New Books in Language

When big claims are made about neurolinguistics, there often seems to be a subtext that the latest findings will render traditional linguistics obsolete. These claims are often met with appropriate scepticism by experienced linguistics practitioners, either because experience tells them not to believe the hype, or (in a few cases) because they were already obsolete and were managing just fine anyway. Alistair Knott‘s claim in Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax (MIT Press, 2012) is extremely atypical: it is that at least one strand of traditional linguistics, namely Minimalist syntax, is in fact more relevant than even its defenders believed. He argues that the necessary constituent steps of a reach-to-grasp action are, collectively, isomorphic to the syntactic operations that are required to describe the action with a sentence. Although this particular case is the focus of his discussion here, he also believes that the parallelism is more widespread, and that in fact Minimalism may have articulated a profound and general truth about the way human cognition works. To defend the parallel, this book surveys a wealth of research, covering both the neuropsychology of the relevant sensorimotor processes and the motivation for the linguistic analysis. In our interview, we discuss some of the particular challenges of positing this interdisciplinary synthesis, and look (perhaps optimistically) at the potential for the resolution of long-standing debates about the nature of the human syntactic capability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

David Bleich‘s book The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics and the University (Indiana University Press, 2013) is described as a wide-ranging critique of academic practice, which is almost an understatement. From the point of view of someone working in linguistics as (at least in principle) a scientific discipline, his thesis is interesting and provocative. He argues forcefully for the relevance of language, construed as a material entity, across a wide range of disciplines (and to life in general), and challenges the focus on treating language as a cognitive phenomenon and studying it in abstract terms. In this interview, I resist the temptation to take up a defensive position on behalf of cognitive linguists. Instead, we talk about the role of academic history in shaping current scientific practice, and the possible consequences of that for power dynamics, with particular reference to gender. And we look at some of things the study of language might contribute to – for want of a less ambitious term – the future well-being of humanity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Scientists – and I claim to include myself in this category – sometimes seem to be disparaging about the ability of people in general to understand and act upon quantitative data, such as information about risk in the medical domain. There’s also an extensive literature on humans’ irrationality. And it’s grist to the mill when we notice people engaging in wantonly risky behaviour in the face of sound medical or scientific advice. Rodney H. Jones persuasively challenges this analysis of ‘irrational’ health-related behaviour. His argument is that, if we take seriously the complex web of dependencies and discourses that influence our actions, it’s very often possible to see such actions as perfectly rational and soundly motivated. The goal in doing so is not to deny the correctness or primacy of scientific findings or medical advice, but to attempt to identify and overcome the barriers that actually block people (be they patients or politicians) from acting in accordance with this advice. In this interview, we discuss some cases in point, and consider how intricate the relation between discourses and behaviour can be. We get some impression of the transformative effect of technology, not just on how – for instance – the interaction between doctor and patient is mediated, but also in how new communities can form up around, and attempt to make sense of, results of the latest biomedical techniques. And we discuss how medical professionals (and scientific communicators) might try to ensure that their message reaches its audience and achieves an effect there. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

The recognition of speech acts – classically, things like stating, requesting, promising, and so on – sometimes seems like a curiously neglected topic in the psychology of language. This is odd for several reasons. For one, there’s a rich philosophical tradition devoted to the topic. For another, it’s in many ways a really classic linguistic problem: one of those things that speakers can do effortlessly, but for which it’s extremely hard to explain how. With his new book From Utterances to Speech Acts (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Mikhail Kissine offers a stimulating contribution to the debate. His approach aims to identify certain broad classes of speech act with communicative processes that are genuinely fundamental to human interaction (not merely cultural creations). Moreover, it aims to account for the recognition of speech acts in a way that obviates the need for the classically Gricean process of multi-layered intention attribution: which, as we discuss, has the potential to explain how individuals with deficits in ‘mind-reading’ can nevertheless grasp the intended purpose of ambiguous utterances. In this interview, we also discuss the major philosophical and practical contributions of this approach, and explore the consequences of it for our views of the nature of human-human communication. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

A common philosophical picture of language proposes to begin with the various kinds of communicative acts individuals perform by means of language.  This view has it that communication proceeds largely by way of interpretation, where we hear the sounds others make, and infer from those sounds the communicative intentions of speakers.  On this view, communication is a highly deliberate affair, involving complex mediating processes of inference and interpersonal reasoning. In his new book, Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a Common Language Arises and Persists (Oxford University Press 2013), Jody Azzouni accepts the idea that we must begin theorizing language from the perspective of language use.  But nonetheless he rejects this common picture.  In fact, Azzouni argues that the common view actually misconstrues our experience as communicators.  On Azzouni’s alternative, we involuntarily perceive language items as public objects that have meaning properties independently of speaker intentions.  Put differently, Azzouni argues that meaning is perceived, not inferred, much in the way we perceive the properties of physical objects. And yet he also argues that our perception of there being a common language– such as English– which supplies a common vehicle for communication is a kind of inescapable collective illusion.  What’s more, Azzouni argues that the view that a common language is an illusion makes better sense of our experiences and practices with language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

