selected quotes: - In August, the company that owns Reader’s Digest filed for bankruptcy protection. … Reader’s Digest both identified and shaped a peculiarly American approach to reading, one that emphasized convenience, entertainment, and the appearance of breadth. An early issue noted that it was “not a magazine in the usual sense, but rather a co-operative means of rendering a time-saving device.” … In his renowned 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Boorstin used Reader’s Digest as an example of what was wrong with a culture that had learned to prefer image to reality, the copy to the original, the part to the whole. Publications such as the Digest, produced on the principle that any essay can be boiled down to its essence, encourage readers to see articles as little more than “a whiff of literary ectoplasm exuding from print,” he argued, and an author’s style as littered with unnecessary “literary embellishments” that waste a reader’s time. … Over time, this attitude undermines our commitment to the kind of “deep reading” that researcher Maryanne Wolf, in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007), argues is important from an early age, when readers learn to identify with characters and to “expand the boundaries of their lives.” … As Boorstin surveyed the terrain nearly half a century ago, his overarching concern was that an image-saturated culture would so distort people’s sense of judgment that they would cease to distinguish between the real and the unreal. He criticized the creation of what he called “pseudo-events” such as politicians’ staged photo-ops, and he traced the ways in which our pursuit of illusion transforms our experience of travel, clouds our ability to discern the motivations of advertisers, and encourages us to elevate celebrities to the status of heroes. “This is the appealing contradiction at the heart of our passion for pseudo-events: for made news, synthetic heroes, prefabricated tourist attractions, homogenized interchangeable forms of art and literature (where there are no ‘originals,’ but only the shadows we make of other shadows),” Boorstin wrote. “We believe we can fill our experience with new-fangled content.” … Boorstin wrote The Image before the digital age, but his book still has a great deal to teach us about the likely future of the printed word. Some of the effects of the Internet appear to undermine Boorstin’s occasionally gloomy predictions. For example, an increasing number of us, instead of being passive viewers of images, are active participants in a new culture of online writing and opinion mongering. … We have embraced new modes of storytelling, such as the interactive, synthetic world of video games, and found new ways to share our quotidian personal experiences, in hyperkinetic bursts, through microblogging services such as Twitter. … Our screen-intensive culture poses three challenges to traditional reading: distraction, consumerism, and attention-seeking behavior. … The “common reader” Virginia Woolf prized, who is neither scholar nor critic but “reads for his own pleasure, rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others,” is a vanishing species. Instead, an increasing number of us engage with the written word not to submit ourselves to another’s vision or for mere edification, but to have an excuse to share our own opinions. … Of greater concern was the attitude students expressed about the usefulness of writing: Most of them judged the quality of writing by the size of the audience that read it rather than its ability to convey ideas. … What Boorstin feared—that a society beholden to the image would cease to distinguish the real from the unreal—has not come to pass. On the contrary, we acknowledge the unique characteristics of the virtual world and have eagerly embraced them, albeit uncritically. But Boorstin’s other concern—that a culture that craves the image will eventually find itself mired in solipsism and satisfied by secondhand experiences—has been borne out. … The screen offers us the illusion of participation, and this illusion is becoming our preference. As Boorstin observed, “Every day seeing there and hearing there takes the place of being there.”The book, that fusty old technology, seems rigid and passé as we daily consume a diet of information bytes and digital images. The fault, dear reader, lies not in our books but in ourselves.
“This book is a feast not just for hip hop specialists but for all those interested in the interfaces between music, language and society. The chapters illustrate the diversity of contexts where this music is enjoyed, but also the common features found in the hip hop production of various cultures… Thanks to the range of materials studied (Norway, Egypt, Cyprus, South Korea and more) and the detail provided in the individual analyses, the book represents a key contribution to work in this fascinating field, and will be essential reading for future research.”
Abdelali Bentahila and Eirlys Davies, Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tangier, Morocco
“The book examines the origins of language and grammar and also looks at the nature of being human. As a species, we have a long history of trying to find aspects of ourselves that are exclusively human. Some of the features of humanity thought to be solely the realm of the spiritual - for example cognition and emotion - are increasingly being explained in terms of physical effects. Exclusive physical functions are now questioned too - bipedality, dexterity, socialisation, delayed gratification. Could the differences between the human and animal kingdom be a matter of degrees rather than absolutes? Language, and language grammar, is one territory that might provide an answer.
Martin Edwardes builds a story examining the evolutionary sources of our self-recognition, of human culture and social institutions and of the cognitive forms that lie behind our linguistic grammatical forms. He covers the current thinking in the field of language origins and goes on to develop an essential new theory of the origins of grammar.
“Martin Edwardes has written a knowledgeable and thoughtful book on the origins of grammar. I am happy to say that Edwardes’ book complements my own book of the same title, taking a similar view on central issues such as the importance of meaning, of social interaction and a gradualist view of evolution. Valuably, Edwardes approaches the topic from an anthropological viewpoint, as his subtitle makes clear. Together, both books offer innovative and thorough coverage of the field. ” James R. Hurford, Professor (Emeritus), University of Edinburgh, Scotland
“Martin Edwardes has written a wonderfully clear book that sets out the central issues in linguistics that are pertinent to the evolution of grammar and brings them into contact with psychological and anthropological concerns. The style is accessible and will meet a broad audience but the thesis will set academics thinking, arguing and reaching for their pens.” Tom Dickins, Reader in the School of Psychology, University of East London, UK”
…Here’s my informal list of people and/or books:
Laurence Lessig The Future of Ideas
Jonathon Zittrain The Future of the Internet
Arjun Appadurai “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy” This essay is 20 years old but it remains a…
Thank you! And that was really fast (thank you Internet - tumblr in particular - for delivering once more). I will hunt down the items on this list. Cheers!
