New Books In Language

Screens are ubiquitous. From the screen on a mobile, to that on a tablet, or laptop, or desktop computer, screens appear all around us, full of content both visual and text. But it is not necessarily the ubiquity of screens that has societal implications. The significance is in how screens fundamentally change how we ingest information. In her new book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (Oxford University Press, 2015), Naomi S. Baron, professor of linguistics and Executive Director of the Center for Teaching, Research & Learning at American University, asserts that despite the benefits of convenience and monetary savings, reading onscreen has many drawbacks. Using surveys of millennials in the United States, Japan and Germany, combined with anecdotes, and information from writers, Baron provides evidence of the impact of technology on reading, and thinking, in society. Just listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Propaganda names a familiar collection of phenomena, and examples of propaganda are easy to identify, especially when one examines the output of totalitarian states. In those cases, language and imagery are employed for the purpose of shaping mass opinion, forming group allegiances, constructing worldviews, and securing compliance. It is undeniable that propaganda is employed by liberal democratic states. But it is also undeniable that the use of propaganda is especially problematic in liberal democracies, as it looks incompatible with the democratic ideals of equality and autonomous self-government. It’s surprising, then, that the topic of propaganda has gone relatively unexplored in contemporary political philosophy. In How Propaganda Works (Princeton University Press, 2015), Jason Stanley develops an original theory of propaganda according to which propaganda is the deployment of an ideal against itself. Along the way, Stanley distinguishes various kinds of propaganda and explores the connections between

A colleague once told me that people in linguistics could be divided into two groups: sheep and snipers. I’m not sure whether this is a proper dichotomy – it’s certainly not quite canonical – but whether it is or not, Pieter Seuren is an example of a linguist who is most emphatically not a sheep. His book From Whorf to Montague: Explorations in the Theory of Language (Oxford UP, 2013) develops a number of themes concerning aspects of language that are problematic for existing theories, and yet have been accidentally (he stresses) overlooked in the recent intellectual history of the field. Adopting a broadly universalist standpoint, he is critical of approaches that reject the idea of even looking for generalisations and unity, but he is also critical of many aspects of the programmes that have attempted to find order in language. This is not a book that many people will agree with from cover to cover, but it is one that persuasively challenges much of the accumulated “wisdom” of any given school of linguist

It is generally accepted that lying is morally prohibited. But theorists divide over the nature of lying’s wrongness, and thus there is disagreement over when the prohibition might be outweighed by competing moral norms.There is also widespread agreement over the idea that promises made under conditions of coercion or duress lack the moral force to create obligations. Finally, although free speech is widely seen as a primary value and right, there is an ongoing debate over the kind of good that free speech is. In Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law (Princeton University Press, 2014), Seana Shiffrin ties these issues together, advancing a powerful argument regarding the central role that sincerity and truthfulness play in our individual and collective moral lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is widely accepted that in uttering sentences we sometimes perform distinctive kinds of acts. We declare, assert, challenge, question, corroborate by means of speech; sometimes we also use speech to perform acts such as promising, commanding, judging, pronouncing, and christening. Yet it seems that in order to perform an act of, say, promising, one must have a certain kind of normative status; at the very least, one must be accountable. Similarly, in order to issue a command, one must, in some sense, have the authority to do so. It seems, then, that the power to perform acts by means of speech depends upon the normative status and standing of speakers. In Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking (Oxford University Press, 2014), Terence Cuneo appeals to this fact in devising an original and compelling argument for moral realism. He claims that were it not for the existence of moral facts, we would not be able to perform ordinary speech acts such as promising. As we clearly do perfor

One of the most puzzling things about humans is their ability to manipulate symbols and create artifacts. Our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom–apes–have only the rudiments of these abilities: chimps don’t have language and, if they have culture, it’s extraordinarily primitive in comparison to the human form. What we have between apes and humans is not really a continuum; it’s a break. So how did this break occur? The answer, of course, is evolutionarily. It stands to Darwinian reason that our distant ancestors must have been selected for symbolic use and cultural production, and it was in this natural selective way that they became human. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it presents us with another puzzle: why is human language and culture so astoundingly complex? In order to prosper in the so-called “era of evolutionary adaptation,” neither needed to have been complex at all. A Hominin with a smallish fraction of the symbolic and cultural abilities of Homo sapiens would easily have emerged (and may