One of the risks of a telephone interview is that the sound quality can be less than ideal, and sometimes there’s no way around this and we just have to try to press on with it. Under those conditions, although I get used to it, I can’t help wondering whether the result will make sense to an outside listener. I mention this now because Anne Cutler‘s book, Native Listening: Language Experience and the Recognition of Spoken Words (MIT Press, 2012), is an eloquent and compelling justification of my worrying about precisely this issue. In particular, she builds the case that our experience with our native language fundamentally shapes the way in which we approach the task of listening to a stream of speech – unconsciously, we attend to the cues that are useful in our native language, and use the rules that apply in that language, even when this is counterproductive in the language that we’re actually dealing with. This explains how native speakers can typically process an imperfect speech signal, and why this sometimes fails when we’re listening to a non-native language. (But I hope this isn’t going to be one of those times for anyone.) In this interview, we explore some of the manifestations of the tendency to use native-language experience in parsing, and the implications of this for the rest of the language system. We see why attending to phonologically ‘possible words’ is useful in most, but not quite all, languages, and how this helps us solve the problem of embedded words (indeed, so effectively that we don’t even notice that the problem exists). We consider how the acquisition of language-specific preferences might cohere with the idea of a ‘critical period’ for second-language learning. And we get some insights into the process of very early language acquisition – even before birth – which turns out to have access to richer input data than we might imagine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

It’s tempting to think that lexicography can go on, untroubled by the concerns of theoretical linguistics, while the rest of us plunge into round after round of bloody internecine strife. For better or worse, as Patrick Hanks makes clear in Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations (MIT Press, 2013), this is no longer true: lexicographers must respond to theoretical and practical pressures from lexical semantics, and this lexicographer has very interesting things to say about that discipline too. Hanks’s central point is perhaps that the development of huge electronic corpora poses enormous problems, as well as exciting challenges, for the study of word meaning. It’s no longer tenable to list every sense of a word that is in common currency: and even if we could, it would be a pointless exercise, as the vast output of such an exercise would tell us very little about what meaning is intended on a given instance of usage. However, these corpora provide us with the opportunity to say a great deal about the way in which words are typically used: and the theory that Hanks develops in this book represents an attempt to make that notion precise. In this interview, we discuss the impact of corpus-driven work on linguistics in general and lexical semantics in particular, and discuss the analogy between definitions and prototypes. In doing so, we find for Wittgenstein over Leibniz, and tentatively for ‘lumpers’ over ‘splitters’, but rule that both parties are at fault in the battle between Construction Grammar and traditional generative syntax. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Stephen Crain, a professor and author of The Emergence of Meaning, discusses the intriguing concept of logical nativism—how certain logical structures may be innate rather than acquired through experience. He highlights cross-linguistic patterns, particularly in child language acquisition, that suggest a shared cognitive framework underlying diverse languages like English and Mandarin. The conversation also tackles how children interpret logical concepts such as 'or,' emphasizing the role of logical reasoning in language development and critiquing experience-based theories.

Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Yet when it comes to the man behind the ideas, most people know much less. Who was this man – this aristocrat with a Calvinist upbringing who shook the foundations of the linguistic establishment, and whose influence was felt more strongly after his death than it ever was in life? When John Joseph started looking into these questions, he found only scattered information. As a result, he ended up having to write the book that he himself had wanted to read. The result, Saussure (OUP, 2012), is a detailed but nevertheless readable account of the life and works of one of the most respected figures in the history of linguistics. In this interview we discuss some of the questions that arise in connection with Saussure: his major intellectual influences, his remarkable lack of publications during his adult life, the originality (and historical antecedents) of some of his central ideas, and “Calvinist linguistics”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Perry Link, a scholar of Chinese history and literature, dives into the intricate anatomy of the Chinese language. He discusses how rhythm and metaphor shape communication, informed by decades of exploration. Link examines the relationship between language and cultural identity through the lens of modern literature and political language. He highlights consciousness in language via directional metaphors, contrasts eating metaphors, and reveals the political dynamics at play in China, where language often serves as a tool for power.