Title: A Way with Words: Recent Advances in Lexical Theory and Analysis
Subtitle: A Festschrift for Patrick Hanks
Series Title: Menha Linguistics Series
Publication Year: 2010
Publisher: Menha Publishers
http://menhapublishers.com/
Book URL: http://menhapublishers.com/products.html
Editor: Gilles-Maurice de Schryver
Hardback: ISBN: 9789970101016 Pages: 384 Price: Europe EURO 59.95
Abstract:
For the past 50 years, linguists - with their focus on syntax - and
lexicographers - with their focus on defining meaning - have largely ignored
each other or even been mutually hostile. In recent years, however, more
attention in linguistics has switched to the lexicon, while lexicographers have
begun to see the need for better theoretical foundations. The two disciplines -
linguistics and lexicography - are now beginning to recognize the benefits of
interaction. This book, in honour of Patrick Hanks, brings together essays on
major theoretical issues in the lexical with essays on issues in practical
analysis of the lexicon by some of the world’s leading contemporary linguists,
lexicographers, and philosophers with an interest in words and meaning. It
represents both a dialogue and a variety of significant approaches to
fundamental issues in this topic.
The opening paper is a discussion by the late John Sinclair of the
fundamentals of phraseology and core meaning, building on his theoretical
approach to the relationship between collocation and meaning. The first part
also contains important papers by Wilks (on preference semantics),
Pustejovsky & Rumshisky (on the generative lexicon), Mel’cuk (on the
government pattern), and Wiggins (on paradoxes), advancing our theoretical
understanding of the nature of word meaning. The second part is concerned
with the computation of lexical relations, and contains contributions by Ken
Church (on corpus size), Grefenstette (on the number of concepts), David &
Louise Guthrie (on adjectives that predict noun classes), Geyken (on support
verb constructions), Pala & Rychly (on word sketches), Cinková, Holub &
Smejkalová (on the pattern dictionary of English verbs), and Jezek & Frontini
(on the Patternbank). The third part links through to lexical analysis and
dictionary writing, with landmark papers by Rosamund Moon (on idioms),
Atkins (on a new lexicographical database), Kilgarriff & Rychly (on semi-
automatic dictionary drafting), Bogaards (on theory in lexicography), Banko
(on the Polish COBUILD), Green (on argot), and Rundell (on elegance in
defining). The editor, Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, also included an account of
the life and work of Patrick Hanks.
Linguistic Field(s): Lexicography
Linguistic Theories
Title: Conflicts in Interpretation
Series Title: Advances in Optimality Theory
Publication Year: 2010
Publisher: Equinox Publishing Ltd
http://www.equinoxpub.com/
Author: Petra Hendriks
Author: Helen de Hoop
Author: Irene Krämer
Author: Henriëtte de Swart
Hardback: ISBN: 9781845534370 Pages: 192 Price: U.K. £ 60 Comment: $95
Paperback: ISBN: 9781845534387 Pages: 192 Price: U.K. £ 18.99 Comment: $37.95
Abstract:
Conflicts in Interpretation applies novel methods of constraint interaction,
derived from connectionist theories and implemented in linguistics within the
framework of Optimality Theory, to core semantic and pragmatic issues such
as polysemy, negation, (in)definiteness, focus, anaphora, and rhetorical
structure. It explores the hypothesis that a natural language grammar is a set
of potentially conflicting constraints on forms and meanings. Moreover, it
hypothesizes that competent language users not only optimize from an input
form to the optimal output meaning for this form, or vice versa, but also
consider the opposite direction of optimization, thus taking into account the
speaker as a hearer and taking into account the hearer as a speaker. The
book aims to show that such a bidirectional constraint-based grammar sheds
new light on the relation between form and meaning, within a sentence as well
as across sentence boundaries, within a single language as well as across
languages, and within competent adult language users as well as during
language development. An important dimension of the book is the structured
investigation of issues at the interface of semantics with syntax and
pragmatics, such as the effects of distinguishing between speaker’s
perspective and hearer’s perspective in comprehension and production,
stable and instable patterns of form and meaning across languages, and the
development of a coherent pattern of form and meaning in children.
The book will be of interest to any researcher or advanced student in
linguistics, cognitive science, language typology, or psycholinguistics who is
interested in the capacity of our human mind to map meaning onto form, and
form onto meaning.
Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science
Pragmatics
Semantics
A week ago I posted a request for other bloggers to provide some of their favorite books, novellas and/or short stories in order for us to pull our resources and create a reading list made up of Tumblr bloggers. Well, below are the end results. The list is in no particualr order, and I have…
The 2008 Handbook of Pragmatics (Jan-Ola Östman, Jef Verschueren) is part of a larger work that includes articles on theories, fields, and issues within the general scope of pragmatics research,
which are defined as ”the cognitive, social, and cultural study of language and
communication” (p. 2, User’s guide). The Handbook takes a loose-leaf notebook
form and in its complete print form includes a Manual, Handbook, and User’s
Guide. The 2008 installment contains an updated user’s guide designed to replace
the 2007 guide. In addition, the 2008 installment contains 8 new contributions,
two in the ”Traditions Updates” section and six in the ”Handbook A-Z” section.
Traditions Updates refer to traditions and approaches to work in pragmatics,
while the Handbook A-Z contains articles based around key words and terms in the
field. Since the Handbook is designed to be a continuous, cohesive whole, to
which different articles are added each year, each article is paginated
individually, beginning at ‘1’, and the purchaser of the Handbook is advised to
add the new contributions alphabetically for ease of use.
The 2008 installment contains the following new articles:
Traditions: Conceptual semantics and Socio-onomastics
A-Z: Authenticity, Contact, Embodiment, Énonciation: French pragmatic
approach(es), Listener response, and Overlap
