Author : Peter W. Culicover
Publisher :
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 49,84 MB
Release : 2017-08-29
Category : Foreign Language Study
ISBN : 9780814254431
Basics of Language for Language Learners, 2nd edition, by Peter W. Culicover and Elizabeth V. Hume, systematically explores all the aspects of language central to second language learning: the sounds of language, the different grammatical structures, the tools and strategies for learning, the social functions of communication, and the psychology of language learning and use.
Author : Frederick Bodmer
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 724 pages
File Size : 43,92 MB
Release : 1985
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780393300345
Here is an informative introduction to language: its origins in the past, its growth through history, and its present use for communication between peoples. It is at the same time a history of language, a guide to foreign tongues, and a method for learning them. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages -- Teutonic, Romance, Greek -- helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a language as it is actually used in everyday life.
Author : John McWhorter
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 18,91 MB
Release : 2013-02-12
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1101644451
New York Times bestselling author and renowned linguist, John McWhorter, explores the complicated and fascinating world of languages. From Standard English to Black English; obscure tongues only spoken by a few thousand people in the world to the big ones like Mandarin - What Language Is celebrates the history and curiosities of languages around the world and smashes our assumptions about "correct" grammar. An eye-opening tour for all language lovers, What Language Is offers a fascinating new perspective on the way humans communicate. From vanishing languages spoken by a few hundred people to major tongues like Chinese, with copious revelations about the hodgepodge nature of English, John McWhorter shows readers how to see and hear languages as a linguist does. Packed with Big Ideas about language alongside wonderful trivia, What Language Is explains how languages across the globe (the Queen's English and Surinam creoles alike) originate, evolve, multiply, and divide. Raising provocative questions about what qualifies as a language (so-called slang does have structured grammar), McWhorter also takes readers on a marvelous journey through time and place-from Persian to the languages of Sri Lanka- to deliver a feast of facts about the wonders of human linguistic expression.
Author : Morten H. Christiansen
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 15,57 MB
Release : 2016-03-18
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 026203431X
A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences. Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through the processes of cultural evolution. Christiansen and Chater propose a revolutionary new framework for understanding the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, offering an integrated theory of how language creation is intertwined across these multiple timescales. Christiansen and Chater argue that mainstream generative approaches to language do not provide compelling accounts of language evolution, acquisition, and processing. Their own account draws on important developments from across the language sciences, including statistical natural language processing, learnability theory, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults. Christiansen and Chater also consider some of the major implications of their theoretical approach for our understanding of how language works, offering alternative accounts of specific aspects of language, including the structure of the vocabulary, the importance of experience in language processing, and the nature of recursive linguistic structure.
Author : Louisa Cook Moats
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 13,81 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Composition (Language arts)
ISBN : 9781491690130
Author : Boris Shekhtman
Publisher : M S I Press
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 18,1 MB
Release : 2003
Category : Foreign Language Study
ISBN : 9780967990750
This book provides a unique set of tools designed to enhance an individual's success in communicati0n in a foreign language environment. The devices presented allow the speaker of a foreign language to demonstrate the level of his/her language more impressively. These techniques were developed and tested by the author with adult professionals in such varied fields as journalism, diplomacy, government, and international business.
Author : Ivan Fonagy
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 842 pages
File Size : 12,90 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9027232830
There is little hope of reconstructing by means of comparative or typological studies a lingua adamica essentially different from present-day languages. The distant preverbal past is however still present in live speech. Phonetic, syntactic and semantic rule transgressions, far from being products of a deficient output, are governed by a universal iconic apparatus, a sort of 'anti-grammar' or 'proto-grammar' which enables the speaker and the poet to express preconscious and subconscious mental contents that could not be conveyed by means of the grammar of any language. Secondary messages, generated by the proto-grammar are integrated into the primary grammatical message. The two messages whose structural and semantic divergence represents a chronological distance of hundreds of thousands of years, constitute a dialectic unity which characterize natural languages. The evolutive approach offers a different, perhaps better understanding of questions related to dynamic synchrony, vocal and verbal style, poetic language, language change.Chapters on: Diversity of the lexicon; Dual encoding: vocal style; Syntactic gesturing; Syntactic regressions; Prosodic expression of emotions; Poetry and vocal art; Situation and meaning; A hidden presence: verbal magic; Playing with language: joke and metaphor; Metaphor: a research instrument; Dynamics of poetic language; Semantic structure of possessive constructions; Semantic structure of punctuation marks; Why gestures?; Between acts and words; Language within language: dynamics, change and evolution.
Author : Christopher Taylor
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 30,63 MB
Release : 1998-11-12
Category : Foreign Language Study
ISBN : 9780521597234
A practical and theoretical guide for Italian/English translators.
Author : Kat— Lomb
Publisher : Lulu.com
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 40,91 MB
Release : 2008-01-01
Category : Language and languages
ISBN : 1606437062
KAT LOMB (1909-2003) was one of the great polyglots of the 20th century. A translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, Lomb worked in 16 languages for state and business concerns in her native Hungary. She achieved further fame by writing books on languages, interpreting, and polyglots. Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, first published in 1970, is a collection of anecdotes and reflections on language learning. Because Dr. Lomb learned her languages as an adult, after getting a PhD in chemistry, the methods she used will be of particular interest to adult learners who want to master a foreign language.
Author : Peter Hagoort
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 753 pages
File Size : 34,88 MB
Release : 2019-10-29
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 0262042630
A unique overview of the human language faculty at all levels of organization. Language is not only one of the most complex cognitive functions that we command, it is also the aspect of the mind that makes us uniquely human. Research suggests that the human brain exhibits a language readiness not found in the brains of other species. This volume brings together contributions from a range of fields to examine humans' language capacity from multiple perspectives, analyzing it at genetic, neurobiological, psychological, and linguistic levels. In recent decades, advances in computational modeling, neuroimaging, and genetic sequencing have made possible new approaches to the study of language, and the contributors draw on these developments. The book examines cognitive architectures, investigating the functional organization of the major language skills; learning and development trajectories, summarizing the current understanding of the steps and neurocognitive mechanisms in language processing; evolutionary and other preconditions for communication by means of natural language; computational tools for modeling language; cognitive neuroscientific methods that allow observations of the human brain in action, including fMRI, EEG/MEG, and others; the neural infrastructure of language capacity; the genome's role in building and maintaining the language-ready brain; and insights from studying such language-relevant behaviors in nonhuman animals as birdsong and primate vocalization. Section editors Christian F. Beckmann, Carel ten Cate, Simon E. Fisher, Peter Hagoort, Evan Kidd, Stephen C. Levinson, James M. McQueen, Antje S. Meyer, David Poeppel, Caroline F. Rowland, Constance Scharff, Ivan Toni, Willem Zuidema
