The work of Bach and Harnish represents an able attempt by a philosopher and a linguist respectively to restore some sorely needed naturalistic assumptions to the study of linguistic communication
Cognitive linguistics has an honourable tradition of paying respect to naturally occurring language data and there have been fruitful interactions between corpus data and aspects of linguistic structure and meaning. More recently, dialect data and sociolinguistic data collection methods/theoretical concepts have started to generate interest. There has also been an increase in several kinds of experimental work. However, not all linguistic data is simply naturally occurring or derived from experiments with statistically robust samples of speakers.
This handbook provides a critical state-of-the-art overview of work in linguistic typology. It examines the directions and challenges of current research and shows how these reflect and inform work on the development of linguistic theory. It describes what typologists have revealed about language in general and discovered (and continue to discover) about the richly various ways in which meaning and expression are achieved in the world's languages. Typological research extends across all branches of linguistics. The degree to which the characteristics of language are universal or particular is crucial to the understanding of language and its relation to human nature and culture.
This book is an introduction to a history of language. Addressing the topic in its broadest sense, its intention is to prepare someone, who is perhaps only generally familiar with foreign languages and language study, for professional linguistic tuition. In this sense, the present volume is a useful preliminary reading before commencing a university or college introductory linguistics course. No previous training in linguistics is needed to read this book. It requires no foreknowledge of special linguistic terminology or of particular linguistic methods.
This volume seeks to expand our understanding of the relation holding between discourse relations, cognitive units, and linguistic coding. The twenty contributions in this collection explore one or more of the following themes: How point of view, or the salience of information in discourse, affects the organizational coherence of text and discourse; the concept of cognitive and linguistic event and how events are reflected in text and discourse organization; the nature of linguistic coding of events and other kinds of significant information; and the cognitive bases or cognitive correlates of the linguistic organization of discourse.
