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"A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book." — New York Times Book Review The classic work on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind In The Language Instinct, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.
In recent years the field has seen an increasing realisation that the full complexity of language acquisition demands theories that (a) explain how children integrate information from multiple sources in the environment, (b) build linguistic representations at a number of different levels, and (c) learn how to combine these representations in order to communicate effectively. These new findings have stimulated new theoretical perspectives that are more centered on explaining learning as a complex dynamic interaction between the child and her environment. This book is the first attempt to bring some of these new perspectives together in one place. It is a collection of essays written by a group of researchers who all take an approach centered on child-environment interaction, and all of whom have been influenced by the work of Elena Lieven, to whom this collection is dedicated.
Berwick and Chomsky draw on recent developments in linguistic theory to offer an evolutionary account of language and humans' remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire it. “A loosely connected collection of four essays that will fascinate anyone interested in the extraordinary phenomenon of language.” —New York Review of Books We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—“the language faculty”—raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book by two distinguished scholars—a computer scientist and a linguist—addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language. Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently the evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define “language” and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals. Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world; the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding; the tension between Darwin's idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language; and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds.
Winner of the British Association of Applied Linguistics Book Prize 2014 This book addresses how the new linguistic concept of 'Translanguaging' has contributed to our understandings of language, bilingualism and education, with potential to transform not only semiotic systems and speaker subjectivities, but also social structures.
This book explores the importance of Cognitive Linguistics for specialized language within the context of Frame-based Terminology (FBT). FBT uses aspects of Frame Semantics, coupled with premises from Cognitive Linguistics to structure specialized domains and create non-language-specific knowledge representations. Corpus analysis provides information regarding the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of specialized knowledge units. Also studied is the role of metaphor and metonymy in specialized texts. The first section explains the purpose and structure of the book. The second section gives an overview of basic concepts, theories, and applications in Terminology and Cognitive Linguistics. The third section explains the Frame-based Terminology approach. The fourth section explores the role of contextual information in specialized knowledge representation as reflected in linguistic contexts and graphical information. The final section highlights the conclusions that can be derived from this study.
This book provides a synopsis of Seuren's work in linguistic theory, syntax, semantics, and creole linguistics over the past three decades.
An overview of current issues and developments in foreign language education, designed for instructors of language, literature, and culture at any stage of their careers A contemporary guide to language teaching, this book presents the latest developments and issues in the field of applied linguistics. Written by scholars with expertise in theoretical linguistics, literary and cultural studies, and education, the book encourages readers to examine their beliefs about language teaching and to compare these perspectives with the tenets of current research-supported frameworks and approaches. It also leads instructors to make vital connections between theory and practice while linking language and content pedagogy so that they may develop innovative lesson plans, classroom activities, and course materials that align with the specific contexts in which they teach. Serving as a textbook for teaching methods courses, as well as a reference for instructors with varying levels of experience and diverse specializations, the book is applicable to all levels of instruction and provides guidelines and models that prepare instructors to teach in a rapidly evolving field.
The two most popular titles by the noted linguist and critic in one volume—an ideal introduction to his work. On Language features some of Noam Chomsky’s most informal and highly accessible work. In Part I, Language and Responsibility, Chomsky presents a fascinating self-portrait of his political, moral, and linguistic thinking. In Part II, Reflections on Language, Chomsky explores the more general implications of the study of language and offers incisive analyses of the controversies among psychologists, philosophers, and linguists over fundamental questions of language. “Language and Responsibility is a well-organized, clearly written and comprehensive introduction to Chomsky’s thought.” —The New York Times Book Review “Language and Responsibility brings together in one readable volume Chomsky’s positions on issues ranging from politics and philosophy of science to recent advances in linguistic theory. . . . The clarity of presentation at times approaches that of Bertrand Russell in his political and more popular philosophical essays.” —Contemporary Psychology “Reflections on Language is profoundly satisfying and impressive. It is the clearest and most developed account of the case of universal grammar and of the relations between his theory of language and the innate faculties of mind responsible for language acquisition and use.” —Patrick Flanagan
Rather than simply a record of proceedings (3rd International Conference on Functional Grammar, Amsterdam, June 1988), this volume contains revised and expanded papers from the conference and other papers inspired by the lively discussion there. The volume focuses on the nature of the structures assumed to underlie utterances in natural languages, in two respects. One area is the question of whether to expand the representations accepted in Functional Grammar (FG) in order to capture interpersonal functions, i.e., communication between speaker and hearer in a particular situation and context, to include, for example, aspect, tense, modality and illocutionary force. The second area concerns whether current underlying representation in FG is sufficiently abstract to be the format for the deepest level of human conceptual knowledge storage, as discussed by Simon Dik in a number of recent articles.
Language in Use creatively brings together, for the first time, perspectives from cognitive linguistics, language acquisition, discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology. The physical distance between nations and continents, and the boundaries between different theories and subfields within linguistics have made it difficult to recognize the possibilities of how research from each of these fields can challenge, inform, and enrich the others. This book aims to make those boundaries more transparent and encourages more collaborative research. The unifying theme is studying how language is used in context and explores how language is shaped by the nature of human cognition and social-cultural activity. Language in Use examines language processing and first language learning and illuminates the insights that discourse and usage-based models provide in issues of second language learning. Using a diverse array of methodologies, it examines how speakers employ various discourse-level resources to structure interaction and create meaning. Finally, it addresses issues of language use and creation of social identity. Unique in approach and wide-ranging in application, the contributions in this volume place emphasis on the analysis of actual discourse and the insights that analyses of such data bring to language learning as well as how language shapes and reflects social identity—making it an invaluable addition to the library of anyone interested in cutting-edge linguistics.