This detailed, chronological study investigates the rise of the European fascination with the Chinese language up to 1615. By meticulously investigating a wide range of primary sources, Dinu Luca identifies a rhetorical continuum uniting the land of the Seres, Cathay, and China in a tropology of silence, vision, and writing.

Gathering important papers by both philosophers and scientists, this collection illuminates the central themes that have arisen during the last two decades of work on the conceptual foundations of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Each volume begins with a comprehensive introduction that places the coverage in a broader perspective and links it with material in the companion volumes. The collection is of interest in many disciplines including computer science, linguistics, biology, information science, psychology, neuroscience, iconography, and philosophy.

Oral Poetics has produced insights that are relevant not only for the study of oral traditions, but also for our general understanding of language and cognition. Cognitive Science has developed theories with great potential for research on poetics and oral performance. This book explores how connections between the two disciplines can lead to a Cognitive Oral Poetics, a new field for the study of oral poetry as a window to the mind.

Sign languages are of great interest to linguists, because while they are the product of the same brain, their physical transmission differs greatly from that of spoken languages. In this 2006 study, Wendy Sandler and Diane Lillo-Martin compare sign languages with spoken languages, in order to seek the universal properties they share.

I Speak, Therefore I Am: Seventeen Thoughts About Language

In I Speak, Therefore I Am, the Italian linguist and neuroscientist Andrea C. Moro composes an album of his favorite quotations from the history of philosophy, beginning with the Book of Genesis and the power of naming and concluding with Noam Chomsky's metaphor that language is a snowflake. Moro's seventeen linguistic snapshots and his commentary on them constitute an album that displays the humanness of language: our need to name, to contain, and to translate the world in order to express and understand ourselves. This book is sure to delight anyone who enjoys the ineffable paradox that is human language.