New Books in Language

It’s now well over 100 years since John Stuart Mill noted that, if I say “I saw some of your children today”, you get the impression that I didn’t see all of them. This idea – that what we don’t say can also carry meaning – was fleshed out 50 years ago by Paul Grice. Given the timeframe involved, you might be tempted to ask why we’re still working on this today. (I work in this area myself, and I’m often tempted to ask…) Bart Geurts‘s engaging book Quantity Implicatures (Cambridge University Press, 2011) answers this question in several ways. For one thing, as the author observes, inferences of this type are very widespread in day-to-day interaction. For another, as this book also makes clear, some of these inferences are difficult to explain systematically, and this difficulty has begotten a wide range of contrasting and conflicting theories that make competing claims about the nature of pragmatics (and semantics) in general. In this interview, Geurts discusses the evidence that leads him to favour a Gricean view over a conventionalist account (one in which the richer meanings have the status of linguistic conventions), but also why he thinks the precise direction of recent Gricean approaches is not quite right. Following the trajectory of the book, we go on to look at more complex expressions, and discuss why these sometimes exotic constructions might enable progress to be made in distinguishing correct from incorrect theories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

What’s the connection between Sarah Palin and Plato? The response that leaps to mind is that they’ve both never heard of one another. But another similarity is their scepticism about high-flown rhetoric as a tool used to pull the wool over the eyes of the common man. One possible difference is whether they respond to this with sound logical reasoning or with an ‘anti-rhetorical’ rhetorical attack of their own. Sam Leith’s book Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama (Basic Books, 2012) is a work that encourages the reader to think about rhetoric in this way. For Leith, rhetoric is all around us, as it has been for many centuries, and yet the terminology used to talk about it is close to falling into disuse. Through a series of enlightening and diverting examples, he makes the case for the traditional style of analysis, while showing that it is capable of handling contemporary examples. In this interview, we discuss rhetorical styles in politics, and we see where the interests of the scholar and the journalist come together. We look at the contrasting approaches taken by adherents of the rhetorical high style and those who prefer to rely on ethos appeals, and compare historical and recent examples of this. And we touch upon the lives of some colourful figures in the history of rhetoric, and consider how their usage of language has gone sofar as to reshape their identity in the eyes of posterity.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

On 1 January 1993 Slovakia became an independent nation. According to conventional Slovak nationalist history that event was the culmination of a roughly thousand year struggle. Alexander Maxwell argues quite differently in his book Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language, and Accidental Nationalism (Tauris Academic Studies, 2009). Although focused primarily on the long nineteenth century and concluding with the interwar period, he shows just how much Slovak nationalism owes to unlikely contingencies, especially the dismantling of greater Hungary at the end of World War I. In so doing, he pays special attention to debates that shaped the standardization of Slovak, showing them to be far more complicated and more amorphous than has previously understood. Further, far from aspiring to independence, many of the steps that have since been portrayed as demonstrative of Slovak nationalist will in fact reflected Slovak intellectuals efforts to create a culturally pluralist Hungary. I enjoyed talking with Maxwell about his arguments and their significance recently, and invite you to listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In linguistics, if a book is ever described as a “must read for X”, it generally means that (i) it is trenchantly opposed to whatever X does and (ii) X will completely ignore it. Alexander Clark and Shalom Lappin, Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) is described, on its dust-jacket, as a “must read for generative linguists”. Apparently generative linguists have so far taken the hint. This is a great pity, as this book is not only very pertinent, but also succeeds in eschewing most of the polemical excess that tends to engulf us all in this field. It’s not an easy book. This interview reflects that – we range from fairly general historical and philosophical observations to some rather technical results in learnability. But I think it gives some sense of what the enterprise is about. Alex Clark describes it, at one point, as an exercise in clearing the ground – and it succeeds in sweeping away certain comfortable assumptions that are often made in this area, concerning (for instance) the irrelevance of negative evidence, what languages are provably unlearnable, and the role of the Chomsky hierarchy. The book itself covers much of this territory in quite an accessible and systematic way. Here we proceed a bit more rapidly. If it gets too much, I recommend hearing the last ten minutes or so, for some interesting and provocative speculations on how linguistics has taken its current form, and what could or should be happening in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In the preface to Fifty Key Thinkers on Language and Linguistics (Routledge, 2011), devoted to short but attentively researched biographical sketches of major figures in the language sciences, Margaret Thomas compares the task of compiling it with that of organising a party. Here, the enterprise has been successful – the guests are interesting (as you might expect), but they are also presented to their best advantage, and the host succeeds in establishing connections between them, so that no-one is left out. Also, it proceeds at an agreeably fast pace and ends promptly before anyone can make a scene. We develop this analogy a little further over the course of the interview, but we do also talk about the book in its own right. We discuss the question of whether or not Chomskyan linguistics is, or should be, related to the earlier history of the discipline, and consider the effect of 20th century American linguistics on the historiography of the subject. And we touch upon some of the figures outside the mainstream Western tradition whose influences haven’t always been widely felt, but whose contribution to the study of language is nonetheless remarkable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

