New Books in Language

Sherry SimonView on AmazonThe idea that bilingualism can be enriching and beneficial for an individual is a popular one. But what about for a city? Here the associations are less positive, particularly if we automatically think of cities whose linguistic divisions echo the political or religious divisions between two communities unable to communicate. In Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (Routledge, 2012), however, Sherry Simon develops an account of how civic plurilingualism can be a powerful creative driver. Her work explores how the linguistically-divided city is not only a location for 'distancing' – where communities develop their distinct independent identities – but, more interestingly, one for 'furthering' – the cultural encounters that are a pervasive force in modernity. With particular reference to the writers and translators of Calcutta, Trieste, Barcelona and Montreal, Simon demonstrates some of the ways in which translational practice has shaped the literatures of divided cities, and evokes their creative dynamics. Here we talk about the various Renaissances of these cities, as well as some of the themes that recur across time and space: the physical aspect of the city, and the passages through which ideas are transported; the practice and the consequences of 'reading one language, writing in another'; and the role that self-translation can play in the development of an author's voice as well as the contestation of their legacy.

View on AmazonIt's now well over 100 years since John Stuart Mill noted that, if I say "I saw some of your children today", you get the impression that I didn't see all of them.  This idea – that what we don't say can also carry meaning – was fleshed out 50 years ago by Paul Grice.  Given the timeframe involved, you might be tempted to ask why we're still working on this today.  (I work in this area myself, and I'm often tempted to ask…) Bart Geurts's engaging book Quantity Implicatures (Cambridge University Press, 2011) answers this question in several ways.  For one thing, as the author observes, inferences of this type are very widespread in day-to-day interaction.  For another, as this book also makes clear, some of these inferences are difficult to explain systematically, and this difficulty has begotten a wide range of contrasting and conflicting theories that make competing claims about the nature of pragmatics (and semantics) in general. In this interview, Geurts discusses the evidence that leads him to favour a Gricean view over a conventionalist account (one in which the richer meanings have the status of linguistic conventions), but also why he thinks the precise direction of recent Gricean approaches is not quite right.  Following the trajectory of the book, we go on to look at more complex expressions, and discuss why these sometimes exotic constructions might enable progress to be made in distinguishing correct from incorrect theories.

Sam LeithView on AmazonWhat's the connection between Sarah Palin and Plato?  The response that leaps to mind is that they've both never heard of one another.  But another similarity is their scepticism about high-flown rhetoric as a tool used to pull the wool over the eyes of the common man.  One possible difference is whether they respond to this with sound logical reasoning or with an 'anti-rhetorical' rhetorical attack of their own. Sam Leith's book Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama (Basic Books, 2012) is a work that encourages the reader to think about rhetoric in this way.  For Leith, rhetoric is all around us, as it has been for many centuries, and yet the terminology used to talk about it is close to falling into disuse.  Through a series of enlightening and diverting examples, he makes the case for the traditional style of analysis, while showing that it is capable of handling contemporary examples. In this interview, we discuss rhetorical styles in politics, and we see where the interests of the scholar and the journalist come together.  We look at the contrasting approaches taken by adherents of the rhetorical high style and those who prefer to rely on ethos appeals, and compare historical and recent examples of this.  And we touch upon the lives of some colourful figures in the history of rhetoric, and consider how their usage of language has gone sofar as to reshape their identity in the eyes of posterity.  

View on AmazonIn linguistics, if a book is ever described as a "must read for X", it generally means that (i) it is trenchantly opposed to whatever X does and (ii) X will completely ignore it.  Alexander Clark and Shalom Lappin, Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) is described, on its dust-jacket, as a "must read for generative linguists".  Apparently generative linguists have so far taken the hint.  This is a great pity, as this book is not only very pertinent, but also succeeds in eschewing most of the polemical excess that tends to engulf us all in this field. It's not an easy book.  This interview reflects that – we range from fairly general historical and philosophical observations to some rather technical results in learnability.  But I think it gives some sense of what the enterprise is about.  Alex Clark describes it, at one point, as an exercise in clearing the ground – and it succeeds in sweeping away certain comfortable assumptions that are often made in this area, concerning (for instance) the irrelevance of negative evidence, what languages are provably unlearnable, and the role of the Chomsky hierarchy. The book itself covers much of this territory in quite an accessible and systematic way.  Here we proceed a bit more rapidly.  If it gets too much, I recommend hearing the last ten minutes or so, for some interesting and provocative speculations on how linguistics has taken its current form, and what could or should be happening in the future.

Margaret ThomasView on AmazonIn the preface to Fifty Key Thinkers on Language and Linguistics (Routledge, 2011), devoted to short but attentively researched biographical sketches of major figures in the language sciences, Margaret Thomas compares the task of compiling it with that of organising a party. Here, the enterprise has been successful – the guests are interesting (as you might expect), but they are also presented to their best advantage, and the host succeeds in establishing connections between them, so that no-one is left out. Also, it proceeds at an agreeably fast pace and ends promptly before anyone can make a scene. We develop this analogy a little further over the course of the interview, but we do also talk about the book in its own right. We discuss the question of whether or not Chomskyan linguistics is, or should be, related to the earlier history of the discipline, and consider the effect of 20th century American linguistics on the historiography of the subject. And we touch upon some of the figures outside the mainstream Western tradition whose influences haven't always been widely felt, but whose contribution to the study of language is nonetheless remarkable.

