New Books in Language

Over the last thirty years, Jonathon Green has established himself as a major figure in lexicography, specialising in English slang. During this time he has accumulated a database of over half a million citations for more than 100,000 words and phrases, and these are the basis for the vast, authoritative and widely acclaimed Green’s Dictionary of Slang (Hodder Education, 2010), winner of the Dartmouth Medal as the American Library Association’s ‘outstanding reference work of the year’. Slang’s definition is itself perhaps elusive, but to Green it is ‘counter-language’, by analogy with ‘counter-culture’, and possesses the same vivid qualities: it is irreverent, subversive and fun. It is, however, also important for what it tells us about how people live, interact and think, and is worthy of serious study. In this interview we do not attempt to summarise the A-Z of slang (nor even the C-F), but we do talk about slang’s relation to culture, the history of its lexicography, and the day-to-day work of its researchers. We talk about the benefits of the internet for this work, as well as the limitations of user-generated alternatives and the challenges they pose to the professional scholar. And inevitably, we bring together the themes of the Oxford English Dictionary, canonical literature and comic-book porn. 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 this book, Keith Gilyard describes his career as 30 years of roaming the areas of rhetoric, composition, sociolinguistics, creative writing, applied linguistics, education theory, literary study, history, and African American studies. That gives some impression of the range of topics covered in this compilation of selected highlights of his work, including several brand new contributions. He goes on to affirm that he is “not great in any of these fields”, but on this evidence he is being too modest. True to the Language Game: African American Discourse, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2011) is an engaging, entertaining and challenging book. Moving from the author’s ‘disciplinary birth’ as a teacher of composition, through an overview of some of the language controversies in the US classroom, to his recent work in literary history, it serves as an introduction not only to Gilyard’s research and ideas but to those of many other educational, cultural and literary theorists. In this interview, we cover a little of this ground. We talk about the importance to society of critical thinking, the role of AAVE in bilingual education, the construction of race as a tool for social progress, and the status of the Black American literary canon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

I favour any book that applies the logic of Wittgenstein to quotes from the Goon Show. (Often in linguistics the reverse is true.) So I was delighted to have the opportunity to talk to Debra Aarons (University of New South Wales) about her book Jokes and the Linguistic Mind (Routledge, 2011). Rather than being a work of ‘humour studies’, Jokes and the Linguistic Mind is essentially a broad and accessible introduction to modern linguistics. Debra Aarons has drawn upon her experience of teaching linguistics and her love of wordplay to present a multitude of examples that are both entertaining and illustrative of a vast range of linguistic topics, ranging from pragmatics to syntax to translation studies. In this interview, we discuss the potential insights that humour offers us into how we process language, and how we can exploit this in research. We also consider the language abilities of humorists, and how we create and enjoy jokes without analysis. Finally, we touch upon the tension between wordplay and ‘proper’ linguistics, and I learn what linguists don’t like about crosswords. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

“Every once in a while Nature gives us insight into the human condition by providing us with a unique case whose special properties illumine the species as a whole. Christopher is such an example.” Christopher has a startling talent for language learning, thrown into sharper relief by his concurrent disabilities. Autistic, apraxic, visuo-spatially impaired, and with a severely low non-verbal IQ, he has been feeding his linguistic fascination by collecting languages and has now mastered more than twenty. Neil Smith and his colleagues have been working with Christopher for over twenty years, and The Signs of a Savant: Language Against the Odds (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is their second to detail their work and Christopher’s progress, following on from The Mind of a Savant, published in 1995. The book documents Christopher’s experiences of learning British Sign Language. Like other languages, BSL has a full grammatical system on which its vocabulary hangs, but unlike spoken languages, it relies on physical coordination, and the integration of handshapes, arm movements, body postures and facial expressions, all of which pose problems for Christopher. The results of Christopher’s BSL lessons are analyzed in detail, and the book culminates in a new insights into the nature of the mind and where language fits within the complex system of human cognition. I talk with Neil Smith about savantism, about sign language and about the mind. He also tells me about his first (accidental) steps in linguistics, how they took him to Africa and back to London, and how he is the only author not only to have published a case study on his own son’s acquisition of languages, but also his grandson’s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

