This updated and expanded edition of The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Music Theory breaks down a difficult subject in a simple way—even for those who think they have no rhythm or consider themselves tone deaf. With clear, concise language, it explains everything from bass-clef basics to confusing codas.
What are the essential features that permit a sentence to convey a complex idea? What must language users do in order to produce and understand meaningful sentences? And what enables humans, and perhaps apes and robots, to learn this remarkable skill? Janice Moulton and George Robinson offer a fresh and readable approach to these questions. They present an important new theory that clarifies the relationship of language to thought. This theory, which will attract considerable critical attention, combines a general analysis of language with an original cognitive model of syntax and language acquisition; it is a refreshing alternative to recent theories that..
To understand the role of language in public life and the social process in general, we need first a closer understanding of how linguistic knowledge and social factors interact in discourse interpretation. This volume is a major advance towards that understanding. Professor Gumperz here synthesizes fundamental research on communication from a wide variety of disciplines and develops an original and broadly based theory of conversational inference which shows how verbal communication can serve either between individuals of different social and ethnic backgrounds.
Basil Bernstein began to develop his theory of social structure and power relations during the 1950s and 1960s. Early in the 1960s he met M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, who were developing the first formulations of what would become known as systemic functional (SF) linguistic theory. A far-reaching dialogue began. Bernstein recognized the significant role that language plays in the construction of social experience and social inequality. Halliday and Hasan were actively seeking a theory of language that would explain the nature of the social.
Word Grammar: New Perspectives on a Theory of Language Structure
This book is an introduction to Word Grammar, a theory of language structure founded and developed by Dick Hudson. In this theory, language is a cognitive network - a network of concepts, words and meanings containing all the elements of a linguistic analysis. The theory of language is therefore embedded in a theory of knowledge, in which there are no boundaries between one form of knowledge and any other. Contributors to this volume are primarily Word Grammar grammarians from across the world.
