Language Archives

Essays on Logic, Ethics, and Universal Grammar

This new volume of Bentham’s philosophical writings deals with his most fundamental ideas concerning logic, language, ethics, and grammar. It includes four major essays written between 1814 and 1816, namely ‘Essay on Logic’, ‘Essay on Ethics’, ‘Didacologia’, and ‘Universal Grammar’, all of them closely related to Chrestomathia, Bentham’s major work on education.

In ‘Essay on Logic’, Bentham contrasts the præcognita of Aristotle with his own ‘characteristics’ of logic and deals with methodization, ontology, and the relationship between logic and language. In ‘Essay on Ethics’, he offers a critique of the Aristotelian virtues and outlines his own division of ethics into prudence, probity, and benevolence. In ‘Didacologia’, he presents an outline of a comprehensive plan for the division of the arts and sciences based on the method of exhaustive bifurcation and a new nomenclature. In ‘Universal Grammar’, Bentham deals with language as the basis for thought and communication and investigates the nature of the different parts of speech. The volume is completed with an Appendix containing fragmentary material, written in August and September 1813, with a focus on language. All the texts are based on Bentham’s original manuscripts and have never before been published in authentic form.

The Origins of Self

The Origins of Self explores the role that selfhood plays in defining human society, and each human individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialisation and language, and the types of self we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood.

Edwardes argues that other awareness is a relatively early evolutionary development, present throughout the primate clade and perhaps beyond, but self-awareness is a product of the sharing of social models, something only humans appear to do. The self of which we are aware is not something innate within us, it is a model of our self produced as a response to the models of us offered to us by other people. Edwardes proposes that human construction of selfhood involves seven different types of self. All but one of them are internally generated models, and the only non-model, the actual self, is completely hidden from conscious awareness. We rely on others to tell us about our self, and even to let us know we are a self.

Developed in relation to a range of subject areas – linguistics, anthropology, genomics and cognition, as well as socio-cultural theory – The Origins of Self is of particular interest to students and researchers studying the origins of language, human origins in general, and the cognitive differences between human and other animal psychologies.

A Grammar of Paraguayan Guarani

The history of Guarani is a history of resilience. Paraguayan Guarani is a vibrant, modern language, mother tongue to millions of people in South America. It is the only indigenous language in the Americas spoken by a non-ethnically indigenous majority, and since 1992, it is also an official language of Paraguay alongside Spanish. This book provides the first comprehensive reference grammar of Modern Paraguayan Guarani written for an English-language audience. It is an accessible yet thorough and carefully substantiated description of the language’s phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics. It also includes information about its centuries of documented history and its current sociolinguistic situation.

Examples come from literary sources and film, scholastic grammars, online newspapers, blogs and other publications, publicly accessible social media data, and the author’s own fieldwork. They are specifically chosen to reflect the diversity of uses of modern-day Guarani, with the aim of providing a realistic picture of the current state of the language in twenty-first century Paraguay.

This book will benefit researchers and students of Guarani and Paraguay, such as linguists, anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists, historians, or cultural studies and literature scholars. Typologically-oriented researchers and students of other Tupian and Amerindian languages will have reliable data for comparative purposes. Given the unique socio-historical profile of Guarani, researchers in fields such as language contact, bilingualism, code-switching, language planning, language education, and literacy will find this book a valuable reference resource.

Elements, Government, and Licensing

Elements, Government, and Licensing brings together new theoretical and empirical developments in phonology. It covers three principal domains of phonological representation: melody and segmental structure; tone, prosody and prosodic structure; and phonological relations, empty categories, and vowel-zero alternations. Theoretical topics covered include the formalisation of Element Theory, the hotly debated topic of structural recursion in phonology, and the empirical status of government.
In addition, a wealth of new analyses and empirical evidence sheds new light on empty categories in phonology, the analysis of certain consonantal sequences, phonological and non-phonological alternation, the elemental composition of segments, and many more. Taking up long-standing empirical and theoretical issues informed by the Government Phonology and Element Theory, this book provides theoretical advances while also bringing to light new empirical evidence and analysis challenging previous generalisations.
The insights offered here will be equally exciting for phonologists working on related issues inside and outside the Principles & Parameters programme, such as researchers working in Optimality Theory or classical rule-based phonology.

Coderspeak

Software applications have taken over our lives. We use and are used by software many times a day. Nevertheless, we know very little about the invisibly ubiquitous workers who write software. Who are they and how do they perceive their own practice? How does that shape the ways in which they collaborate to build the myriad of apps that we use every day?

Coderspeak provides a critical approach to the digital transformation of our world through an engaging and thoughtful analysis of the people who write software. It is a focused and in-depth look at one programming language and its community – Ruby – based on ethnographic research at a London company and conversations with members of the wider Ruby community in Europe, the Americas and Japan. This book shows that the place people write code, the language they write it in and the stories shared by that community are crucial in questioning and unpacking what it means to be a ‘coder’. Understanding this social group is essential if we are to grasp a future (and a present) in which computer programming increasingly dominates our lives.