Tore JansonView on AmazonIt's a sobering thought that, but for the spread of English, I wouldn't be able to do these interviews.  In particular, I don't speak Swedish, and I'm not going to try to speak Latin to a world expert on the subject.  Fortunately for my purposes, English has reached a level of saturation, and thus Tore Janson is able to explain to us why that is. The History of Languages: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012) gives a brief synopsis of some of the major trends in language change over the course of recorded history.  Indo-European is discussed, but the scope of the book is much wider, turning to the Bantu and Australian language families, and also to the written traditions of China and Ancient Egypt.  Rather than being concerned with the linguistic regularities of change, Prof. Janson's focus is much more on the circumstantial historical causes of change, and his work is a useful complement to work in historical linguistics – in addition to being a very enjoyable read in its own right. In this interview, we talk about some of the points he raises: the dissimilarity between the languages of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, the motivations for the emergence of written language and its role as a stabilising influence on society, and the foundations of linguistic identity in the modern nation-state, among others.  And we consider the parallel between Latin in England and Arabic in Persia, as examples of how seemingly inevitable linguistic change can unexpectedly falter.

Jeanne FahnestockView on AmazonA thing I enjoy about this job is being encouraged to read books that unexpectedly turn out to be profoundly relevant to my own interests. Jeanne Fahnestock's new book, Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion (Oxford University Press, 2011), turns out to be just such a volume. I read it with a constant sense of surprise that this long and distinguished tradition provides insights on many objects of current linguistic enquiry (and indeed a sense of embarrassment that I didn't already know that). But there is plenty in this book for readers who don't share my eccentric obsessions. On the one hand, there's a careful and very readable account of the numerous techniques identified by rhetoricians, from amphiboly to antimetabole. On the other, there's vivid exemplification of the rhetorical effects that can be achieved, with examples from influential literary, political and scientific texts. The reader is left in no doubt that rhetoric is alive, well, and perhaps more powerful than ever. In this interview, we talk about the status of rhetoric as an object of study, and its recent renaissance. We discuss the usefulness of the exhaustive distinctions identified by rhetoricians of the past, and their relevance to users and analysts of language today. And we consider the ultimate goal of persuasive language use, the attainment of the (rhetorical) sublime.

Robert BarskyView on AmazonZellig Harris's name is famous in linguistics primarily for his early work on transformational grammar and his influence on his most famous student, Noam Chomsky.  However, much of his linguistic work has since fallen into comparative obscurity.  Moreover, his political research and activism – about which he was especially guarded throughout his lifetime – has received scant attention. In this meticulously-researched biography, Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism (MIT Press, 2011), Robert Barsky casts a great deal more light upon Harris's story.  Exploring his involvement in the Avukah student group in the 1930s and 40s, Barsky shows how Harris not only strove to advance the cause of socialist Zionism, but also shaped the destinies of several influential thinkers.  He also traces the course of the revolutionary programme of linguistic enquiry that Harris laid out, inspired by the example of theoretical physics, and how this ongoing work came to be regarded as eccentric by practitioners of the dominant contemporary research trends. In this interview, we discuss the utopian ideals of socialist Zionism, and the influence of Harris upon Chomsky's political thought.  We look at the contradictory facets of Zellig Harris as an individual.  And we consider whether rationality is an unreasonable assumption, when it comes to inter-personal dynamics.

View on AmazonWe've never been in a more crowded marketplace, with more corporations shouting for our attention and custom. Yet this choice is an illusion, as detailed in Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You (Wiley, 2011). Using a battery of techniques, advertisers push us into recognising and ultimately choosing their brand. But forget crude commands to buy buy buy; advertisers are using sophisticated approaches which work with, not against, our cognitive abilities of memory, attention and language. Here is a book where the corporate and academic worlds meet head on. Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson, both serious researchers in the cognitive and language sciences, exemplify and analyse the ways in which advertisers and political candidates target their market. Familiar techniques of branding and personalisation exploit linguistic features such as presupposition, implicature, metaphor, audience design, speech acts, sociolinguistic variation, and syntactic framing. But can an awareness of these techniques put us in a better position to choose how we choose? I talk with Julie Sedivy about the nature and the illusion of choice, and how advertisers may come knocking on linguists' doors for expert advice on how language, and the language user, works.

Theo van LeeuwenView on AmazonTheo van Leeuwen comes to the academic discipline of social semiotics – the study of how meanings are conveyed – from his previous career as a film and TV producer. His interest in the makings of visual communication is hardly surprising. More surprising was his realisation that, after 10 years teaching and research in the field, he had little to say about the role of colour; a realisation that spurred the research presented in this book, The Language of Colour: An Introduction (Routledge, 2011). The use and meaning of colour has been debated by philosophers, artists and scientists for millennia, with distinct aspects being considered focal at different times: its symbolism, its role in yielding naturalism of representation, and its emotional force. Now, as van Leeuwen puts it, "colour has made a comeback". Not only are all these different aspects of colour being exploited in communication, but they are being exploited over a wide range of contexts: fashion, web design, interior decoration, and so on. This predictably attractive book serves not only to trace the history of colour meaning (a particularly interesting summary), but also to explore the technological and intellectual drivers of its change, and to suggest a system for analysing colour meaning. We talk about this history, the tension between perceptual and conceptual approaches to colour, the dangers of ethnocentrism in the study of colour, and the status of some modern artists as researchers into colour meaning.

Jonathon GreenView on AmazonOver 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.

Keith GilyardView on AmazonIn 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.

View on AmazonI 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.

View on Amazon"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 analysed 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.

Adam HodgesView on AmazonMany 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.