1. Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition – Sophia S.A. Marmaridou
2. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan - Randall Hansen
3. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics – René Dirven and Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.)
4. Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain – Phil Harrison
5. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species and Making us Smarter – Joseph Henrich
6. Heroic Failure and the British - Stephanie Barczewski
7. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain - Maryanne Wolf
8. Language Soup: A Taste of How Diverse People Around the World Communicate - Kathryn A. T. Knox
9. A Place for everything: The curious History of Alphabetical order – Judith Flanders
10. Contrastive Analysis - Carl James
208 pp.
This is a rather old text- originally published in 1980 and one of the results was that the reference list included a good deal of really old sources. When I read these academic books, I always comb through the reference list and then try to track down interesting books and papers using Google scholar or other on-line resources, or look on Amazon jp. In this case many of the papers I tried to track down just were not available anymore outside hard copies in bound collections in university libraries around the world. Oh, well...
Anyways, the book was an interesting overview of the ways in which languages can be contrasted. There was a bit of a bias towards the major languages of Europe with plenty of examples from German, French and Spanish. The author often assumed a working knowledge of these languages and did not always provide translations of his examples.
There was a lot that was of interest to me in these pages.
On p. 32 there is an example of a sentence in English (She has finished reading this book). This is paired with its Russian equivalent. (она дочитала эту книгу) The author notes how the English sentence gets the meaning across with six words but the Russian sentence gets the job done with just four words. The situation is reversed however when we count the number of morphemes (the meaning bearing parts of words).
In English there are 8 morphemes - She/has/finish/ed/read/ing/this/book, but the Russian sentence needs 10 morphemes to get the meaning across. on/a/do/cita/l/a/et/u/knig/u. It is clear that English deploys extra words to give extra meaning whereas Russian deploys all kinds of suffixes and the like to do the job. (I remember my early attempts to learn Russian. Every bloody word in a sentence needs some alteration to make it grammatical..a never ending list of inflections. My Russian is still extremely rudimentary..)
There is a further example of the kinds of ways Russian and English diverge on p.65. The author takes the sentence 'I have arrived' in English and compares it with its Russian equivalent. He then gives a list of things that both languages encode in the utterance.
1) Speaker, 2) Female, 3) Arrival, 4) On foot, 5) Anterior, 6) Current relevance 7) Completed.
The English sentence encodes 1,3,5,6 while the Russian one encodes 1,2,3,4,5 and 7. That is, both languages encode first person speaker, arrival, and previousness, but they differ in other respects. The English sentence does not encode gender, but the Russian does, the English sentence does not encode means of arrival (on foot or by transport) but the Russian does, the Russian does not encode current relevance, but the English one does.
There were numerous examples of other ways in which languages compare and contrast and a lot of really good insights into the underlying structures of the languages dealt with. This is something that I have to think about in my day job. Sometimes the simplest of questions from a student can open a can of worms about the multiple different concepts that underlie seemingly equivalent words in English and Japanese.
I'll try to read some more up to date books and papers on this topic.
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