It’s a sobering thought that, but for the spread of English, I wouldn’t be able to do these interviews. In particular, I don’t speak Swedish, and I’m not going to try to speak Latin to a world expert on the subject. Fortunately for my purposes, English has reached a level of saturation, and thus Tore Janson is able to explain to us why that is. The History of Languages: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012) gives a brief synopsis of some of the major trends in language change over the course of recorded history. Indo-European is discussed, but the scope of the book is much wider, turning to the Bantu and Australian language families, and also to the written traditions of China and Ancient Egypt. Rather than being concerned with the linguistic regularities of change, Prof. Janson’s focus is much more on the circumstantial historical causes of change, and his work is a useful complement to work in historical linguistics – in addition to being a very enjoyable read in its own right. In this interview, we talk about some of the points he raises: the dissimilarity between the languages of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, the motivations for the emergence of written language and its role as a stabilising influence on society, and the foundations of linguistic identity in the modern nation-state, among others. And we consider the parallel between Latin in England and Arabic in Persia, as examples of how seemingly inevitable linguistic change can unexpectedly falter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

A thing I enjoy about this job is being encouraged to read books that unexpectedly turn out to be profoundly relevant to my own interests. Jeanne Fahnestock‘s new book, Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion (Oxford University Press, 2011), turns out to be just such a volume. I read it with a constant sense of surprise that this long and distinguished tradition provides insights on many objects of current linguistic enquiry (and indeed a sense of embarrassment that I didn’t already know that). But there is plenty in this book for readers who don’t share my eccentric obsessions. On the one hand, there’s a careful and very readable account of the numerous techniques identified by rhetoricians, from amphiboly to antimetabole. On the other, there’s vivid exemplification of the rhetorical effects that can be achieved, with examples from influential literary, political and scientific texts. The reader is left in no doubt that rhetoric is alive, well, and perhaps more powerful than ever. In this interview, we talk about the status of rhetoric as an object of study, and its recent renaissance. We discuss the usefulness of the exhaustive distinctions identified by rhetoricians of the past, and their relevance to users and analysts of language today. And we consider the ultimate goal of persuasive language use, the attainment of the (rhetorical) sublime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Zellig Harris’s name is famous in linguistics primarily for his early work on transformational grammar and his influence on his most famous student, Noam Chomsky. However, much of his linguistic work has since fallen into comparative obscurity. Moreover, his political research and activism – about which he was especially guarded throughout his lifetime – has received scant attention. In this meticulously-researched biography, Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism (MIT Press, 2011), Robert Barsky casts a great deal more light upon Harris’s story. Exploring his involvement in the Avukah student group in the 1930s and 40s, Barsky shows how Harris not only strove to advance the cause of socialist Zionism, but also shaped the destinies of several influential thinkers. He also traces the course of the revolutionary programme of linguistic enquiry that Harris laid out, inspired by the example of theoretical physics, and how this ongoing work came to be regarded as eccentric by practitioners of the dominant contemporary research trends. In this interview, we discuss the utopian ideals of socialist Zionism, and the influence of Harris upon Chomsky’s political thought. We look at the contradictory facets of Zellig Harris as an individual. And we consider whether rationality is an unreasonable assumption, when it comes to inter-personal dynamics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

We’ve never been in a more crowded marketplace, with more corporations shouting for our attention and custom. Yet this choice is an illusion, as detailed in Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You (Wiley, 2011). Using a battery of techniques, advertisers push us into recognising and ultimately choosing their brand. But forget crude commands to buy buy buy; advertisers are using sophisticated approaches which work with, not against, our cognitive abilities of memory, attention and language. Here is a book where the corporate and academic worlds meet head on. Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson, both serious researchers in the cognitive and language sciences, exemplify and analyse the ways in which advertisers and political candidates target their market. Familiar techniques of branding and personalisation exploit linguistic features such as presupposition, implicature, metaphor, audience design, speech acts, sociolinguistic variation, and syntactic framing. But can an awareness of these techniques put us in a better position to choose how we choose? I talk with Julie Sedivy about the nature and the illusion of choice, and how advertisers may come knocking on linguists’ doors for expert advice on how language, and the language user, works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Theo van Leeuwen comes to the academic discipline of social semiotics – the study of how meanings are conveyed – from his previous career as a film and TV producer. His interest in the makings of visual communication is hardly surprising. More surprising was his realisation that, after 10 years teaching and research in the field, he had little to say about the role of colour; a realisation that spurred the research presented in this book, The Language of Colour: An Introduction (Routledge, 2011). The use and meaning of colour has been debated by philosophers, artists and scientists for millennia, with distinct aspects being considered focal at different times: its symbolism, its role in yielding naturalism of representation, and its emotional force. Now, as van Leeuwen puts it, “colour has made a comeback”. Not only are all these different aspects of colour being exploited in communication, but they are being exploited over a wide range of contexts: fashion, web design, interior decoration, and so on. This predictably attractive book serves not only to trace the history of colour meaning (a particularly interesting summary), but also to explore the technological and intellectual drivers of its change, and to suggest a system for analysing colour meaning. We talk about this history, the tension between perceptual and conceptual approaches to colour, the dangers of ethnocentrism in the study of colour, and the status of some modern artists as researchers into colour meaning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language