Results by title
372 books match the query 'Language' and 85 start with t
The Possibility of Language
Internal Tensions in Wittgenstein's TractatusMaria Cerezo
CSLI, 2003
The Postmodern Condition
A Report on KnowledgeJean-Francois Lyotard
University of Minnesota Press, 1984
The Power of Babel
Language and Governance in the African ExperienceAli A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui
University of Chicago Press, 1998
The Power of Babel is one of the first comprehensive studies of the complex linguistic constellations of Africa. It draws on Ali Mazrui's earlier work in its examination of the "triple heritage" of African culture, in which indigenous, Islamic, and Western traditions compete for influence. In bringing the idea of the triple heritage to language, the Mazruis unravel issues of power, culture, and modernity as they are embedded in African linguistic life.
The first section of the book takes a global perspective, exploring such issues as the Eurocentrism of much linguistic scholarship on Africa; part two takes an African perspective on a variety of issues from the linguistically disadvantaged position of women in Africa to the relation of language policy and democratic development; the third section presents a set of regional studies, centering on the Swahili language's exemplification of the triple heritage.The Power of Babel unites empirical information with theories of nationalism and pluralism—among others—to offer the richest contextual account of African languages to date.
The Practice of Rhetoric
Poetics, Performance, PhilosophyEdited by Debra Hawhee and Vessela Valiavitcharska
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Essays that show what a broad conception of rhetoric means and does in relation to practice
Rhetoric is the art of emphasis, in the ancient sense of bringing to light or obscuring in shadow, and it is both a practice and a theory about that practice. In recent decades, scholars of rhetoric have turned to approaches that braid together poetics, performance, and philosophy into a “practical art.” The Practice of Rhetoric: Poetics, Performance, Philosophy presents just such an account of rhetoric that presumes and incorporates theoretical approaches, offering a collection of principles assembled in the heat and trials of public practice. The essays gathered in this volume are inspired by the capacious conception of rhetoric put forth by historian of rhetoric Jeffrey Walker, who is perhaps best known for stressing rhetoric’s educational mission and its investments in both theory and practice.
The book extends that vision through the prisms of poetics, performance, and philosophy of argument. Poetics shows rhetoric’s meaning making in all its verbal possibilities and material manifestations, in contexts ranging from mouse-infested medieval fields to the threat of toxin-ridden streams in the twentieth century. Performance puts what is created into the heat of public life, tapping out the rhythms of Byzantine prose or using collage to visually depict the beliefs and convictions of Martin Luther King Jr. Philosophy of argument enacts the mutually constitutive relationship between rhetoric and dialectic, offering new insights on and contexts for old tools like stasis and disputation, while keeping the focus on usefulness and teachability.
Ranging across centuries and contexts, the essays collected here demonstrate the continued need to attend carefully to the cooperation of descriptive language and normative reality, conceptual vocabulary and material practice, public speech and moral self-shaping. This volume will rekindle long-standing conversations about the public, world-making practice of rhetoric, thereby enlivening anew its civic mission.
The Psalms of Solomon
Language, History, TheologyEberhard Bons
SBL Press, 2015
A fresh analysis of that sheds new light on the Psalms of Solomon
Researchers whose work focuses on the Psalms of Solomon, experts on the Septuagint, and scholars of Jewish Hellenistic literature take a fresh look at debates surrounding the text. Authors engage linguistic, historical, and theological issues including the original language of the psalms, their historical setting, and their theological intentions with the goal of expanding our understanding of first-century BCE Jewish theology.
Features:
- New methods applied to open questions of authorship and historical context
- Focusd scholarly attention on a work of theological and literary importance
- Revised essays originally presented at the First International Meeting on the Psalms of Solomon
The Rhetoric of Law
Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1996
The Rhetoric of Rebel Women
Civil War Diaries and Confederate PersuasionKimberly Harrison
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
Informed by more than one hundred diaries, this study provides insight into how women cultivated rhetorical agency, challenging traditional gender expectations while also upholding a cultural status quo. Author Kimberly Harrison analyzes the rhetorical choices these women made and valued in wartime and postwar interactions with Union officers and soldiers, slaves and former slaves, local community members, and even their God. In their intimate accounts of everyday war, these diarists discussed rhetorical strategies that could impact their safety, their livelihoods, and those of their families. As they faced Union soldiers in attempts to protect their homes and property, diarists saw their actions as not only having local, immediate impact on their well-being but also as reflecting upon their cause and the character of the southern people as a whole. They instructed themselves through their personal writing, allowing insight into how southern women prepared themselves to speak and act in new and contested contexts.
The Rhetoric of Rebel Women highlights the contributions of privileged white southern women in the development of the Confederate national identity, presenting them not as passive observers but as active participants in the war effort.
