Mikhail Bakhtin, and the writers associated with him, are of great importance to the traditions of literary theory and criticism. In particular, his concept of locating utterances in a "dialogical" situation has contributed immensely to theories of linguistics, language, and literature, and philosophy.

In Bakhtin Thought, Simon Dentith provides a lucid and approachable introduction to the work of Bahktin and his circle, taking the reader helpfully through the many areas of their thought. Dentith indicates the points of contention, difficulty, and importance. The book not only draws together together the often disparately collected writing of Bakhtin, but also that of Voloshinov and Medvedev, language theorists of commensurable importance as well.

In Dialogism, Michael Holquist provides the first comprehensive account of the Bakhtinian legacy, drawing on the entire corpus of Bakhtin's existing works, including previously unexamined Soviet archival material. While work from Bakhtin's different periods is highly varied, Holquist argues that there is a coherent shape to the achievement as a whole. Its key is Bakhtin's commitment to the concept of dialogue, the principle of constant interplay between a variety of dynamic voices and discourses in different levels of texts, nature, society and the self.

In this multi-disciplinary volume, comprising the work of several established scholars from different countries, central concepts associated with the work of the Bakhtin Circle are interrogated in relation to intellectual history, language theory and an understanding of new media. The book will prove an important resource for those interested in the ideas of the Bakhtin Circle, but also for those attempting to develop a coherent theoretical approach to language in use and problems of meaning production in new media.

 

This book looks at the relationship between linguistic universals and language change. Reflecting the resurgence of work in both fields over the last two decades, it addresses two related issues of central importance in linguistics: the balance between synchronic and diachronic factors in accounting for universals of linguistic structure, and the means of distinguishing genuine aspects of a universal human cognitive capacity for language from regularities that may be traced to extraneous origins. The volume brings together specially commissioned work by leading scholars, including prominent representatives of generative and functional linguistics. It examines rival explanations for linguistic universals and assesses the effectiveness of competing models of language change. The authors investigate patterns and processes of grammatical and lexical change across a wide range of languages; they consider the degree to which common characteristics condition processes of change in related languages; and examine how far differences in linguistic outcomes may be explained by cultural or external factors. This book will interest the wide range of scholars in linguistics and related fields concerned with language change, historical linguistics, linguistic typology and universals, and the nature of the human language faculty.