Linguistics

Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through the processes of cultural evolution. Christiansen and Chater propose a revolutionary new framework for understanding the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, offering an integrated theory of how language creation is intertwined across these multiple timescales. Christiansen and Chater argue that mainstream generative approaches to language do not provide compelling accounts of language evolution, acquisition, and processing. Their own account draws on important developments from across the language sciences, including statistical natural language processing, learnability theory, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults. Christiansen and Chater also consider some of the major implications of their theoretical approach for our understanding of how language works, offering alternative accounts of specific aspects of language, including the structure of the vocabulary, the importance of experience in language processing, and the nature of recursive linguistic structure.

About the Author

Morten H. Christiansen is Professor of Psychology and Codirector of the Cognitive Science Program at Cornell University. Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick.

Exam Essentials is our major British English exam preparation series combining exam preparation, practice, and tips for the revised Cambridge English exams. This effective combination of testing and teaching has proved a popular formula with teachers and students. The first two practice tests in each book are ‘walk-through’ tests. Students are carefully guided through the tests and shown how they work and what they have to do to succeed in each part of the exam. Additional step-by-step support for the Writing paper is offered in all the tests. All of the tests are written by experts in the field, which means that students preparing for the exams experience material that is appropriate for and at a level at least as high as the actual exams. Candidates internationally find the Speaking test very challenging. To help them deal with this, each Practice Test book comes with a DVD-ROM which includes a bespoke video showing a complete Speaking test interview as well as an examiner talking about this part of the exam and giving students expert guidance on how to approach it. The DVD-ROM also features worksheets to use with the interview and all the Listening test files.

About the Author

Tom Bradbury has been an English language teacher for many years in various parts of Europe and Latin America as well as the UK. He is also an examiner and an experienced writer of various EFL and ESOL exams, practice test books and teaching materials.

Eunice Yeates was an English teacher in Japan for a number of years before turning her attention to the textbook side of English language learning. She has worked in publishing since 1999 and has written extensively for both teachers and students, with a particular focus on assessment content and exam preparation materials.

An essential introduction to the pronunciation of modern German, this unique classroom text is designed to help mid- to upper-level undergraduate students of German produce more accurate and comprehensible German speech. Written in English in a clear and engaging style and employing a minimum of technical jargon, it is the first German phonetics and phonology text to focus on theory and practice, covering topics ranging from the analysis of one’s own speech to historical developments and regional variation. This work includes a wealth of exercises supported by an ancillary website audio program designed to help students perceive and produce sounds and prosodic features more accurately. Addressing topics such as word stress, sentence stress, and intonation as well as the pronunciation of individual sounds, this one-of-a-kind primer provides its users with a solid basis in German phonetics and phonology in order to improve their pronunciation of German.

About the Author

Mary Grantham O’Brien is associate professor of German at the University of Calgary in Canada, where she lives. Sarah M. B. Fagan is professor of German at the University of Iowa, where she lives.

Homer recounts how, trapped inside a monster’s cave, with nothing but his wits to call upon, Ulysses once saved himself by twisting his name. He called himself Outis: “No One,” or “Non-One,” “No Man,” or “Non-Man.” The ploy was a success. He blinded his barbaric host and eluded him, becoming anonymous, for a while, even as he bore a name. Philosophers never forgot the lesson that the ancient hero taught. From Aristotle and his commentators in Greek, Arabic, Latin, and more modern languages, from the masters of the medieval schools to Kant and his many successors, thinkers have exploited the possibilities of adding “non -” to the names of man . Aristotle is the first to write of “indefinite” or “infinite” names, his example being “non-man.” Kant turns to such terms in his theory of the infinite judgment, illustrated by the sentence, “The soul is non-mortal.” Such statements play major roles in the philosophies of Maimon, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Hermann Cohen. They are profoundly reinterpreted in the twentieth century by thinkers as diverse as Carnap and Heidegger. Reconstructing the adventures of a particle in philosophy,Daniel Heller-Roazen seeks to show how a grammatical possibility can be an incitement for thought. Yet he also draws a lesson from persistent examples. The philosophers’ infinite names all point to one subject: us. “Non-man” or “soul,” “Spirit” or “the unconditioned,” we are beings who name and name ourselves, bearing witness to the fact that we are, in every sense, unnamable.

About the Author

Daniel Heller-Roazen is the Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations, and The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World, all published by Zone Books.

Sociolinguistics deals with the social life of language, language in its sociocultural context. It is a branch of linguistics that looks less at the shape or sound of words–morphology or phonology–and more at how our words and sentences are influenced by the society around us–for instance, how the accent or the dialect we use has been shaped by where we come from or which social class we belong to.

In this Very Short Introduction, John Edwards offers the most up-to-date brief overview available of sociolinguistics, with side trips into the sociology of language and psycholinguistics. He considers such topics as the different social evaluations of languages and dialects, the loaded significance of names, and the importance of politically-driven language planning and policy. The relationship between language and gender, sexist language, the language of poverty, and the intertwining of language and religion are also dealt with here. Edwards stresses that, while linguists see all dialects as equally valid, in the wider world powerful attitudes have always placed language varieties in social hierarchies. The author also looks at language more broadly, examining the ways in which languages rise or fall, the attempts to revive flagging or endangered varieties, the reasons why some languages came to dominate others, and the special dynamics that affect contact between “big” and “small” languages.

In both its role as our most powerful tool of communication and as the most immediate symbolic marker of human affiliation, language is pre-eminently a social phenomenon. This compact volume offers an invaluable introduction to this vital aspect of language.

About the Series:

Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects–from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative–yet always balanced and complete–discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.