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128 books match the query 'Language and languages' and 7 start with o

cover of Of Problematology: Philosophy, Science, and Language

Of Problematology

Philosophy, Science, and Language

Michel Meyer

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Michel Meyer offers a new beginning for philosophy rooted in a theory of questioning that he calls "problematology." Meyer argues that a new beginning is necessary in order to resituate philosophy, science, and linguistic analysis, and he proposes a global view of rationality by returning to the nature of questioning itself.

For Meyer, philosophy does not solve problems or give answers but instead shows how propositions are related to a whole field of questions that give them meaning. Reason is identified not with answers but with the question-answer process. Meyer pursues this new theory of reason and meaning in a critique of Western philosophy from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle through Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Foucault. He provides a detailed analysis of Descartes' notion of radical doubt and demonstrates its implications for the subsequent philosophical tradition that ignored the questioning process while pursuing an unshakable foundation for knowledge. Meyer argues that recent work in rhetoric points toward a theory of radical questioning and claims that the methods of rhetoric and argumentation must be turned back on philosophy itself in order to recover the original significance of metaphysics as the science of ultimate questions.
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cover of On Heidegger and Language

On Heidegger and Language

Edited and Translated by Joseph J. Kockelmans

Northwestern University Press, 1980

This collection contains original translations of essays, discussions, and papers including six previously unpublished works from the International Colloquium on Heidegger’s Conception of Language, held at The Pennsylvania State University in 1969. This volume endeavors to place Martin Heidegger’s ideas within a wide range of philosophical thought. It contains critical reflections on his conception of speech in Being and Time, linguistic meditations on Heidegger’s use of language, and analysis of his view on the relationship between thought and the language in which it is expressed. In this book, Heidegger scholars will find additional insights into his conception of language and his philosophy as a whole.
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cover of On What We Know We Don't Know: Explanation, Theory, Linguistics, and How Questions Shape Them

On What We Know We Don't Know

Explanation, Theory, Linguistics, and How Questions Shape Them

Sylvain Bromberger

University of Chicago Press, 1992

In this collection of essays, Bromberger explores the centrality of questions and predicaments they create in scientific research. He discusses the nature of explanation, theory, and the foundations of linguistics.
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cover of On the Origin of Language

On the Origin of Language

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder

University of Chicago Press, 1986

This volume combines Rousseau's essay on the origin of diverse languages with Herder's essay on the genesis of the faculty of speech. Rousseau's essay is important to semiotics and critical theory, as it plays a central role in Jacques Derrida's book Of Grammatology, and both essays are valuable historical and philosophical documents.
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cover of Optimizing Structure in Context: Scrambling and Information Structure

Optimizing Structure in Context

Scrambling and Information Structure

Hye-Won Choi

CSLI, 1999

This book examines the scrambling phenomena in German and Korean from the perspective that different ordering possibilities are motivated and constrained by interactions among syntactic, semantic, and discourse principles. Using Optimality Theory, Optimizing Structure in Context demonstrates how these principles from different modules of grammar interact and thus resolve conflicts among themselves to yield the most optimal output, that is, a sentence with a particular word order, in a given semantic and discoursal context. This way, it explains various meaning-related effects associated with scrambling such as definiteness effect and focus effect. While developing constraints in the discourse domain, it also proposes a new model of information structure based on basic discourse features. By expanding the core idea of constraint interaction in Optimality Theory to interactions 'between' modules of grammar as well as 'between', this book provides a model of interface theory.
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cover of Original Signs: Gesture, Sign, and the Sources of Language

Original Signs

Gesture, Sign, and the Sources of Language

David F. Armstrong

Gallaudet University Press, 2002

In the ongoing debate about evolution, scholars frequently argue either the perspective that humans stand as the end product of a deliberate process or that they derive from a series of random acts of natural selection. David F. Armstrong’s new book Original Signs embraces the Darwinian concept of natural selection and extends it to apply to the formation of language. While most current linguistic theory envisions language as a system for translating the contents of the mind into linear strings of arbitrary symbols, Armstrong asserts that this model does not characterize signed languages. He shows that language is inherently a multichannel activity, of which the two primary channels are auditory and visual.

Original Signs employs a more expansive notion of language that takes into account the full range of human communicative behavior. By making no strict separation between language and gesture, this thought-provoking work reveals that the use by deaf people of signs to create a fully formed language is also a natural facet of communication development for hearing people.

Armstrong explores the influences of Plato and Descartes on modern linguistics, and delineates the theories of earlier anthropological linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who thought of language as natural experiments connected to individual cultures. This exceptional work of scholarship methodically demonstrates that the intricacies of how languages develop, whether they depend upon words or signs, and that the complexity among languages that contact one another cannot be accounted for by the sequential hierarchical processes previously put forth by linguists and logicians. Original Signs will prove to be a fascinating, watershed work invaluable to linguists, anthropologists, and all other scholars and students engaged in the search for the origin of language.

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cover of Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric

Out of Style

Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric

Paul G. Butler

Utah State University Press, 2008

Paul Butler applauds the emerging interest in the study of style among scholars of rhetoric and composition, arguing that the loss of stylistics from composition in recent decades left it alive only in the popular imagination as a set of grammar conventions. Butler’s goal in Out of Style is to articulate style as a vital and productive source of invention, and to redefine its importance for current research, theory, and pedagogy.
    Scholars in composition know that the ideas about writing most common in the discourse of public intellectuals are egregiously backward. Without a vital approach to stylistics, Butler argues, writing studies will never dislodge the controlling fantasies of self-authorized pundits in the nation’s intellectual press. Rhetoric and composition must answer with a public discourse that is responsive to readers’ ongoing interest in style but is also grounded in composition theory.
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