The Mirror of Language (Revised Edition)

The Mirror of Language (Revised Edition) PDF Author: Marcia L. Colish
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803264472
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
Early Christianity faced the problem of the human word versus Christ the Word. Could language accurately describe spiritual reality? The Mirror of Language brilliantly traces the development of one prominent theory of signs from Augustine through Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante. Their shared epistemology validated human language as an authentic but limited index of preexistent reality, both material and spiritual. This sign theory could thereby account for the ways men receive, know, and transmit religious knowledge, always mediated through faith. Marcia L. Colish demonstrates how the three theologians used different branches of the medieval trivium to express a common sign theory: Augustine stressed rhetoric, Anselm shifted to grammar (including grammatical proofs of God's existence), and Thomas Aquinas stressed dialectic. Dante, the one poet included in this study, used the Augustinian sign theory to develop a Christian poetics that culminates in the Divine Comedy. The author points out not only the commonality but also the sharp contrasts between these writers and shows the relation between their sign theories and the intellectual ferment of the times. When first published in 1968, The Mirror of Language was recognized as a pathfinding study. This completely revised edition incorporates the scholarship of the intervening years and reflects the refinements of the author's thought. Greater prominence is given to the role of Stoicism, and sharper attention is paid to some of the thinkers and movements surrounding the major thinkers treated. Concerns of semiotics, philosophy, and literary criticism are elucidated further. The original thesis, still controversial, is now even wider ranging and more salient to current intellectual debate.

The Mirror of Language (Revised Edition)

The Mirror of Language (Revised Edition) PDF Author: Marcia L. Colish
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803264472
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
Early Christianity faced the problem of the human word versus Christ the Word. Could language accurately describe spiritual reality? The Mirror of Language brilliantly traces the development of one prominent theory of signs from Augustine through Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante. Their shared epistemology validated human language as an authentic but limited index of preexistent reality, both material and spiritual. This sign theory could thereby account for the ways men receive, know, and transmit religious knowledge, always mediated through faith. Marcia L. Colish demonstrates how the three theologians used different branches of the medieval trivium to express a common sign theory: Augustine stressed rhetoric, Anselm shifted to grammar (including grammatical proofs of God's existence), and Thomas Aquinas stressed dialectic. Dante, the one poet included in this study, used the Augustinian sign theory to develop a Christian poetics that culminates in the Divine Comedy. The author points out not only the commonality but also the sharp contrasts between these writers and shows the relation between their sign theories and the intellectual ferment of the times. When first published in 1968, The Mirror of Language was recognized as a pathfinding study. This completely revised edition incorporates the scholarship of the intervening years and reflects the refinements of the author's thought. Greater prominence is given to the role of Stoicism, and sharper attention is paid to some of the thinkers and movements surrounding the major thinkers treated. Concerns of semiotics, philosophy, and literary criticism are elucidated further. The original thesis, still controversial, is now even wider ranging and more salient to current intellectual debate.

Language, the Social Mirror

Language, the Social Mirror PDF Author: Elaine Chaika
Publisher: Newbury House Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Language and languages
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Get Book Here

Book Description
Discusses the ways people use language in society with chapters on kinesics, dialect, and bilingualism.

Mirror Of Language

Mirror Of Language PDF Author: Kenji Hakuta
Publisher: New York : Basic Books
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A leading Yale psycholinguist separates myth from fact in the first comprehensive account of the psychological, linguistic, educational, and social aspects of bilingualism."

Action to Language via the Mirror Neuron System

Action to Language via the Mirror Neuron System PDF Author: Michael A. Arbib
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139458132
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, internationally recognised experts from child development, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, primatology and robotics discuss the role of the mirror neuron system for the recognition of hand actions and the evolutionary basis for the brain mechanisms that support language.

