New Books In Language

Rhythm, metaphor, politics: these three features of language simultaneously enable us to communicate with each other and go largely unnoticed in the course of that communication. In An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Harvard University Press, 2013), Perry Link mobilizes more than three decades of reading, writing, listening, and speaking in the service of a profoundly transdisciplinary exploration of the particular anatomy of the Chinese language within the larger species of human language more generally. It is a bold and ambitious project, but one that never strays far beyond the specific archive of carefully chosen examples, cases, and utterances from the history of and in Chinese speech and writing. Link integrates a wide range of sophisticated methodological instruments from cognitive science, philosophy of mind, prosody, music theory, politics, linguistics, and other fields into a narrative argument that avoids getting mired in the professional jargon that often plagues attempts at synthe