From Naming to Saying explores the classicquestion of the unity of the proposition, combining an historical approach with contemporary causal theories to offer a unique and novel solution.
* Defends a novel approach to the classical question about the unity of the proposition.
* Examines three key historical theories: Frege’s doctrine of concept and object, Russell’s analysis of the sentence, and Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning.
* Combines an historical approach with discussion and defense of a contemporary causal theory of the unity of the proposition.
* Establishes a view compatible with, though not dependent on, a causal theory of meaning.
This introduction to neurolinguistics is intended for anybody who wants to acquire a grounding in the field. It was written for students of linguistics and communication disorders, but students of psychology, neuroscience and other disciplines will also find it valuable. The introductory section presents the theories, models and frameworks underlying modern neurolinguistics. Then the neurolinguistic aspects of different components of language – phonology, morphology, lexical semantics, and semantics-pragmatics in communication – are discussed. The third section examines reading and writing, bilingualism, the evolution of language, and multimodality. The book also contains three resource chapters, one on techniques for investigating the brain, another on modeling brain functions, and a third that introduces the basic concepts of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. This text provides an up-to-date linguistic perspective, with a special focus on semantics and pragmatics, evolutionary perspectives, neural network modeling and multimodality, areas that have been less central in earlier introductory works.
Added by: Maria | Karma: 3098.81 | Non-Fiction, Linguistics | 24 July 2008
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A student introduction to descriptive linguistics, Describing Language is essentially practical in its orientation. It is useful for anyone who wishes to refer to technical literature involving linguistic description, who requires a basic conceptual framework and technical vocabulary with which to discuss language, and who needs to make elementary but principled descriptions and analyses of real data (such as classroom interaction or counselling sessions). Topics covered include phonetics, prosody, word structure, syntax, text and discourse structure, word and utterance meaning, and non-verbal behaviour.
Includes an accessible introduction to both Chomsky's Universal Grammar and Halliday's Systemic Grammar. It is an invaluable textbook for students across the social sciences.
This book reconstructs what the earliest grammars might have been and shows how they could have led to the languages of modern humankind.
Like other biological phenomena, language cannot be fully understood without reference to its evolution, whether proven or hypothesized," wrote Talmy Givon in 2002. As the languages spoken 8,000 years ago were typologically much the same as they are today and as no direct evidence exists for languages before then, evolutionary linguists are at a disadvantage compared to their counterparts in biology. Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva seek to overcome this obstacle by combining grammaticalization theory, one of the main methods of historical linguistics, with work in animal communication and human evolution. The questions they address include: do the modern languages derive from one ancestral language or from more than one? What was the structure of language like when it first evolved? And how did the properties associated with modern human languages arise, in particular syntax and the recursive use of language structures? The authors proceed on the assumption that if language evolution is the result of language change then the reconstruction of the former can be explored by deploying the processes involved in the latter. Their measured arguments and crystal-clear exposition will appeal to all those interested in the evolution of language, from advanced undergraduates to linguists, cognitive scientists, human biologists, and archaeologists.
