Date: 11-Aug-2010 From: Daniel Davies <ddaviescambridge.org> Subject: Language from the Body: Taub E-mail this message to a friend
Title: Language from the Body
Subtitle: Iconicity and Metaphor in American Sign Language
Published: 2010
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
http://us.cambridge.org
Author: Sarah F Taub
Electronic: ISBN: 9780511034138 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 60.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9780521770620 Pages: 272 Price: U.K. £ 52.00 Comment: published in 2001
Paperback: ISBN: 9780521158602 Pages: 272 Price: U.K. £ 11.99
Abstract:
New Edition
What is the role of meaning in linguistic theory? Generative linguists have severely limited the influence of meaning, claiming that language is not affected by other cognitive processes and that semantics does not influence linguistic form. Conversely, cognitivist and functionalist linguists believe that meaning pervades and motivates all levels of linguistic structure. This dispute can be resolved conclusively by evidence from signed languages. Signed languages are full of iconic linguistic items: words, inflections, and even syntactic constructions with structural similarities between their physical form and their referents' form. Iconic items can have concrete meanings and also abstract meanings through conceptual metaphors. Language from the Body rebuts the generativist linguistic theories which separate form and meaning and asserts that iconicity can only be described in a cognitivist framework where meaning can influence form.
- Serves as a brief introduction to cognitive linguistics - Written in an accessible style appropriate for non-specialists - Includes analysis of American Sign Language poem
Contents
1. A glimpse of the material; 2. Motivation and linguistic theory; 3. Iconicity defined and demonstrated; 4. The analogue-building model of linguistic iconicity; 5. Survey of iconicity in signed and spoken languages; 6. Metaphor in American Sign Language: the double mapping; 7. Many metaphors in a single sign; 8. The vertical scale as source domain; 9. Verb agreement paths in American Sign Language; 10. Complex superposition of metaphors in an American Sign Language poem; 11. The future of signed-language research; Appendices; References; Index.
About LINGUIST
|
Contact Us
While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed
on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.