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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Philosophy of language
This exploration of seminal French theoretical writings approaches them as coherent philosophical fictions and brings to light their contradictory political, social and pedagogical implications and their complex historicity.;Because Lacan, Barthes, Foucault and Derrida have been so innovative and challenging in the different disciplines they worked with, their writings have been widely and selectively pillaged. But, as they well knew, ideas, methods, structures and styles of writing are never "neutral" or "innocent"; they always have pedagogical, social and political consequences. Pillaging does not neutralize those consequences; it merely allows them to operate unchosen, unquestioned and unchecked.;By replacing them in very various French contexts, this book indicates important differences between the situation of university intellectuals in France and those in England or America. Eve Tavor Bannet not only sheds new light on influential theoretical texts; she also raises questions about academic writing and about the intellectual's role in the university and in the modern world.;Eve Tavor Bannet is the author of "Scepticism, Society and the Eighteenth Century Novel".
The articles collected in this book are concerned with the
treatment of anaphora within generative grammar, specifically,
within Chomsky's 'Ex tended Standard Theory' (EST). Since the
inception of this theory, and virtually since the inception of
generative grammar, anaphora has been a central topic of
investigation. In current research, it has, perhaps, become even
more central, as a major focus of study in such areas as syntax,
semantics, discourse analysis, and language acquisition. Beginning
in the early 1970's, and continuing to the present, Chomsky has
developed a comprehensive syntactic theory of anaphora. The
articles here are all related to stages in the development of that
theory, and can best be understood in relation to that development.
For that reason, Chapter 1 presents a historical survey of
Chomsky's EST proposals on anaphora, along with brief indications
of how the present articles fit into that history. Some of the
articles here (e.g. Chapters 4, 8, and 9) proposed extensions of
Chomsky's basic ideas to a wider range of phenomena."
Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin's first full,
historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English
know it as "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," but in fact the
subject is something else-the play of mourning. Howard Eiland's
completely new English translation, the first since 1977, is closer
to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin's
philosophical idiom. Focusing on the extravagant
seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor
of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive
trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical
perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a
melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the
transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays-though no less
haunted and bedeviled. History as trauerspiel is the condition as
well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the
abyssal. Benjamin's investigation of the trauerspiel includes
German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Hamlet and
Calderon's Life Is a Dream. The prologue is one of his most
important and difficult pieces of writing. It lays out his method
of indirection and his idea of the "constellation" as a key means
of grasping the world, making dynamic unities out of the myriad
bits of daily life. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and
historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary
material, this rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh
understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century's
greatest literary critics.
An exploration of the relation between language and our senses and
emotions, taking readers into domains as diverse as wine-tasting,
marriage guidance counselling, medical training and face
recognition. The authors argue that language is a double-edged
weapon, equally capable of clarifying and confusing. At best it
provides no more than a fragile bridge between us, sustained by
illusions we all share. Through language we can reconstruct
experiences in a way far-removed from what we actually lived, feign
understanding, hide what we actually feel, or talk with confidence
about what we ill-understand.
Analytic philosophy is alive and in good health, as this collection
of twenty, previously unpublished essays most ably demonstrates.
The reader will find here assembled some of the finest writings of
modern analytic philosophers at the top of their form. Matthews
discusses Plato's attempt to deal with the problem of false belief
about identities. Parson evaluates Russell's early theory of
denoting phrases. Chisholm exhibits the utility of thirteen
epistemic categories. Plantinga criticizes Chisholm's account of
justification. Conee argues that solving the Gettier Problem is
important, and Ginet proposes a solution to it. Lehrer criticizes
an argument based on the simplicity of our belief in material
objects and other minds. R. Feldman defends an account of having
evidence. F. Feldman defends a propositional account of pleasure.
Van Fraassen criticizes Garber's solution to the problem of old
evidence. CastaAeda investigates the nature of negation. McKay
argues that de se analyses of belief do not account for belief de
re. Richard argues that no Fregean semantics for belief attribution
will succeed. Ryckman suggests that the Millian theory of names has
little to do with the theory of belief is no threat to God's
omniscience. Dunn investigates constraints imposed on non-classical
modal logics by extensionality. Fitch argues that singular
propositions perform important functions in modal logic. Jubien
evaluates arguments for and against possible worlds. Ratzsch argues
that there must be a deeper source of nomicality than ordinary
subjunctives, and Stalnaker argues that there is room for
determinancy of identity and indeterminacy in reference.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students,
researchers and practitioners in all of the social and
language-related sciences carefully selected book-length
publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings
and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in
its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary
field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical,
supplement and complement each other. The series invites the
attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests,
sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians
etc. to the development of the sociology of language.
