Interviews with Scholars of Language about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language
https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/politics-society/language/
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 16 days 12 hours 18 minutes
David Bleich, “The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics and the University” (Indiana UP, 2013)
David Bleich‘s book The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics and the University (Indiana University Press, 2013) is described as a wide-ranging critique of academic practice, which is almost an understatement.
Rodney H. Jones, “Health and Risk Communication: An Applied Linguistic Perspective” (Routledge, 2013)
Scientists – and I claim to include myself in this category – sometimes seem to be disparaging about the ability of people in general to understand and act upon quantitative data, such as information about risk in the medical domain.
Mikhail Kissine, “From Utterances to Speech Acts” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
The recognition of speech acts – classically, things like stating, requesting, promising, and so on – sometimes seems like a curiously neglected topic in the psychology of language. This is odd for several reasons. For one,
Jody Azzouni, “Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a Common Language Arises and Persists” (Oxford UP, 2013)
A common philosophical picture of language proposes to begin with the various kinds of communicative acts individuals perform by means of language. This view has it that communication proceeds largely by way of interpretation,
Anne Cutler, “Native Listening: Language Experience and the Recognition of Spoken Words” (MIT Press, 2012)
One of the risks of a telephone interview is that the sound quality can be less than ideal, and sometimes there’s no way around this and we just have to try to press on with it. Under those conditions, although I get used to it,
Patrick Hanks, “Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations” (MIT Press, 2013)
It’s tempting to think that lexicography can go on, untroubled by the concerns of theoretical linguistics, while the rest of us plunge into round after round of bloody internecine strife. For better or worse,
Stephen Crain, “The Emergence of Meaning” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
It’s not surprising that human language reflects and respects logical relations – logic, in some sense, ‘works’. For linguists, this represents a potentially interesting avenue of approach to the much-debated question of innateness.
John E. Joseph, “Saussure” (Oxford UP, 2012)
Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign.
Perry Link, “An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics” (Harvard UP, 2013)
Rhythm, metaphor, politics: these three features of language simultaneously enable us to communicate with each other and go largely unnoticed in the course of that communication. In An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor,
Jonathan Bobaljik, “Universals of Comparative Morphology” (MIT Press, 2012)
Morphology is sometimes painted as the ‘here be dragons’ of the linguistic map: a baffling domain of idiosyncrasies and irregularities, in which Heath Robinson contraptions abound and anything goes. In his new book,