LINGUIST List 8.418

Tue Mar 25 1997

Books: New Books Available for Review

Editor for this issue: Andrew Carnie <carnielinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Andrew Carnie, Books Available for Review

The books listed below are in the LINGUIST office and now
available for review. If you are interested in reviewing
a book (or leading a discussion of the book); 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, affiliation and other information that might
be valuable to help us select a suitable reviewer.



LANGUAGE ACQUISITION - SPEECH PERCEPTION

Jusczyk, Peter W. (1997) The Discovery of Spoken Language. MIT Press, Cambridge
This book examines the initial capacities that infants possess for
discriminating and categorizing speech sounds and how these capacities
evolve as infants gain experinece with native langague input.

LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS/COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS

Klavans, Judith and Philip Resnik (eds) (1997) The Balancing Act. Combining
Symbolic and Statistical approaches to Language.

This book contains 8 papers on the question of the balance between symbolic
and statistical analysises to langague. At the heart of the debate are
fundamental questions concerning the nature of language the role of data
in building a model or theory and the impact of the competence performance
distinction on the field of computational linguistics.


NOAM CHOMSKY - BIOGRAPHY

***Special note: the reviewer for the following volume should be willing
to review not only the book, but also the interactive Web Site associated
with the book. The reviewer must therefore have web-reading software and
knowledge of the WWW***

Robert F. Barsky (1997) Noam Chomsky: A life of dissent. MIT Press Cambridge.

	This biography describes the intellectual and political milieus that
helped shape Noam Chomsky, a pivotal figure in contemporary linguistics,
politics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy. It also presents an
engaging polical history of the last several decades. The book highlights
Chomsky's views on the uses and misuses of the university as an institution,
his assessment of useful political engagement and his dobuts about
postmodernism. Because Chomsky is given ample space to articulate his views on
many of the major issues relating to his work, both linguistic and political,
this book can also be seen as the autobiography that Chomsky says he will
never write.