The Rhetorical Invention of Diversity
Supreme Court Opinions, Public Arguments, and Affirmative ActionM. Kelly Carr
Michigan State University Press, 2018
The Sound of Leadership
Presidential Communication in the Modern AgeRoderick P. Hart
University of Chicago Press, 1987
The Sound of Leadership answers these questions and many more. Based on analysis of nearly 10,000 presidential speeches delivered between 1945 and 1985, this book is the first comprehensive examination of the ways in which presidents Truman through Reagan have used the powers of communication to advance their political goals. This communication revolution has produced, Roderick P. Hart argues, a new form of governance, one in which public speech has come to be taken as political action. Using a rhetorical appraoch, Hart details the features of this new American presidency by carefully examining when and where presidents spoke in public during the last four decades and what they said. Even though presidents have been speaking more and more, Hart reveals, they have been saying less and less. Rather than leading the nation, the modern president usually offers only the hollow "sound" of leadership. Written with great flair and acuteness, The Sound of Leadership will become a standard guide to the voices of modern presidential politics.
The Spell of Language
Poststructuralism and SpeculationThomas G. Pavel
University of Chicago Press, 2001
In this spirited book, Pavel shows that structuralism's flawed use of linguistic theory has rendered hollow the philosophical core of a whole generation of work in the human sciences.
The Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language and Computation
Selected PapersEdited by Jonathan Ginzburg, Zurab Khasidashvili, Carl Vogel, Jean-Jacques Lévy,
CSLI, 1998
The Tenth Muse
Victorian Philology and the Genesis of the Poetic Language of Gerard Manley HopkinsBy Cary H. Plotkin
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989
With authority and sensitivity Plotkin traces the close relationship between Hopkins’s poetry and the theories of language suggested in his Journals and expounded by Victorian philologists such as Max Müller and George Marsh.
Plotkin seeks to determine what changed Hopkins’s perception of language between the writing of such early poems as "The Habit of Perfection" and "Nondum" (1866) and his creation of The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875–76). Did the language of the ode, and of Hopkins’s mature poetry generally, arise as spontaneously as it appears to have done, or does it have a traceable genesis in the ways in which language as a whole was conceived and studied in mid-century England? In answer, Plotkin fixes the development of Hopkins’s singular poetic language in the philological context of his time.
If one is to understand Hopkins’s writings and poetic language in the context in which they developed rather than in the terms of a present-day theory of history or textuality, then that movement in all of its complexity must be considered. Hopkins "translates" into the language of poetry patterns and categories common to Victorian language study.
The Three and a Half Minute Transaction
Boilerplate and the Limits of Contract DesignMitu Gulati and Robert E. Scott
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Boilerplate language in contracts tends to stick around long after its origins and purpose have been forgotten. Usually there are no serious repercussions, but sometimes it can cause unexpected problems. Such was the case with the obscure pari passu clause in cross-border sovereign debt contracts, until a novel judicial interpretation rattled international finance by forcing a defaulting sovereign—for one of the first times in the market’s centuries-long history—to repay its foreign creditors. Though neither party wanted this outcome, the vast majority of contracts subsequently issued demonstrate virtually no attempt to clarify the imprecise language of the clause.
The Translations of Nebrija
Language, Culture, and Circulation in the Early Modern WorldByron Ellsworth Hamann
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
Tracing the global influence of Nebrija's dictionary, Byron Ellsworth Hamann, in this interdisciplinary, deeply researched book, connects pagan Rome, Muslim Spain, Aztec Tenochtitlan, Elizabethan England, the Spanish Philippines, and beyond, revealing new connections in world history. The Translations of Nebrija re-creates the travels of people, books, and ideas throughout the early modern world and reveals the adaptability of Nebrija's text, tracing the ways heirs and pirate printers altered the dictionary in the decades after its first publication. It reveals how entries in various editions were expanded to accommodate new concepts, such as for indigenous languages in the Americas—a process with profound implications for understanding pre-Hispanic art, architecture, and writing. It shows how words written in the margins of surviving dictionaries from the Americas shed light on the writing and researching of dictionaries across the early modern world.
Exploring words and the dictionaries that made sense of them, this book charts new global connections and challenges many assumptions about the early modern world.
The Use of Language
Prashant Parikh
CSLI, 2001
The Violence of the Letter
Toward a Theory of WritingMelanie McMahon
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Co-Winner of the 2024 ACLA Renè Wellek Prize for Monograph
The emergence of the alphabet in ancient Greece, usually heralded as the first step in the inexorable march toward reason and progress, in fact signaled the introduction of a chance technology that hijacked the future, with devastating consequences for humanity. By investigating an array of cultural artifacts, ranging from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Oracle at Delphi to Luther's challenge to the Church, this book demonstrates how the apparently benign emergence of writing made possible far-ranging systems of organized domination and unprecedented levels of violence. The Violence of the Letter considers how a twenty-six-letter code changed the face of the world, and not always for the better.