Whether all human languages are fundamentally the same or different
has been a subject of debate for ages. This problem has deep
philosophical implications: If languages are all the same, it
implies a fundamental commonality--and thus mutual
intelligibility--of human thought.We are now on the verge of
solving this problem. Using a twenty-year-old theory proposed by
the world's greatest living linguist, Noam Chomsky, researchers
have found that the similarities among languages are more profound
than the differences. Languages whose grammars seem completely
incompatible may in fact be structurally almost identical, except
for a difference in one simple rule. The discovery of these rules
and how they may vary promises to yield a linguistic equivalent of
the Periodic Table of the Elements: a single framework by which we
can understand the fundamental structure of all human language.
This is a landmark breakthrough both within linguistics, which will
herewith finally become a full-fledged science, and in our
understanding of the human mind.
First published in 1977, this book presents a comprehensive and
lucid guide through the labyrinths of semiology and structuralism -
perhaps the most significant systems of study to have been
developed in the twentieth century. The authors describe the early
presuppositions of structuralism and semiology which claim to be a
materialist theory of language based on Saussure's notion of the
sign. They show how these presuppositions have been challenged by
work following Althusser's development of the Marxist theory of
ideology, and by Lacan's re-reading of Freud. The book explains how
the encounter of two disciplines - psychoanalysis and Marxism - on
the ground of their common problem -language - has produced a new
understanding of society and its subjects. It produces a critical
re-examination of the traditional Marxist theory of ideology,
together with the concepts of sign and identity of the subject.
Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As
children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least
one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to
take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning,
particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of
this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs
on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone
who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in
general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.
Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As
children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least
one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to
take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning,
particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of
this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs
on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone
who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in
general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.
Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As
children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least
one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to
take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning,
particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of
this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs
on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone
who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in
general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.
Language Isolates explores this fascinating group of languages that
surprisingly comprise a third of the world's languages. Individual
chapters written by experts on these languages examine the world's
major language isolates by geographic regions, with up-to-date
descriptions of many, including previously unrecorded language
isolates. Each language isolate represents a unique lineage and a
unique window on what is possible in human language, making this an
essential volume for anyone interested in understanding the
diversity of languages and the very nature of human language.
Language Isolates is key reading for professionals and students in
linguistics and anthropology.
Since the first chapter of this book presents an intro duction to
the present state of game-theoretical semantics (GTS), there is no
point in giving a briefer survey here. Instead, it may be helpful
to indicate what this volume attempts to do. The first chapter
gives a short intro duction to GTS and a survey of what is has
accomplished. Chapter 2 puts the enterprise of GTS into new philo
sophical perspective by relating its basic ideas to Kant's phi
losophy of mathematics, space, and time. Chapters 3-6 are samples
of GTS's accomplishments in understanding different kinds of
semantical phenomena, mostly in natural languages. Beyond
presenting results, some of these chapters also have other aims.
Chapter 3 relates GTS to an interesting line of logical and
foundational studies - the so-called functional interpretations -
while chapter 4 leads to certain important methodological theses.
Chapter 7 marks an application of GTS in a more philo sophical
direction by criticizing the Frege-Russell thesis that words like
"is" are multiply ambiguous. This leads in turn to a criticism of
recent logical languages (logical notation), which since Frege have
been based on the ambi guity thesis, and also to certain
methodological sug gestions. In chapter 8, GTS is shown to have
important implications for our understanding of Aristotle's
doctrine of categories, while chapter 9 continues my earlier
criticism of Chomsky's generative approach to linguistic
theorizing."
We are grateful to the authors who wrote papers specially for this
volume and kindly gave their permission for printing them together.
None of these papers appeared anywhere before. Our special thanks
are due to the first six authors who kindly responded to our
request and agreed to join this new venture which we are calling
'comparative perspective' in ana lytical philosophy. In the
introductory essay certain salient points from each paper have been
noted only to show how 'com parative perspective' may add to, and
be integrated with, mod ern philosophical discussion in the
analytic tradition. Need less to say, any mistake, possible
mis-attribution or misrepresentation of the views of the original
authors of the papers (appearing in the said introductory essay) is
entirely the responsibility of the author of that essay. The author
apologizes if there has been such unintentional misrepresenta tion
and insists that the readers should depend upon the orig inal
papers themselves for their own understanding. For typo graphical
problems it has not always been possible to use the symbols
originally used by the authors, but care has been taken to use the
proper substitute for each of them. Bimal K. Matilal ANALYTICAL
PHILOSOPHY IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE: AN INTRODUCTION 1. The aim
of this volume is to extend the horizon of philosophi cal analysis
as it is practiced today."