The human capacity for language is always cited as the or one of the cognitive capacities we have that separates us from non-human animals. And linguistics, at its most basic level, is the study of language as such – in the primary and usual case, how we manage the pairing of sounds with meanings to make such a thing as speech even possible. The standard view in linguistics today, introduced by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s, is that language is a biologically based cognitive capacity that develops in specific ways in all humans given the appropriate (usually acoustic) inputs. The end result is someone who speaks a natural language – such as English –and has reliable intuitions about what can and cannot correctly be said in that natural language. Peter Ludlow, John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University, examines a variety of controversial themes related to this model in his new book, The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics (Oxford University Press, 2011). What is the nature of this universal capacity for language, and how is it related to the natural languages that we come to speak? What sort of evidence can intuitions about what we can and can’t say provide about the underlying rules for generating meaningful sounds, especially when we have no conscious access to them? Does it make sense to think that this grammar provides normative guidance for our linguistic behavior when we don’t know what it is? Ludlow suggests provocative answers to these questions and more in this ground-breaking book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In his new bookActing White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), former White House aide Ron Christie recounts the history of the pejorative term “acting white.” He traces its lineage from the present day through the Black Power movement back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, unraveling a fascinating history in the process. In our interview, we talked about Ron’s experiences as an African-American Republican, his ambitious vow to eradicate the term “acting white,” and his hopes for the future of America’s African-American community. Read all about it, and more, in Christie’s thought-provoking new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Many entries in our lexicon have an interesting history, but it’s very seldom the case that the currency of a phrase has global repercussions. In his book The ‘War on Terror’ Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2011), Adam Hodges makes a compelling case that the expression “War on Terror” became part of a political narrative that was sufficiently powerful to gain public support for at least two major wars. Hodges traces the characterisation of America’s “War on Terror” from George Bush’s first speeches after 9/11 all the way to the end his Presidency. He explores how the narrative grew to encompass Iraq as well as Afghanistan, and how systematically it was presented to the public. He considers how the pre-eminence of this narrative marginalised alternative world-views and shaped political debate, as well as influencing the public’s perception of reality. At the same time, his book is a theoretically sophisticated work of applied discourse analysis and a compelling exploration of the role of language in domestic politics and international relations. In this interview, Hodges discusses the trajectory of the narrative, its reception among the public and the political classes, and the potential role of discourse analysts in contributing to a better public understanding of political actions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In an enormously prolific writing and editing career, David Crystal has excelled in supplying volumes hitherto missing from the field: here a balanced and accessible introduction to general linguistics, there a lucid specialised textbook in an emerging field. With this memoir, Just a Phrase I’m Going Through: My Life in Language (Routledge, 2009), he fills another gap, and offers a vivid picture of the working life of a professional linguist. The book follows Crystal’s career across an enormous range of linguistic disciplines, from English usage through clinical linguistics and on into semantic Web indexing. It also describes the many other channels along which Crystal’s enthusiasm for language has run – reconstructing the speech sounds of Shakespeare for the stage, presenting the case for endangered languages, and doing battle with the forces of ‘linguistic purism’ on the radio. I talk with Crystal about his motivation for writing a memoir, the challenges of applied linguistics, and the unpredictable future of language and its study. Along the way, I learn how to sell parts of speech to a shoe merchant, how not to sell knives to internet users, and why we won’t be seeing a Broadway musical on the topic of language death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Isn’t it odd how the golden age of correct language always seems to be around the time that its speaker was in high school, and that language has been going to the dogs ever since? Such is the anguish of declinists the world over, pushing the commercial success of language-bashing stocking fillers. But what’s the real reason that we get hung up on greengrocers’ apostrophes and the superiority of certain language forms over others? Robert Lane Greene‘s premise is that for those who hold up the standardised variety as the one true voice, the authority of the prestige language is not about words and rules, but about the perceived superiority of the people who use it. Hand-wringing over glottal stops and ‘ain’t’ contractions obscures attempts to define ‘us’ and distance ‘them’, and is a tool to support class, ethnic, or national prejudices. Lane’s new book You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws and the Politics of Identity (Delacorte Press, 2011) gives an overview of these traits and then focuses on situations in which linguistic policy has had huge political consequences or where civil unrest is manifested in language laws. We learn about the imposition of Afrikaans and the riots that marked the beginning of the end of apartheid, how Ataturk imposed a whole new way of using Turkish on his people, and why Catalan nationalism is back on the boil. I talk with Lane about small things like prepositions as well as weightier issues such as the oppression of minority groups and why George W. Bush’s southern accent may have done him a few favours. We touch on people’s deepest insecurities about the language they use and how bemoaning the loss of the glory days is a popular sport in language as in many other domains. We talk about Arabic, Catalan, French and Hindi. Lane busts a few language myths for us – not least that there is no such thing as a truly primitive language – and expands on his book which gives a comprehensive tour through history and politics across time and space. All this is done from the standpoint of languages and the societies that speak them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language