I hope I’m not being species-centric when I say that the emergence of human language is a big deal. John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary rate it as one of the “major transitions in evolution”, placing it in exalted company alongside the evolution of multicellularity, sociality, sexual reproduction, and various other preoccupations of ours. But the nature of the transition is hotly disputed: is there a sudden shift involving the emergence of complex syntax, or is the process more gradual and socially driven? In his entertaining and approachable volume Speaking Our Minds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Thom Scott-Phillips argues for a different approach. On his view, there is a categorical difference between human language and its precursors, but the critical ingredient is ostensive-inferential communication – that is, the ability to express and recognize intentions – and this underlies the expressive power of language. His view calls for a reappraisal of the role of pragmatics in linguistics, from being a commun

Language change is like a river. When people tell you how to use language, and how not to use it, they’re attempting to build a dam that will put a stop to linguistic change. But all such efforts are bound to fail, and the river will sweep away anything that’s put in its path. At least, that’s the standard story among linguists. But in her book Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History  (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Anne Curzan makes the case that the dam-builders, or linguistic prescriptivists, may have more of an influence on the language than usually acknowledged. The dam that gets washed away may still have an effect on the river’s flow, even if not the one that the builders intended – and prescriptivism may similarly have consequences for change in language, even if those consequences are sometimes subtle and often unpredictable. In this interview we discuss the place of prescriptivism in telling the story of the English language, as well as the many guises that prescriptivism can take,

The name of the New Books in Language channel might hint at a disciplinary bias towards “language”. So in some sense Ruth Finnegan‘s Communicating: the Multiple Modes of Human Communication (2nd edition; Routledge, 2014) is a departure: central to her approach is the idea that, within a broader view of human communication, language (in the linguistic sense of the word) is over-emphasised. The book sets out many more ingredients to communication, spanning the gamut of sensory modalities (and hinting at what might lie beyond) as well as considering the role of artifacts. Although both the book and this interview ultimately take place in conventional language, Ruth Finnegan succeeds admirably in evoking the richness of multisensory experience, whether in the poetics of ancient Greece or in the storytelling practices of the Limba tribe of Sierra Leone. The book’s illustrations offer some cross-modal enrichment of the experience, and I hope this interview does too. For a more direct impression, the World Oral Lit

As linguists, we’re wont to get protective about languages, whether we see them as data points in a typological analysis or a mass of different ways of seeing the world. Given a free choice, we’d always like to see them survive. Which is fine for us, because we don’t necessarily have to speak them. But for a language to survive and thrive, someone has to be speaking it, and encouraging them to do so is no straightforward matter. In Attitudes to Endangered Languages: Identities and Policies (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Julia Sallabank discusses some of the issues that arise among (actual or potential) endangered-language speech communities. She focuses on the languages of Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, and discusses how speakers relate to those languages and to the revitalisation efforts that are currently underway. She argues persuasively that we cannot treat these communities as homogeneous groups: in fact, the attitudes of the established speakers to the future of their language are potential

The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think – sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – has had an interesting history. It’s particularly associated with the idea that languages dismissed as primitive by 19th century thinkers, such as those of indigenous peoples in America and Australia, are not only as rich and complex as European languages (a now uncontroversial point) but also cause their speakers to conceive of reality in fundamentally different and more sophisticated ways. One problem with this idea, as John McWhorter points out in his new book The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language (Oxford UP, 2014), is that, for there to be ‘winners’, there must also be ‘losers’ – people who are held back by their language. And that’s a much less palatable idea, whether we think that it’s Hopi or English or Chinese speakers that are the ‘losers’. However, McWhorter’s main objection to the Whorfian idea is not that it’s unpalatable, but rather that (as the title