The Voice in the Drum
Music, Language, and Emotion in Islamicate South AsiaRichard K. Wolf
University of Illinois Press, 2014
The Women and Language Debate
A SourcebookEdited by Camille Roman, Suzanne Juhasz, and Cristanne Miller
Rutgers University Press, 1993
The Word and the Spiritual Realities (the I and the Thou)
Ferdinand Ebner
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
The World of Early Egyptian Christianity
Language, Literature, and Social Context (CUA Studies in Early Christianity)James E. Goehring
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
Theories of Translation
An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to DerridaEdited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Most of the twenty-one pieces appear in translation, some here in English for the first time and many difficult to find elsewhere. Selections include writings by Scheiermacher, Nietzsche, Ortega, Benjamin, Pound, Jakobson, Paz, Riffaterre, Derrida, and others.
A fine companion to The Craft of Translation, this volume will be a valuable resource for all those who translate, those who teach translation theory and practice, and those interested in questions of language philosophy and literary theory.
These Words
Poetic Midrash on the Language of TorahAlden Solovy
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023
In These Words, liturgist Alden Solovy distills the Torah into its very essence: the individual words it contains. Echoing the midrash that the Torah has seventy faces, Solovy selects seventy of its Hebrew words that are pregnant with meaning. For each word, he delves into the etymology, translation, and usage, providing deeper insights into familiar texts. Then Solovy presents a beautiful poem—what he calls “poetic midrash”—inspired by and interpreting each word. From b’reishit (“in beginning”) to shamayim (“heavens”) to zachor (“remember”), These Words will change the way you look at the language of the Torah.
Things, Thoughts, Words, and Actions
The Problem of Language in Late Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorical TheoryH. Lewis Ulman
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994
H. Lewis Ulman here examines the roles of language theory in eighteenth-century British rhetorics, linking those roles to philosophical issues informing twentieth-century rhetorical theory. In doing so, Ulman develops a general model of the "problem of language" for rhetorical theory, a model that transcends the impasse between realism and skepticism that marks both eighteenth- and twentieth-century rhetorical theory.
The nature of language was never more central to rhetorical theory than in the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet, until now, the articulation of theories of language and the arts of rhetoric in eighteenth-century Britain has received little attention. Ulman examines the role of grammar and theories of language in the formation of eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, investigating the significance of language theory for such key concerns of eighteenth-century rhetoric as verbal criticism, style, and elocution. His study highlights what he understands as the central motive of late eighteenth-century British rhetoricians—to construct for their particular cultural context philosophically rigorous accounts of verbal communication based on carefully articulated theories of thought and language.
Toward this end, Ulman examines three eighteenth-century British rhetorical treatises: George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, and Thomas Sheridan’s Course of Lectures on Elocution. He then identifies the continuities and discontinuities between the problem of language for eighteenth- and twentieth-century rhetorical theory and proposes a pluralistic stance toward the problem of language in rhetoric as an alternative to the theoretical standoff that currently characterizes the debate between realist and antirealist rhetorics.
Thinking, Language, and Experience
Hector-Neri Castañeda
University of Minnesota Press, 1989
This Is Not Civil Rights
Discovering Rights Talk in 1939 AmericaGeorge I. Lovell
University of Chicago Press, 2012
This New Yet Unapproachable America
Lectures after Emerson after WittgensteinStanley Cavell
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Three Demonstrations and a Funeral and Other Essays
Maria de Ponte, Kepa Korta, and John Perry
CSLI, 2024
The result of the collaboration between three distinguished philosophers, this book comprises the best sample of one of the most original theories in contemporary philosophy of language and communication—Critical Pragmatics. They present the development of the theory from its initial sprout, with “Three Demonstrations and a Funeral” (2006) as its first visible result, to a critical clarification of its tenets in “Critical Pragmatics: Nine Misconceptions” (2023). After Korta and Perry’s Critical Pragmatics (2011), this is the most important book on Critical Pragmatics, as it was conceived, developed and applied by its creators. Having de Ponte, Korta and Perry’s most important papers together on one place will be of great value to both philosophers and linguists.
