How to Do Things With Words

Preface. Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction Knowledge of Language Variation Language and Society Sociolinguistics and the Sociology of Language Methodological Concerns Overview Further Reading Part I: Languages and Communities: 2. Languages, Dialects, and Varieties Language or Dialect? Standardization Regional Dialects Social Dialects Styles, Registers, and Beliefs Further Reading 3. Pidgins and Creoles Lingua Francas Definitions Distribution and Characteristics Origins From Pidgin to Creole and Beyond Further Reading 4. Codes Diglossia Bilingualism and Multilingualism Code-Switching Accommodation Further Reading 5. Speech Communities Definitions Intersecting Communities Networks and Repertoires Further Reading Part II: Inherent Variety: 6. Language Variation Regional Variation The Linguistic Variable Social Variation Data Collection and Analysis Further Reading 7. Some Findings and Issues An Early Study New York City Norwich and Reading A Variety of Studies Belfast Controversies Further Reading 8. Change The Traditional View Some Changes in Progress The Process of Change Further Reading Part III: Words at Work: 9. Words and Culture Whorf Kinship Taxonomies Color Prototypes Taboo and Euphemism Further Reading 10. Ethnographies Varieties of Talk The Ethnography of Speaking Ethnomethodology Further Reading 11. Solidarity and Politeness Tu and Vous Address Terms Politeness Further Reading 12. Talk and Action Speech Acts Cooperation Conversation Further Reading Part IV: Understanding and Intervening: 13. Gender Differences Possible Explanations Further Reading 14. Disadvantage Codes Again African American English Consequences for Education Further Reading 15. Planning Issues A Variety of Situations Further Examples Winners and Losers Further Reading 16. Conclusion References Index

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An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

In this provocative book, Barwise and Perry tackle the slippery subject of \"meaning, \" a subject that has long vexed linguists, language philosophers, and logicians.

/pdf/situations-and-attitudes-57f065zg2d.pdf

Situations and Attitudes.

Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

Sociolinguistics: A critical survey of theory and application

Preface. Acknowledgements. Part 1 1. Linguistics from Antiquity till the Seventeenth-Century. 2. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Centuries. 3. The Twentieth-Century: Europe. 4. The Twentieth-Century: America. Part 2 5. Predicate Calculus: from Aristotle to Generalized Quantifiers. 6. The Study of Meaning. 7. Meaning and Grammar. Bibliography. Index.

Pieter A. M. Seuren

Papers

Sociolinguistics: A critical survey of theory and application

Western Linguistics: An Historical Introduction

Semantic transparency as a factor in Creole genesis

The comparative revisited

The structure and selection of positive and negative gradable adjectives