Results by title

128 books match the query 'Language and languages' and 11 start with l

Sort by

Language

Leonard Bloomfield

University of Chicago Press, 1984

Perhaps the single most influential work of general linguistics published in the twentieth century, Leonard Bloomfield’s Language is both a masterpiece of textbook writing and a classic of scholarship. Intended as an introduction to the field of linguistics, it revolutionized the field when it appeared in 1933 and became the major text of the American descriptivist school.

The book quickly became the primary text for the American descriptivist school of linguistics. Bloomfield’s clear, systematic methodology and focus on observable language data laid the groundwork for a new era in linguistic theory. His work, which covers a wide range of topics, from phonology and morphology to syntax and semantics, provides a comprehensive framework for understanding how language functions as a structured system.

Through twelve detailed chapters, Bloomfield explores topics such as the sounds of language, the structure of words, and the organization of sentences. His emphasis on structuralism and the empirical study of language has had a profound impact on the discipline, making Language an essential reference for anyone interested in the history and development of linguistic theory.

As both an introduction for newcomers and a resource for more advanced students, Language continues to be a crucial text in understanding the scientific study of language and its ongoing evolution.

[more]

Language Beyond Postmodernism

Saying and Thinking in Gendlin Philosophy

David Kleinberg-Levin

Northwestern University Press, 1997

Eugene Gendlin's contribution to the theory of language is the focus of this collection of essays edited by David Michael Levin. This compilation of critical studies—each followed by a comment from Gendlin himself—investigates how concepts grow out of experience, and explores relations between Gendlin's philosophy of language and experience and the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Dilthey, and Heidegger.

[more]

Language and Power in the Early Middle Ages

Patrick J. Geary

Brandeis University Press, 2013

The eminent historian Patrick J. Geary has written a provocative book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel about the role of language and ideology in the study and history of the early Middle Ages. He includes a fascinating discussion of the rush by nationalist philologists to rediscover the medieval roots of their respective vernaculars, the rivalry between vernacular languages and Latin to act as transmitters of Christian sacred texts and administrative documents, and the rather sloppy and ad hoc emergence in different places of the vernacular as the local administrative idiom. This is a fascinating look at the weakness of language as a force for unity: ideology, church authority, and emerging secular power always trumped language.

[more]

Language and Sexuality

Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice

Edited by Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert J. Podesva, Sarah Roberts, and Andrew

CSLI, 2001

Language and Sexuality explores the question of how linguistic practices and ideologies relate to sexuality and sexual identity, opening with a discussion of the emerging field of "queer linguistics" and moving from theory into practice with case studies of language use in a wide variety of cultural settings. The resulting volume combines the perspectives of the field's top scholars with exciting new research to present new ideas on the ways in which language use intersects with sexual identity.

[more]

Language and Species

Derek Bickerton

University of Chicago Press, 1992

Language and Species presents the most detailed and well-documented scenario to date of the origins of language. Drawing on "living linguistic fossils" such as "ape talk," the "two-word" stage of small children, and pidgin languages, and on recent discoveries in paleoanthropology, Bickerton shows how a primitive "protolanguage" could have offered Homo erectus a novel ecological niche. He goes on to demonstrate how this protolanguage could have developed into the languages we speak today.

"You are drawn into [Bickerton's] appreciation of the dominant role language plays not only in what we say, but in what we think and, therefore, what we are."—Robert Wright, New York Times Book Review

"The evolution of language is a fascinating topic, and Bickerton's Language and Species is the best introduction we have."—John C. Marshall, Nature

[more]

Language and the Rise of the Algorithm

Jeffrey M. Binder

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A wide-ranging history of the algorithm.

Bringing together the histories of mathematics, computer science, and linguistic thought, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm reveals how recent developments in artificial intelligence are reopening an issue that troubled mathematicians well before the computer age: How do you draw the line between computational rules and the complexities of making systems comprehensible to people? By attending to this question, we come to see that the modern idea of the algorithm is implicated in a long history of attempts to maintain a disciplinary boundary separating technical knowledge from the languages people speak day to day.

Here, Jeffrey M. Binder offers a compelling tour of four visions of universal computation that addressed this issue in very different ways: G. W. Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator; a universal algebra scheme Nicolas de Condorcet designed during the French Revolution; George Boole’s nineteenth-century logic system; and the early programming language ALGOL, short for algorithmic language. These episodes show that symbolic computation has repeatedly become entangled in debates about the nature of communication. Machine learning, in its increasing dependence on words, erodes the line between technical and everyday language, revealing the urgent stakes underlying this boundary.

The idea of the algorithm is a levee holding back the social complexity of language, and it is about to break. This book is about the flood that inspired its construction.

[more]

Language

A Right and a Resource: Approaches to Linguistic Human Rights

Tibor Várady

Central European University Press, 2000

Linguistic Human Rights (LHR) is a fast growing new area of study combining the principles of national and international law with the study of language as a central dimension of ethnicity. Implementation of these principles is aimed at ensuring that no state or society violates these basic rights.

This path breaking study broadens our knowledge of the important role of language in minority rights and in social and political struggles for LHRs. Exploring the interactions of linguistic diversity, biodiversity, the free market and human rights, the contributors present case studies to highlight such issues as Kurdish satellite TV attempting to create a virtual state on the air through trying to achieve basic LHR’s for Kurds in Turkey; the implementation of LHRs in the Baltic states; language rights activism in Canada; the spread of English as an international language; and the obstacles met in education by Roma and the Deaf in Hungary because of lack of appropriate LHRs.

Language: A Right and a Resource is a valuable multi-disciplinary text which can be used in a variety of different areas of study in the legal profession, linguistics, cultural and political studies.

[more]

Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time

Johanna Nichols

University of Chicago Press, 1992

In this ground-breaking book, Johanna Nichols proposes means of describing, comparing, and interpreting linguistic diversity, both genetic and structural, providing the foundations for a theory of diversity based upon population science. This book will interest linguists, archaeologists, and population specialists.

"An awe-inspiring book, unequalled in scope, originality, and the range of language data considered."—Anna Siewierska, Linguistics

"Fascinating. . . . A brilliant pioneering study."—Journal of Indo-European Studies

"A superbly reasoned book."—John A. C. Greppin, Times Literary Supplement

[more]

Linking Literacies

Perspectives on L2 Reading-Writing Connections

Diane Belcher and Alan Hirvela, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2001

Linking Literacies provides the most up to date theoretical overview of the connection between reading and writing in second language acquisition. Belcher and Hirvela have brought together the definitive collection of developments in reading-writing relations research and pedagogy. Papers are organized into these parts:
Ground Practice: Theory, Research, and History
In the Classroom: Teaching Reading as Writing and Writing as Reading
(E)Merging Literacies and the Challenge of Textual Ownership
Technology-Assisted Reading and Writing.
In addition to examining the ways in which L1 influences have affected the development of L2 reading-writing theory and pedagogy, Linking Literacies looks at how L2 reading-writing scholarship has created an identity separate of an L1 framework. Linking Literacies examines a broad range of questions and concerns within the structure of L2 reading-writing connections and L2 academic literacy through discussions of theory, research, and

[more]