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Author: S. K. Leung
Publisher: Janus Publishing Company Lim
ISBN: 9781902835136
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Against the popular belief that language and meaning are essentially public in their epistemological origin, this book offers a philosophical basis for its antithesis. The author refutes the separation of reference from meaning, the long-held logical principle of the identity of the indiscernibles, and Wittgenstein's no-private-language philosophy.
Author: S. K. Leung
Publisher: Janus Publishing Company Lim
ISBN: 9781902835136
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Against the popular belief that language and meaning are essentially public in their epistemological origin, this book offers a philosophical basis for its antithesis. The author refutes the separation of reference from meaning, the long-held logical principle of the identity of the indiscernibles, and Wittgenstein's no-private-language philosophy.
Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674970276
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
“We have been given a powerful and often uplifting vision of what it is to be truly human.” —John Cottingham, The Tablet In seminal works ranging from Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create possible ways of being, both as individuals and as a society. In his new book setting forth decades of thought, he demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process. For centuries, philosophers have been divided on the nature of language. Those in the rational empiricist tradition—Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, and their heirs—assert that language is a tool that human beings developed to encode and communicate information. In The Language Animal, Taylor explains that this view neglects the crucial role language plays in shaping the very thought it purports to express. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning and fundamentally shapes human experience. The human linguistic capacity is not something we innately possess. We first learn language from others, and, inducted into the shared practice of speech, our individual selves emerge out of the conversation. Taylor expands the thinking of the German Romantics Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt into a theory of linguistic holism. Language is intellectual, but it is also enacted in artistic portrayals, gestures, tones of voice, metaphors, and the shifts of emphasis and attitude that accompany speech. Human language recognizes no boundary between mind and body. In illuminating the full capacity of “the language animal,” Taylor sheds light on the very question of what it is to be a human being.
Author: Paul R. Kroeger
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961101361
Category : Context (Linguistics)
Languages : en
Pages : 502
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Book Description
This book provides an introduction to the study of meaning in human language, from a linguistic perspective. It covers a fairly broad range of topics, including lexical semantics, compositional semantics, and pragmatics. The chapters are organized into six units: (1) Foundational concepts; (2) Word meanings; (3) Implicature (including indirect speech acts); (4) Compositional semantics; (5) Modals, conditionals, and causation; (6) Tense & aspect. Most of the chapters include exercises which can be used for class discussion and/or homework assignments, and each chapter contains references for additional reading on the topics covered. As the title indicates, this book is truly an INTRODUCTION: it provides a solid foundation which will prepare students to take more advanced and specialized courses in semantics and/or pragmatics. It is also intended as a reference for fieldworkers doing primary research on under-documented languages, to help them write grammatical descriptions that deal carefully and clearly with semantic issues. The approach adopted here is largely descriptive and non-formal (or, in some places, semi-formal), although some basic logical notation is introduced. The book is written at level which should be appropriate for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students. It presupposes some previous coursework in linguistics, but does not presuppose any background in formal logic or set theory.
Author: Edward Sapir
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language and languages
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Professor Sapir analyzes, for student and common reader, the elements of language. Among these are the units of language, grammatical concepts and their origins, how languages differ and resemble each other, and the history of the growth of representative languages--Cover.
Author: Philippe Schlenker
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262047438
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
How meaning works—from monkey calls to human language, from spoken language to sign language, from gestures to music—and how meaning is connected to truth. We communicate through language, connecting what we mean to the words we say. But humans convey meaning in other ways as well, with facial expressions, hand gestures, and other methods. Animals, too, can get their meanings across without words. In What It All Means, linguist Philippe Schlenker explains how meaning works, from monkey calls to human language, from spoken language to sign language, from gestures to music. He shows that these extraordinarily diverse types of meaning can be studied and compared within a unified approach—one in which the notion of truth plays a central role. “It’s just semantics” is often said dismissively. But Schlenker shows that semantics—the study of meaning—is an unsung success of modern linguistics, a way to investigate some of the deepest questions about human nature using tools from the empirical and formal sciences. Drawing on fifty years of research in formal semantics, Schlenker traces how meaning comes to life. After investigating meaning in primate communication, he explores how human meanings are built, using in some cases sign languages as a guide to the workings of our inner “logic machine.” Schlenker explores how these meanings can be enriched by iconicity in sign language and by gestures in spoken language, and then turns to more abstract forms of iconicity to understand the meaning of music. He concludes by examining paradoxes, which—being neither true nor false—test the very limits of meaning.
