Over the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has grown to be one of the most broadly appealing and dynamic frameworks for the study of natural language. Essentially, this new school of linguistics focuses on the meaning side of language: linguistic form is analysed as an expression of meaning. And meaning itself is not something that exists in isolation, but it is integrated with the full spectrum of human experience: the fact that we are embodied beings just as much as the fact that we are cultural beings.
A garden of delights for the word obsessed: a funny, amazing, and even profound world tour of the best of all those strange words that don't have a precise English equivalent, the ones that tell us so much about other cultures' priorities and preoccupations and expand our minds.
Did you know that people in Bolivia have a word that means "I was rather too drunk last night and it's all their fault"? That there's no Italian equivalent for the word "blue"? That the Dutch word for skimming stones is "plimpplamppletteren"? This delightful book, which draws on the collective wisdom of more than 254 languages, includes not only those words for which there is no direct counterpart in English ("pana po'o" in Hawaiian means to scratch your head in order to remember something important), but also a frank discussion of exactly how many Eskimo words there are for snow and the longest known palindrome in any language ("saippuakivikauppias"--Finland).
And all right, what in fact is "tingo"? In the Pascuense language of Easter Island, it's to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by asking to borrow them. Well, of course it is. Enhanced by its ingenious and irresistible little Schott's Miscellany/Eats Shoots and Leaves package and piquant black-and-white illustrations throughout, The Meaning of Tingo is a heady feast for word lovers of all persuasions. Viva Tingo!
Meaning construction pervades every aspect of our lives. A crucial aspect of our interaction in the world is being able to identify and categorize things. In his pioneering work on remembering, the British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett (1932) confronted subjects with what would seem to be meaningless figures and asked them to remember and reproduce them.
This book is concerned with the meaning and use of two kinds of declarative sentences:
1) It's raining? 2) It's raining.
The difference between (1) and (2) is intonational: (1) has a final rise--indicated by the question mark--while (2) ends with a fall.
Christine Gunlogson's central claim is that the meaning and use of both kinds of sentences must be understood in terms of the meaning of their defining formal elements, namely declarative sentence type and rising versus falling intonation.
In this book, Charles Ruhl argues that words should be presumed initially to be monosemic: having a single, highly abstract meaning. Semantic research should first seek a unitary meaning, resorting to polysemy, homonymy or idiomaticity only when an extended attempt fails. Using a large database, Ruhl shows that some supposed "lexical" semantic meaning is actually pragmatic or extralinguistic. Included are extensive treatments of the verbs bear, hit, kick, and slap, the phrase take off, and the noun ice.