Jeanne Pitre Soileau, winner of the 2018 Chicago Folklore Prize and
the 2018 Opie Prize for Yo' Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and
Thibodeaux: Louisiana Children's Folklore and Play, vividly
presents children's voices in What the Children Said: Child Lore of
South Louisiana. Including over six hundred handclaps, chants,
jokes, jump-rope rhymes, cheers, taunts, and teases, this book
takes the reader through a fifty-year history of child speech as it
has influenced children's lives. What the Children Said affirms
that children's play in south Louisiana is acquired along a network
of summer camps, schoolyards, church gatherings, and sleepovers
with friends. When children travel, they obtain new games and
rhymes, and bring them home. The volume also reveals, in the words
of the children themselves, how young people deal with racism and
sexism. The children argue and outshout one another, policing their
own conversations, stating their own prejudices, and vying with one
another for dominion. The first transcript in the book tracks a
conversation among three related boys and shows that racism is part
of the family interchange. Among second grade boys and girls at a
Catholic school another transcript presents numerous examples in
which boys use insults to dominate a conversation with girls, and
girls use giggles and sly comebacks to counter this aggression.
Though collected in the areas of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and
Lafayette, Louisiana, this volume shows how south Louisiana child
lore is connected to other English-speaking places: England,
Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the rest
of the United States.
This essay contains material which will hopefully be of interest
not only to philosophers, but also to those social scientists whose
research concerns the analysis of communication, verbal or
non-verbal. Although most of the topics taken up here are central
to issues in the philosophy of language, they are, in my opinion,
indistinguishable from topics in descriptive social psychology. The
essay aims to provide a conceptual framework within which various
key aspects of communication can be described, and it presents a
formal language, using techniques from modern modal logic, in which
such descriptions can themselves be formulated. It is my hope that
this framework, or parts of it, might also turn out to be of value
in future empirical work. There are, therefore, essentially two
sides to this essay: the development of a framework of concepts,
and the construction of a formal language rich enough to express
the elements of which that framework is composed. The first of
these two takes its point of departure in the statement quoted from
Lewis (1972) on the page preceding this introduction. The
distinction drawn there by Lewis is accepted as a working
hypothesis, and in one sense this essay may be seen as an attempt
to explore some of the consequences of that hypothesis.
In this book, I attempt to lay the axiomatic foundations of
metaphysics by developing and applying a (formal) theory of
abstract objects. The cornerstones include a principle which
presents precise conditions under which there are abstract objects
and a principle which says when apparently distinct such objects
are in fact identical. The principles are constructed out of a
basic set of primitive notions, which are identified at the end of
the Introduction, just before the theorizing begins. The main
reason for producing a theory which defines a logical space of
abstract objects is that it may have a great deal of explanatory
power. It is hoped that the data explained by means of the theory
will be of interest to pure and applied metaphysicians, logicians
and linguists, and pure and applied epistemologists. The ideas upon
which the theory is based are not essentially new. They can be
traced back to Alexius Meinong and his student, Ernst Mally, the
two most influential members of a school of philosophers and
psychologists working in Graz in the early part of the twentieth
century. They investigated psychological, abstract and non-existent
objects - a realm of objects which weren't being taken seriously by
Anglo-American philoso phers in the Russell tradition. I first took
the views of Meinong and Mally seriously in a course on metaphysics
taught by Terence Parsons at the University of
Massachusetts/Amherst in the Fall of 1978. Parsons had developed an
axiomatic version of Meinong's naive theory of objects."
Based on spontaneous conversations of shantytown youth hanging out
on the streets of their neighborhoods and interviews from the
comfortable living rooms of the middle class, Jennifer Roth-Gordon
shows how racial ideas permeate the daily lives of Rio de Janeiro's
residents across race and class lines. Race and the Brazilian Body
weaves together the experiences of these two groups to explore what
the author calls Brazil's "comfortable racial contradiction," where
embedded structural racism that privileges whiteness exists
alongside a deeply held pride in the country's history of racial
mixture and lack of overt racial conflict. This linguistic and
ethnographic account describes how cariocas (people who live in Rio
de Janeiro) "read" the body for racial signs. The amount of
whiteness or blackness a body displays is determined not only
through observations of phenotypical features-including skin color,
hair texture, and facial features-but also through careful
attention paid to cultural and linguistic practices, including the
use of nonstandard speech commonly described as giria (slang).
Vivid scenes from daily interactions illustrate how implicit social
and racial imperatives encourage individuals to invest in and
display whiteness (by demonstrating a "good appearance"), avoid
blackness (a preference challenged by rappers and hip-hop fans),
and "be cordial" (by not noticing racial differences). Roth-Gordon
suggests that it is through this unspoken racial etiquette that Rio
residents determine who belongs on the world famous beaches of
Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon; who deserves to shop in
privatized, carefully guarded, air conditioned shopping malls; and
who merits the rights of citizenship.
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