LINGUIST List 8.160

Sun Feb 2 1997

Books: Available for LINGUIST review

Editor for this issue: T. Daniel Seely <seelylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Daniel Seely, Books available for LINGUIST review

The books listed below are in the LINGUIST office and now
available for review. If you are interested in reviewing
(or leading a discussion of) one of the books; please contact 
our book review editor, Andrew Carnie, at:

carnielinguistlist.org

Please include in your request message a brief statement about your
research interests, background, and other information that might
be valuable for the review selection process.



REFERENCE:

Brown, Nicholas J. (1996) Russian Learners' Dictionary: 10,000
	Words in Frequency Order. Routledge. New York & London.

	This dictionary contains 10,000 Russian words in order of
	importance, starting with the most common and finishing with 
	words that occur about eight times in a million. All items
	have English translations, many have examples of usage and 
	many include information on stress and grammatical
	irregularities.



NEURAL NETWORK MODELING AND CONNECTIONISM:

Regier, Terry (1996) The Human Semantic Potential: Spatial Language
	and Constrained Connectionism. The MIT Press. Cambridge,
	Massachusetts. London, England.

	Drawing on ideas from cognitive linguistics, connectionism,
	and perception, _The Human Semantic Potential_ describes
	a connectionist model that learns perceptually grounded
	semantics for natural language in spatial terms. Languages
	differ in the ways in which they structure space, and Regier's
	aim is to have the model perform its learning task for terms
	from any natural language.



HISTORICAL:

Smith, Jeremy (1996) An Historical Study of English. 
	Routledge. New York & London.

	Through his analysis of selected major developments in the
	history of English, Jeremy Smith argues that the history of
	the language can only be understood from a dynamic
	perspective. In this book, he proposes that internal
	linguistic mechanisms for language change cannot be
	meaningfully explained in isolation or without reference
	to external linguistic factors.


TRANSLATION:

Gutknecht, Christoph and Lutz J. Rolle (1996) Translating by Factors.
	State University of New York Press. Albany, NY.


	By emphasizing, using English-German examples, the notion of
	factor set, this book fosters the awareness that successful
	and adequate translation requires properly accounting for
	the pertinent translation factors in each individual case.
	The factor approach gives translation criticism an objective
	yearstick for assessing the quality of translations.