Ian Haney Lopez is the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford UP 2014). He is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the Executive Committee of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice. Lopez investigates the often hidden side of racism. He traces the political history of candidates for office using a set of coded phrases, allusions, and references to call attention to race, without ever uttering the word. In the post Brown v. Board era, Lopez argues, candidates learned a new language of strategic racism, substituting anti-government rhetoric for anti-black, anti-Latino, or anti-immigrant. In doing so, the dog whistle was heard as a much wider criticism of the social welfare state, and thus a direct attack not just on minorities, but on the middle class. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A conceptual space sounds like a rather nebulous thing, and basing a semantics on conceptual spaces sounds similarly nebulous. In The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces (MIT Press, 2014), Peter Gardenfors demonstrates that this need not be the case. Indeed, his research is directed towards establishing a formal, mathematically-grounded account of semantics, an account which – as expounded here – is nevertheless accessible. In this interview we discuss the essence of this proposal, focusing in particular on its implications for linguistic analysis, but also touching upon its relation to cognitive science and other related fields. The proposal makes testable predictions about the organization of individual linguistic systems, as well as their acquisition (and potentially their evolution over time). Notably, the “single domain constraint” posits that individual lexical items refer to convex regions of single domains. We discuss the significance of this idea as a bridge between linguistics

Nouns are the bread and butter of linguistic analysis, and it’s easy not to reflect too hard on what they actually are and how they work. In A Syntax of Substance (MIT Press, 2013), David Adger tackles this question, as well as others that are just as fundamental to the way we think about syntax. The book takes nouns to specify “substances”, and Adger defends the view that nouns, unlike verbs, never take arguments. Moreover, he marshals evidence to show that some of the constituents that have been traditionally taken to be arguments of nouns, such as the PP “of Mary” in “the picture of Mary”, are actually not that closely connected to the noun syntactically at all. But the book’s not just about nouns: it presents a radically innovative way of building and labelling phrase structure within Minimalism, denying the existence of functional heads and allowing unary branching trees. In this interview we talk about the differences between nouns and verbs, and the evidence for this difference from a variety of langu

In linguistics, we all happily and glibly affirm that there is no “better” or “worse” among languages (or dialects, or varieties), although we freely admit that people have irrational prejudices about them. But what do we do about those prejudices? And what do we think the speakers of low-status varieties of language should do to overcome them? Take the case of African American English. An influential approach, code-switching, advises teachers to help their AAE-speaking students to identify the systematic differences between their variety and the prestige variety (“Standard English”), and eventually to be able to switch effectively between both varieties according to the circumstances. However, although code-switching seems to promote communicative effectiveness, Vershawn Young and colleagues argue that that approach is inherently problematic. By effectively labelling AAE as inappropriate for public contexts, code-switching runs the risk of promoting and reinforcing society’s prejudices against the language

Big ideas about language often ignore, or abstract away from, the individual’s capacity to learn more than one language. In a world where the majority of human beings are bilingual, is this kind of idealization desirable? Is it useful, or necessary? Aneta Pavlenko‘s book The Bilingual Mind And What It Tells Us about Language and Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2014), covers a range of issues in the relationship between language and cognition, and its core thesis is that study of the monolingual mind in isolation is simply not enough to shed light on all aspects of the human mind. Drawing on a variety of sources, from traditional psycholinguistic experimental work to literary case studies and her own experience growing up as a bilingual, Professor Pavlenko debunks myths surrounding the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and argues that even the coldly rational edifice of linguistic theory is shaped by the language backgrounds of the individual theorists involved. In this interview we discuss all of this a

Andrea Bachner‘s wonderfully interdisciplinary new book explores the many worlds and media through which the Chinese script has been imagined, represented, and transformed. Spanning literature, film, visual and performance art, design, and architecture, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture (Columbia University Press, 2014) uses the sinograph as a frame to look closely at the relationships between language, script, and media and their entanglements with cultural and national identity. In a structurally meticulous and brilliantly articulate guide through the corpographies, iconographies, sonographies, allographies, and technographies of her study, Bachner introduces fascinating cases that span Malaysian-Chinese literature, film, Danish architecture, Mexican fiction, “Martian Script,” and the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. This reader came away from Bachner’s book wonderfully inspired, thinking of writing in a completely new way and with a mental basket brimming with new

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 articu

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

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