Posted: Mar 31, 2020 2:37 pm
1. The Bilingual Mind and What it Tells us About language and Thought - Aneta Pavlenko
2. Social Interaction and L2 Classroom Discourse - Olcay Sert
3. The Grammar of Knowledge: A Cross-Linguistic Typology - Alexandra Aikhenvald and R.M.W. Dixon (Eds.)
4. Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically : Interactional and Contextual Theories of Human Sense-Making – Per Linnel
5. Salvation - Peter F Hamilton
6. The Expression of Negation - Laurence R. Horn (Ed.)
7. Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind - Arthur Zajon
8. Bad Words and What They Say About Us - Philip Gooden
9 & 10. Tintin on the Moon - Herge
11. The East, the West and Sex: A History = Richard Bernstein
12. A Pragmatic Approach to English Language Teaching and Production - Lala U. Takeda and Megumi Okugiri (Eds.)
13. Salvation Lost - Peter F. Hamilton
14. The Written Language Bias in Linguistics: Its Nature, Origins and Transformations- Per Linnel
256 pp.
A very intellectually stimulating book, and one I think should be a set text for all Linguistics 101 classes.
The author outlines the way in which linguistics has been subtly and not so subtly influenced by the prioritization of the written form of language in theorizing about what language is and how it works. Linnel points out that written language is an artificial, brittle and non-dynamic product of the creator of the text. In this it is at odds with the way that language is actually produced in real time by interactants who deploy multi-modal resources (gesture, pitch, tone, volume, gaze direction, body orientation, speed, pausing et cetara) and work in concert with their fellow interactants to jointly create meaning in the here and now of the interaction space.
Linnel calls into question the Cartesian dualism that underlies a lot of linguistic theorizing; the notion that language is a code for cognition, separate from, and anterior to that cognition. The dialogic approach proposes that language and thought are intertwined and the meanings that interactants seek to convey are local, not universal, and similarly intertwined with the contributions of their recipients.
The author has little time for the Chomskyite project of concocting stand-alone 'John and Mary' sentences and then subjecting them to algebraic-like analyses and the mysterious 'native-speaker intuition' standards of grammaticality (usually meaning the researcher's own intuition). Spoken interaction was dismissed by the Generativists as being too disordered and degenerate to be worthwhile as a thing to study. They would rather chase their tails in trying to cram linguistics into the elegant theorizing and parsimonious explanations that are found in mathematics and physics.
As revealed by Conversation Analysis (CA), natural talk-in-interaction is far from disorderly and reveals sense-making in situ. Language is best understood as a process, not a product and the privileging of the written form of the language has done us all a great disservice.
2. Social Interaction and L2 Classroom Discourse - Olcay Sert
3. The Grammar of Knowledge: A Cross-Linguistic Typology - Alexandra Aikhenvald and R.M.W. Dixon (Eds.)
4. Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically : Interactional and Contextual Theories of Human Sense-Making – Per Linnel
5. Salvation - Peter F Hamilton
6. The Expression of Negation - Laurence R. Horn (Ed.)
7. Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind - Arthur Zajon
8. Bad Words and What They Say About Us - Philip Gooden
9 & 10. Tintin on the Moon - Herge
11. The East, the West and Sex: A History = Richard Bernstein
12. A Pragmatic Approach to English Language Teaching and Production - Lala U. Takeda and Megumi Okugiri (Eds.)
13. Salvation Lost - Peter F. Hamilton
14. The Written Language Bias in Linguistics: Its Nature, Origins and Transformations- Per Linnel
256 pp.
A very intellectually stimulating book, and one I think should be a set text for all Linguistics 101 classes.
The author outlines the way in which linguistics has been subtly and not so subtly influenced by the prioritization of the written form of language in theorizing about what language is and how it works. Linnel points out that written language is an artificial, brittle and non-dynamic product of the creator of the text. In this it is at odds with the way that language is actually produced in real time by interactants who deploy multi-modal resources (gesture, pitch, tone, volume, gaze direction, body orientation, speed, pausing et cetara) and work in concert with their fellow interactants to jointly create meaning in the here and now of the interaction space.
Linnel calls into question the Cartesian dualism that underlies a lot of linguistic theorizing; the notion that language is a code for cognition, separate from, and anterior to that cognition. The dialogic approach proposes that language and thought are intertwined and the meanings that interactants seek to convey are local, not universal, and similarly intertwined with the contributions of their recipients.
The author has little time for the Chomskyite project of concocting stand-alone 'John and Mary' sentences and then subjecting them to algebraic-like analyses and the mysterious 'native-speaker intuition' standards of grammaticality (usually meaning the researcher's own intuition). Spoken interaction was dismissed by the Generativists as being too disordered and degenerate to be worthwhile as a thing to study. They would rather chase their tails in trying to cram linguistics into the elegant theorizing and parsimonious explanations that are found in mathematics and physics.
As revealed by Conversation Analysis (CA), natural talk-in-interaction is far from disorderly and reveals sense-making in situ. Language is best understood as a process, not a product and the privileging of the written form of the language has done us all a great disservice.