Fixing Language

Fixing Language PDF Author: Herman Cappelen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198814712
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Herman Cappelen investigates how language and other representational devices can go wrong, and how to fix them. We use language to understand and talk about the world, but what if our language has deficiencies that prevent it from playing that role? How can we revise our concepts, and what are the limits on revision?

Fixing Language

Fixing Language PDF Author: Herman Cappelen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198814712
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Herman Cappelen investigates how language and other representational devices can go wrong, and how to fix them. We use language to understand and talk about the world, but what if our language has deficiencies that prevent it from playing that role? How can we revise our concepts, and what are the limits on revision?

Fixing English

Fixing English PDF Author: Anne Curzan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107020751
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Anne Curzan presents a pioneering new definition of prescriptivism as a linguistic phenomenon.

Making AI Intelligible

Making AI Intelligible PDF Author: Herman Cappelen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192894722
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This innovative and accessible study illustrates how philosophy can help us understand and improve our interactions with AI.

Opening Minds

Opening Minds PDF Author: Peter Johnston
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003842194
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Introducing a spelling test to a student by saying, 'Let' s see how many words you know,' is different from saying, 'Let's see how many words you know already.' It is only one word, but the already suggests that any words the child knows are ahead of expectation and, most important, that there is nothing permanent about what is known and not known. Peter Johnston Grounded in research, Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Livesshows how words can shape students' learning, their sense of self, and their social, emotional and moral development. Make no mistake: words have the power to open minds – or close them. Following up his groundbreaking book, Choice Words, author Peter Johnston continues to demonstrate how the things teachers say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for the literate lives of students. In this new book, Johnston shows how the words teachers choose can affect the worlds students inhabit in the classroom. He explains how to engage children with more productive talk and how to create classrooms that support students' intellectual development, as well as their development as human beings.

Language Change

Language Change PDF Author: Joan Bybee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107020166
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This new introduction explores all aspects of language change, with an emphasis on the role of cognition and language use.

Roads to Reference

Roads to Reference PDF Author: Mario Gómez-Torrente
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019258524X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
How is it that words come to stand for the things they stand for? Is the thing that a word stands for - its reference - fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words like 'water', 'three', and 'red' refer to appropriate things, just as the word 'Aristotle' refers to Aristotle? If so, which things are these, and how do they come to be referred to by those words? In Roads to Reference, Mario Gómez-Torrente provides novel answers to these and other questions that have been of traditional interest in the theory of reference. The book introduces a number of cases of apparent indeterminacy of reference for proper names, demonstratives, and natural kind terms, which suggest that reference-fixing conventions for them adopt the form of lists of merely sufficient conditions for reference and reference failure. He then provides arguments for a new anti-descriptivist picture of those kinds of words, according to which the reference-fixing conventions for them do not describe their reference. This book also defends realist and objectivist accounts of the reference of ordinary natural kind nouns, numerals, and adjectives for sensible qualities. According to these accounts these words refer, respectively, to 'ordinary kinds', cardinality properties, and properties of membership in intervals of sensible dimensions, and these things are fixed in subtle ways by associated reference-fixing conventions.

On Language Change

On Language Change PDF Author: Rudi Keller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134901984
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In the twentieth century paradigms of linguistics have largely left language change to one side. Rudi Keller's book is an exciting contribution to linguistic philosophy becuase it puts language change back on the linguistics agenda and demonstrates that, far from being a remote mystery, it can and should be explained.

Playing with Languages

Playing with Languages PDF Author: Amy L. Paugh
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857457616
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Over several generations villagers of Dominica have been shifting from Patwa, an Afro-French creole, to English, the official language. Despite government efforts at Patwa revitalization and cultural heritage tourism, rural caregivers and teachers prohibit children from speaking Patwa in their presence. Drawing on detailed ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of video-recorded social interaction in naturalistic home, school, village and urban settings, the study explores this paradox and examines the role of children and their social worlds. It offers much-needed insights into the study of language socialization, language shift and Caribbean children’s agency and social lives, contributing to the burgeoning interdisciplinary study of children’s cultures. Further, it demonstrates the critical role played by children in the transmission and transformation of linguistic practices, which ultimately may determine the fate of a language.

Language Change in East Asia

Language Change in East Asia PDF Author: T. E. McAuley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136844686
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
This book adopts a wide focus on the range of East Asian languages, in both their pre-modern and modern forms, within the specific topic area of language change. It contains sections on dialect studies, contact linguistics, socio-linguistics and syntax/phonology and deals with all three major languages of East Asia: Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Individual chapters cover pre-Sino-Japanese phonology, nominalizers in Chinese, Japanese and Korean; Japanese loanwords in Taiwan Mandarin; changes in Korean honorifics; the tense and aspect system of Japanese; and language policy in Japan. The book will be of interest to linguists working on East Asian languages, and will be of value to a range of general linguists working in comparative or historical linguistics, socio-linguistics, language typology and language contact.

Language Change at the Interfaces

Language Change at the Interfaces PDF Author: Nicholas Catasso
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027257876
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This volume offers an up-to-date survey of linguistic phenomena at the interfaces between syntax and prosody, information structure and discourse – with a special focus on Germanic and Romance – and their role in language change. The contributions, set within the generative framework, discuss original data and provide new insights into the diachronic development of long-burning issues such as negation, word order, quantifiers, null subjects, aspectuality, the structure of the left periphery, and extraposition. The first part of the volume explores interface phenomena at the intrasentential level, in which only clause-internal factors seem to play a significant role in determining diachronic change. The second part examines developments at the intersentential level involving a rearrangement of categories between at least two clausal domains. The book will be of interest for scholars and students interested in generative accounts of language change phenomena at the interfaces, as well as for theoretical linguists in general.