Author: Hugh Chisholm
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Languages : en
Pages : 1090
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Book Description
This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.
Author: Elke Diedrichsen
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527540421
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 407
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Book Description
This book is an exploration of the dimensions of meaning in language from several important perspectives that are of major interest to scholars today, bringing together studies from the realms of linguistic pragmatics, semantics, ontological knowledge engineering, and computational linguistics. Situated within modern functional-cognitive constructional-ontological and computational paradigms, the analyses here are supported by authentic language data, including corpus data, from a rich set of languages. Context and situation play an important but complex role in meaning elaboration. The role of context and situation is elusive and has proved difficult to elucidate with respect to meaning and knowledge representation. This volume provides evidence of the nature of the, often rapid, emergence of meaning in the digital world of the internet, social media, and Internet memes. The use of computational avatars and the rise of human language technologies, including big data and digital corpora, have made the construction of meaning and human language understanding essential to the work of linguists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists who are increasingly working together in collaborative teams to share insights.
Author: Angela D. Friederici
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262036924
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
A comprehensive account of the neurobiological basis of language, arguing that species-specific brain differences may be at the root of the human capacity for language. Language makes us human. It is an intrinsic part of us, although we seldom think about it. Language is also an extremely complex entity with subcomponents responsible for its phonological, syntactic, and semantic aspects. In this landmark work, Angela Friederici offers a comprehensive account of these subcomponents and how they are integrated. Tracing the neurobiological basis of language across brain regions in humans and other primate species, she argues that species-specific brain differences may be at the root of the human capacity for language. Friederici shows which brain regions support the different language processes and, more important, how these brain regions are connected structurally and functionally to make language processes that take place in milliseconds possible. She finds that one particular brain structure (a white matter dorsal tract), connecting syntax-relevant brain regions, is present only in the mature human brain and only weakly present in other primate brains. Is this the “missing link” that explains humans' capacity for language? Friederici describes the basic language functions and their brain basis; the language networks connecting different language-related brain regions; the brain basis of language acquisition during early childhood and when learning a second language, proposing a neurocognitive model of the ontogeny of language; and the evolution of language and underlying neural constraints. She finds that it is the information exchange between the relevant brain regions, supported by the white matter tract, that is the crucial factor in both language development and evolution.
Author: Anita K. Barry
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313013616
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Language issues are intrinsically part of every classroom setting. Therefore, there is a need to present the linguistic perspective to all teachers and teachers-in-training. This perspective assumes that a complex system is learned by children at an early age with little conscious instruction. It recognizes that languages change over time and that variation, based on region, ethnic identity, gender, social class, and social context, is inherent to language. Focusing more on the practical than the theoretical, Barry aims to engage teachers and education students in discussion of the relevance of linguistics to teaching and to encourage them to bring their own expertise to the discussion. Based on the research of scholars in linguistics and related disciplines, Barry's volume helps teachers synthesize some of the foundations of classic linguistic study with important, current findings. She starts by acquainting the reader with fundamentals of linguistics, then she moves on to discussions of teaching grammar and the history of English orthography. An entire chapter is devoted to the process of child language acquisition and another to the obstacles that some people face when attempting to learn a language. The work concludes with pieces on language policies and language literacy. Group exercises and suggested projects are included to facilitate the exchange between linguistics and education. The book is a must for those interested in the fundamental role of language in education.
Author: Alan K. Melby
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027283575
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
This book is about the limits of machine translation. It is widely recognized that machine translation systems do much better on domain-specific controlled-language texts (domain texts for short) than on dynamic general-language texts (general texts for short). The authors explore this general — domain distinction and come to some uncommon conclusions about the nature of language. Domain language is claimed to be made possible by general language, while general language is claimed to be made possible by the ethical dimensions of relationships. Domain language is unharmed by the constraints of objectivism, while general language is suffocated by those constraints. Along the way to these conclusions, visits are made to Descartes and Saussure, to Chomsky and Lakoff, to Wittgenstein and Levinas. From these conclusions, consequences are drawn for machine translation and translator tools, for linguistic theory and translation theory. The title of the book does not question whether language is possible; it asks, with wonder and awe, why communication through language is possible.
