social interaction and its linguistic, cultural, and cognitive underpinnings by focusing on human relationships. This is a naturalistic approach to human sociality, grounded in the systematic study of real-time data from social interaction in everyday life. Many of the illustrative examples and analyses in the book are a result of the author's long-term field work in Laos. Enfield promotes an interdisciplinary approach to studying language, culture, and mind, building on simple but powerful semiotic principles and concentrating on three points of conceptual focus. The first is human agency: the combination of flexibil...
A comprehensive volume which engages with language policies and positions to highlight the issues surrounding language commodification and globalization.