Thucydides Book I
A Students' Grammatical CommentaryH. D. Cameron
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Because Book I is not primarily historical narrative, it inevitably proves difficult for inexperienced readers. Despite the convolutions and density of Thucydides' prose style, no authoritative commentary has been published since the early days of the last century. H. D. Cameron is a renowned expert in Greek and comparative grammar and has written this handbook for all levels of classical students and scholars. His commentary authoritatively accounts for the last one hundred years of evolving grammatical and linguistic theory as they apply to the seminal work of Thucydides.
H. D. Cameron is Professor of Greek and Latin and Director of the Great Books Program at the University of Michigan.
Total Speech
An Integrational Linguistic Approach to LanguageMichael Toolan
Duke University Press, 1996
In every foundational area of linguistics—from literal meaning and metaphor to the nature of repetition to the status of linguistic rules—Toolan advances fascinating and provocative criticisms of received linguistic assumptions. Drawing inspiration from the writings of language theorist Roy Harris, Toolan brings the integrationalist perspective to bear on legal cases, the reception of Salman Rushdie, poetry, and the language of children. Toolan demonstrates that the embeddedness of language and the situation-sensitive mutability of meaning reveal language as a tool for re-fashioning and renewal.
Total Speech breaks free of standard linguistics’ fascinated attraction with “cognitive blueprints” and quasi-algorithmic processing to characterize language anew. Toolan’s reflections on the essence of language, including his important discussion of intention, have strong implications for students and scholars of discourse analysis, literature, the law, anthropology, philosophy of language, communication theory, and cognitive science, as well as linguistics.
Toward a Transnational University
WAC/WID Across Borders of Language, Nation, and DisciplineJonathan Hall
University Press of Colorado, 2023
Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy
Language, Literature, and Ethical TheoryGerald L. Bruns
Northwestern University Press, 1999
Translating Childhoods
Immigrant Youth, Language, and CultureOrellana, Marjorie Faulstich
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Skilled in two vernaculars, children shoulder basic and more complicated verbal exchanges for non-English speaking adults. Readers hear, through children's own words, what it means be "in the middle" or the "keys to communication" that adults otherwise would lack. Drawing from ethnographic data and research in three immigrant communities, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana's study expands the definition of child labor by assessing children's roles as translators as part of a cost equation in an era of global restructuring and considers how sociocultural learning and development is shaped as a result of children's contributions as translators.
Translation Effects
Language, Time, and Community in Medieval EnglandMary Kate Hurley
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
Treatments
Language, Politics, and the Culture of IllnessLisa Diedrich
University of Minnesota Press, 2007
Creative expression inspired by disease has been criticized as a celebration of victimhood, unmediated personal experience, or just simply bad art. Despite debate, however, memoirs written about illness—particularly AIDS or cancer—have proliferated since the late twentieth century and occupy a highly influential place on the cultural landscape today.
In Treatments, Lisa Diedrich considers illness narratives, demonstrating that these texts not only recount and interpret symptoms but also describe illness as an event that reflects wider cultural contexts, including race, gender, class, and sexuality. Diedrich begins this theoretically rigorous analysis by offering examples of midcentury memoirs of tuberculosis. She then looks at Susan Sontag’s Illness As Metaphor, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “White Glasses,” showing how these breast cancer survivors draw on feminist health practices of the 1970s and also anticipate the figure that would appear in the wake of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s—the “politicized patient.” She further reveals how narratives written by doctors Abraham Verghese and Rafael Campo about treating people with AIDS can disrupt the doctor–patient hierarchy, and she explores practices of witnessing that emerge in writing by Paul Monette and John Bayley.
Through these records of intensely personal yet universal experience, Diedrich demonstrates how language both captures and fails to capture these “scenes of loss” and how illness narratives affect the literary, medical, and cultural contexts from which they arise. Finally, by examining the ways in which the sick speak and are spoken for, she argues for an ethics of failure—the revaluation of loss as creating new possibilities for how we live and die.
Lisa Diedrich is assistant professor of women’s studies at Stony Brook University.
Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought
Mood, Modality, and Propositional AttitudesAnastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Can language directly access what is true, or is the truth judgment affected by the subjective, perhaps even solipsistic, constructs of reality built by the speakers of that language? The construction of such subjective representations is known as veridicality, and in this book Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari deftly address the interaction between truth and veridicality in the grammatical phenomena of mood choice: the indicative and subjunctive choice in the complements of modal expressions and propositional attitude verbs.
Combining several strands of analysis—formal linguistic semantics, syntactic theory, modal logic, and philosophy of language—Giannakidou and Mari’s theory not only enriches the analysis of linguistic modality, but also offers a unified perspective of modals and propositional attitudes. Their synthesis covers mood, modality, and attitude verbs in Greek and Romance languages, while also offering broader applications for languages lacking systematic mood distinction, such as English. Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought promises to shape longstanding conversations in formal semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, among other areas of linguistics.