New Books in Language
412 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago - ★★★★ - 19 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Language about their New Books
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Episodes
Robert F. Barsky and Noam Chomsky, “Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism” (MIT Press, 2011)
March 07, 2012 18:49 - 59 minutesZellig 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...
Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson, “Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You” (Wiley, 2011)
February 24, 2012 21:19 - 46 minutesWe’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...
Theo van Leeuwen, “The Language of Colour: An Introduction” (Routledge, 2011)
February 10, 2012 12:59 - 56 minutesTheo 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, 20...
Jonathan Green, “Green’s Dictionary of Slang” (Hodder Education, 2010)
January 26, 2012 15:55 - 57 minutesOver 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...
Keith Gilyard, “True to the Language Game: African American Discourse, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy” (Routledge, 2011)
December 22, 2011 17:57 - 57 minutesIn 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 evidenc...
Debra Aarons, “Jokes and the Linguistic Mind” (Routledge, 2011)
December 01, 2011 17:24 - 59 minutesI 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 teachi...
Neil Smith, et al., “The Signs of a Savant: Language Against the Odds” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
November 15, 2011 18:10 - 54 minutes“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 ...
Peter Ludlow, “The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics” (Oxford UP, 2011)
November 15, 2011 14:30 - 1 hourThe human capacity for language is always cited as the or one of the cognitive capacities we have that separates us from non-human animals. And linguistics, at its most basic level, is the study of language as such – in the primary and usual case, how we manage the pairing of sounds with meanings to make such a thing as speech even possible. The standard view in linguistics today, introduced by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s, is that language is a biologically based cognitive capacity that develop...
Ron Christie, “Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010)
September 26, 2011 15:08 - 40 minutesIn his new bookActing White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), former White House aide Ron Christie recounts the history of the pejorative term “acting white.” He traces its lineage from the present day through the Black Power movement back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, unraveling a fascinating history in the process. In our interview, we talked about Ron’s experiences as an African-American Republican, his ambitious vow to eradicate the term “acting white,” and his hop...
Adam Hodges, “The ‘War on Terror’ Narrative” (Oxford UP, 2011)
September 06, 2011 20:03 - 57 minutesMany 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 fir...
David Crystal, “Just a Phrase I’m Going Through: My Life in Language” (Routledge, 2009)
August 15, 2011 17:30 - 1 hourIn an enormously prolific writing and editing career, David Crystal has excelled in supplying volumes hitherto missing from the field: here a balanced and accessible introduction to general linguistics, there a lucid specialised textbook in an emerging field. With this memoir, Just a Phrase I’m Going Through: My Life in Language (Routledge, 2009), he fills another gap, and offers a vivid picture of the working life of a professional linguist. The book follows Crystal’s career across an enorm...
Robert Lane Greene, “You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws and the Politics of Identity” (Delacorte Press, 2011)
July 11, 2011 15:29 - 51 minutesIsn’t it odd how the golden age of correct language always seems to be around the time that its speaker was in high school, and that language has been going to the dogs ever since? Such is the anguish of declinists the world over, pushing the commercial success of language-bashing stocking fillers. But what’s the real reason that we get hung up on greengrocers’ apostrophes and the superiority of certain language forms over others? Robert Lane Greene‘s premise is that for those who hold up th...