416 Pages
by
Routledge
416 Pages
by
Routledge
416 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
"Language and Human Nature" exposes a century's worth of flawed thinking about language, to exhibit some of the dangers it presents, and to suggest a path to recovery. It begins by examining the causes of changes in the English vocabulary. These sometimes take the form of new words, but more often that of new senses for old words. In the course of this examination, Halpern discusses a wide variety... Read more
1: The Question of Change in Language; 2: How Language is Studied Today; 3: Linguistic Authority: Rules, Dictionaries, and Teaching; 4: Descriptivist, Prescriptivist, and Linguistic Activist; 5: The Eskimo Snow Vocabulary Controversy–A Case Study; 6: A People’s Linguistics; 7: Restoring Rhetoric to Its Throne; 8: Decadence and Diseases of Language; 9: Plagiarism and Misquotation: the Use of Others’ Thoughts and Words; 10: What is To Be Done?; APPENDIX A: Linguistics as a Science; APPENDIX B: Eskimo-Language Terms for Snow and Ice; APPENDIX C: AI and the Golem project — the reverse-engineering twins; APPENDIX D: Notes on Chomsky and the Chomskyan literature; APPENDIX E: A Language of Mathematics? A Proof of Programs?; APPENDIX F: The Principal Players Identified; APPENDIX G: What is A ‘Foreign Term’?
Biography
Mark Halpern
