In the last fifteen years the analysis of conversation has become one of the most active and fastest developing fields in the study of language and communication but so far there has been no comprehensive critical account of its overall strengths and weaknesses. The authors of this volume have broken the pattern with their critical survey of the concepts and methods of conversation analysis. They examine various approaches to the study of conversation, demonstrating that they share implicit assumptions carried over from the tradition of modern descriptive linguistics. They consider - in relation to literature from philosophy, psychology, sociology and linguistics - whether current models of conversation illumine the phenomena of talk and suggest some new directions for our thinking about these phenomena.

Analyzing Conversation: Rules and Units in the Structure of Talk (Language and Communication Library)

Reference

Cameron, Deborah

Taylor, Talbot J.

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Pergamon Pr

Current primate research has yielded stunning results that not only threaten our underlying assumptions about the cognitive and communicative abilities of nonhuman primates, but also bring into question what it means to be human. At the forefront of this research, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh recently has achieved a scientific breakthrough of impressive proportions. Her work with Kanzi, a laboratory-reared bonobo, has led to Kanzi's acquisition of linguistic and cognitive skills similar to those of a two and a half year-old human child. Apes, Language, and the Human Mind skillfully combines a fascinating narrative of the Kanzi research with incisive critical analysis of the research's broader linguistic, psychological, and anthropological implications. The first part of the book provides a detailed, personal account of Kanzi's infancy, youth, and upbringing, while the second part addresses the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological issues raised by the Kanzi research. The authors discuss the challenge to the foundations of modern cognitive science presented by the Kanzi research; the methods by which we represent and evaluate the abilities of both primates and humans; and the implications which ape language research has for the study of the evolution of human language. Sure to be controversial, this exciting new volume offers a radical revision of the sciences of language and mind, and will be important reading for all those working in the fields of primatology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy of mind, and cognitive and developmental psychology.

Apes, Language, and the Human Mind

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue

Shanker, Stuart G.

Psychology & Counseling

Oxford University Press

Landmarks in Linguistic Thought Volume Ii: The Western Tradition in the Twentieth Century (History of Linguistic Thought)

Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II introduces the major issues and themes that have determined the development of Western thinking about language, meaning and communication in the twentieth century. Each chapter contains an extract from a 'landmark' text followed by a commentary, which places the ideas in their social and intellectual context. The book is written in an accessible and non-technical manner. The book summarizes the contribution of the key thinkers who have shaped modern linguistics: Austin, Chomsky, Derrida, Firth, Goffman, Harris, Jakobson, Labov, Orwell, Sapir, Whorf and Wittgenstein. This second volume follows on from Landmarks in Linguistic Thought I, which introduces the key thinkers up to the twentieth century. The series is ideal for anyone with an interest in the history of linguistics or of ideas.

Landmarks in Linguistic Thought Volume II: The Western Tradition in the Twentieth Century (History of Linguistic Thought)

Joseph, John E.

Love, Nigel

Routledge

Do others understand what we say or write? Do we understand them? Theorists of language and interpretation claim to be more concerned with questions about "what" we understand and "how" we understand, rather than with the logically prior question "whether" we understand each other. An affirmative answer to the latter question is apparently taken for granted. However, in Mutual Misunderstanding, Talbot J. Taylor shows that the sceptical doubts about communicational understanding do in fact have a profoundly important, if as yet unacknowledged, function in the construction of theories of language and interpretation.Mutual Misundertanding thus presents a strikingly original analysis of the rhetorical patterns underlying Western linguistic thought, as exemplified in the works of John Locke, Jacques Derrida, Gottlob Frege, Jonathan Culler, Noam Chomsky, Ferdinand de Saussure, H. Paul Grice, Michael Dummet, Stanley Fish, Alfred Schutz, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Harold Garfinkel, and others. This analysis reveals how, by the combined effect of appeals to "commonsense" and anxieties about implications of relativism, scepticism has a determining role in the discursive development of a number of the intellectual disciplines making up the "human sciences" today, including critical theory, literary hermeneutics, philosophy of language and logic, communication theory, discourse and conversation analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, and linguistics. Consequently, this provocative study will be of value to readers from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

Mutual Misunderstanding: Scepticism and the Theorizing of Language and Interpretation (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Duke University Press Books

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