The Articulate Mammal - An Introduction to Psycholinguistics
Requiring no prior knowledge of the subject, chapter by chapter, The Articulate Mammal tackles the basic questions central to the study of psycholinguistics. Jean Aitchison investigates these issues with regard to animal communication, child language and the language of adults, and includes in the text full references and helpful suggestions for further reading
Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language SERIES:
1) An Introduction to International Varieties of English
2) Introduction to English Morphology: Words and Their Structure
3) Introduction to English Phonology
4) Introduction to Middle English
5) Introduction to Old English
Ruth Garrett Millikan "Language: A Biological Model "
Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by prescriptive normative rules. Many believe that it is of the essence of thought itself to follow rules, rules of inference determining the intentional contents of our concepts, and that these rules originate as internalized rules of language. However, exactly what it is for there to be such things as normative rules of language remains distressingly unclear. From what source do these norms flow? What sanctions enforce them? What happens, exactly, if you don't follow the rules? How do children learn the rules? Ruth Millikan presents a radicallly different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, the norms and conventions of language. The central norms applying to language, like those norms of function and behavior that account for the survival and proliferation of biological traits, are non-evaluative norms. Specific linguistic forms survive and are reproduced together with co-operative hearer responses because, in a critical mass of cases, these patterns of production and response benefit both speakers and hearers. Conformity is needed only often enough to ensure that the co-operative use constituting the norm - the convention - continues to be copied and hence continues to characterize some interactions of some speaker-hearer pairs. What needs to be reproduced for discursive language forms to survive, it turns out, is not specific conceptual roles but only satisfaction conditions coupled to essential elements of hearer responses. An uncompromising rejection of conceptual analysis as a tool in philosophy results. At the same time the distinction between the propositional content and the force of a linguistic utterance comes into very sharp focus, force emerging as essential to the creation of content rather than as something added to content. The distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary force, the distinction between linguistic meaning and speaker meaning, and the semantics/pragmatics distinction are each illuminated in new and crisper ways. On the model proposed, neither the intentionality of thought nor the intentionality of language is derived from the other. Processes involved in understanding language are not Gricean but more like direct perception of the world as mediated, for example, through the natural signs contained in the structured light that allows vision. There are also startling implications for pragmatics, and for how children learn language.
"This handbook gives an overview of some of the recent developments in semantic theory. The articles are written by well-known semanticists, who are invariably at the top of their field in the domain at hand. This leads to high quality papers that are almost without exception a great pleasure to read......I am sure the book will be widely used for reference and initial introduction to new topics by both researchers and students."Henriette De Swart, University of Utrecht
Interest in morphology has undergone rapid growth over the past two decades and the area is now seen as crucially important, both in relation to other aspects of grammar and in relation to other disciplines. The Handbook of Morphology brings together articles by authors at the forefront of this research effort. The chapters deal with traditional issues such as inflection, derivation, compounding, productivity, and various aspects of the interface question, the relationship between morphology and phonology, syntax, and semantics. Other chapters offer briefer discussions of specific questions that have more recently become the focus of attention. A further set of chapters explores the role of morphology in a wider perspective: language change, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition.The Handbook concludes with a set of morphological sketches of a typologically and genetically diverse set of languages, each illustrating one or more particularly interesting morphological traits.
"I'm enormously impressed by the scope and depth of The Handbook of Morphology. The coverage is broadly inclusive, without sacrificing depth in the discussion of individual issues. The range of topics covered shows us just how far the study of words, their forms and their structures has penetrated into the core of linguistics since the 1960s, when many thought there was no distinct content to morphology, and everything interesting was either syntax or phonology." Stephen R. Anderson, Yale University