How the Brain Got Language

How the Brain Got Language PDF Author: Michael A. Arbib
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199896682
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
Unlike any other species, humans can learn and use language. This book explains how the brain evolved to make language possible, through what Michael Arbib calls the Mirror System Hypothesis. Because of mirror neurons, monkeys, chimps, and humans can learn by imitation, but only "complex imitation," which humans exhibit, is powerful enough to support the breakthrough to language. This theory provides a path from the openness of manual gesture, which we share with nonhuman primates, through the complex imitation of manual skills, pantomime, protosign (communication based on conventionalized manual gestures), and finally to protospeech. The theory explains why we humans are as capable of learning sign languages as we are of learning to speak. This fascinating book shows how cultural evolution took over from biological evolution for the transition from protolanguage to fully fledged languages. The author explains how the brain mechanisms that made the original emergence of languages possible, perhaps 100,000 years ago, are still operative today in the way children acquire language, in the way that new sign languages have emerged in recent decades, and in the historical processes of language change on a time scale from decades to centuries. Though the subject is complex, this book is highly readable, providing all the necessary background in primatology, neuroscience, and linguistics to make the book accessible to a general audience.

Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language

Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language PDF Author: Maxim I. Stamenov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027297088
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Get Book Here

Book Description
The emergence of language, social intelligence, and tool development are what made homo sapiens sapiens differentiate itself from all other biological species in the world. The use of language and the management of social and instrumental skills imply an awareness of intention and the consideration that one faces another individual with an attitude analogical to that of one’s own. The metaphor of ‘mirror’ aptly comes to mind.Recent investigations have shown that the human ability to ‘mirror’ other’s actions originates in the brain at a much deeper level than phenomenal awareness. A new class of neurons has been discovered in the premotor area of the monkey brain: ‘mirror neurons’. Quite remarkably, they are tuned to fire to the enaction as well as observation of specific classes of behavior: fine manual actions and actions performed by mouth. They become activated independent of the agent, be it the self or a third person whose action is observed. The activation in mirror neurons is automatic and binds the observation and enaction of some behavior by the self or by the observed other. The peculiar first-to-third-person ‘intersubjectivity’ of the performance of mirror neurons and their surprising complementarity to the functioning of strategic communicative face-to-face (first-to-second person) interaction may shed new light on the functional architecture of conscious vs. unconscious mental processes and the relationship between behavioral and communicative action in monkeys, primates, and humans. The present volume discusses the nature of mirror neurons as presented by the research team of Prof. Giacomo Rizzolatti (University of Parma), who originally discovered them, and the implications to our understanding of the evolution of brain, mind and communicative interaction in non-human primates and man.(Series B)

The Mirror of Grammar

The Mirror of Grammar PDF Author: Louis G. Kelly
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027245908
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
Much is known about the grammar of the modistae and about its eclipse; this book sets out to trace its rise. In the late eleventh century grammar became an analytical rather than an exegetical discipline under the impetus of the new theology. Under the impetus of Arab learning the ancient sciences were reshaped according to the norms of Aristotle's Analytics, and developed within a structure of speculative sciences beginning with grammar and culminating in theology. Though the modistae acknowledge Aristotle, Donatus, Priscian and the Arab commentators, their roots also lie in Augustine and Boethius, and they took as much from their scholastic contemporaries as they gave them. This book traces the genesis of a grammar which communicated freely with other speculative sciences, shared their structures and methods, and affirmed its own individuality by defining its object as the causes of language.

Language, the Social Mirror

Language, the Social Mirror PDF Author: Elaine Chaika
Publisher: Newbury House
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
Discusses the ways people use language in society with chapters on kinesics, dialect, and bilingualism.

Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning

Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning PDF Author: Jeff Malpas
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521417211
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book discusses the ideas of Donald Davidson, on the nature of understanding and meaning, and the nature of truth and knowledge, providing an account of Davidson's holistic and hermeneutical conception of linguistic interpretation, and, more generally, of the mind.

Through the Language Glass

Through the Language Glass PDF Author: Guy Deutscher
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1429970111
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Get Book Here

Book Description
A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how—and whether—culture shapes language and language, culture Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language—and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"? Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is—yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water—a "she"—becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery.