Download or read book Fixing Language written by Herman Cappelen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herman Cappelen investigates ways in which language (and other representational devices) can be defective, and how they can be improved. In all parts of philosophy there are philosophers who criticize the concepts we have and propose ways to improve them. Once one notices this about philosophy, it's easy to see that revisionist projects occur in a range of other intellectual disciplines and in ordinary life. That fact gives rise to a cluster of questions: How does the process of conceptual amelioration work? What are the limits of revision? (How much revision is too much?) How does the process of revision fit into an overall theory of language and communication? Fixing Language aims to answer those questions. In so doing, it aims also to draw attention to a tradition in 20th- and 21st-century philosophy that isn't sufficiently recognized. There's a straight intellectual line from Frege and Carnap to a cluster of contemporary work that isn't typically seen as closely related: much work on gender and race, revisionism about truth, revisionism about moral language, and revisionism in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. These views all have common core commitments: revision is both possible and important. They also face common challenges about the methods, assumptions, and limits of revision.
Download or read book Fixing English written by Anne Curzan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anne Curzan presents a pioneering new definition of prescriptivism as a linguistic phenomenon.
Download or read book Making AI Intelligible written by Herman Cappelen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? One aim of Making AI Intelligible is to show that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Cappelen and Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy of to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they also show ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved: our linguistic encounters with AIs revel that our theories of meaning have been excessively anthropocentric. The questions addressed in the book are not only theoretically interesting, but the answers have pressing practical implications. Many important decisions about human life are now influenced by AI. In giving that power to AI, we presuppose that AIs can track features of the world that we care about (e.g. creditworthiness, recidivism, cancer, and combatants.) If AIs can share our concepts, that will go some way towards justifying this reliance on AI. The book can be read as a proposal for how to take some first steps towards achieving interpretable AI. Making AI Intelligible is of interest to both philosophers of language and anyone who follows current events or interacts with AI systems. It illustrates how philosophy can help us understand and improve our interactions with AI.
Download or read book Language Change written by Joan Bybee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-28 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new introduction explores all aspects of language change, with an emphasis on the role of cognition and language use.
Download or read book Fixing Language written by Herman Cappelen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herman Cappelen investigates how language and other representational devices can go wrong, and how to fix them. We use language to understand and talk about the world, but what if our language has deficiencies that prevent it from playing that role? How can we revise our concepts, and what are the limits on revision?
Download or read book Language Change in East Asia written by T. E. McAuley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book adopts a wide focus on the range of East Asian languages, in both their pre-modern and modern forms, within the specific topic area of language change. It contains sections on dialect studies, contact linguistics, socio-linguistics and syntax/phonology and deals with all three major languages of East Asia: Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Individual chapters cover pre-Sino-Japanese phonology, nominalizers in Chinese, Japanese and Korean; Japanese loanwords in Taiwan Mandarin; changes in Korean honorifics; the tense and aspect system of Japanese; and language policy in Japan. The book will be of interest to linguists working on East Asian languages, and will be of value to a range of general linguists working in comparative or historical linguistics, socio-linguistics, language typology and language contact.
Download or read book Understanding Language Change written by April M. S. McMahon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-03-17 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook analyses changes from every area of grammar and addresses recent developments in socio-historical linguistics.
Download or read book Calculus written by David Warren Cohen and published by Jones & Bartlett Learning. This book was released on 2005 with total page 1014 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adaptable to courses for non-engineering majors, this textbook illustrates the meaning of a curve through graphs and tests predictions through numerical values of change, before formally defining the limit of a sequence and function, the derivative, and the integral. The second half of the book develops techniques for integrating functions, approxi
Download or read book Changing Minds Changing Tools written by Vsevolod Kapatsinski and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-07-24 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book that uses domain-general learning theory to explain recurrent trajectories of language change. In this book, Vsevolod Kapatsinski argues that language acquisition—often approached as an isolated domain, subject to its own laws and mechanisms—is simply learning, subject to the same laws as learning in other domains and well described by associative models. Synthesizing research in domain-general learning theory as it relates to language acquisition, Kapatsinski argues that the way minds change as a result of experience can help explain how languages change over time and can predict the likely directions of language change—which in turn predicts what kinds of structures we find in the languages of the world. What we know about how we learn (the core question of learning theory) can help us understand why languages are the way they are (the core question of theoretical linguistics). Taking a dynamic, usage-based perspective, Kapatsinski focuses on diachronic universals, recurrent pathways of language change, rather than synchronic universals, properties that all languages share. Topics include associative approaches to learning and the neural implementation of the proposed mechanisms; selective attention; units of language; a comparison of associative and Bayesian approaches to learning; representation in the mind of visual and auditory experience; the production of new words and new forms of words; and automatization of repeated action sequences. This approach brings us closer to understanding why languages are the way they are, Kapatsinski contends, than approaches premised on innate knowledge of language universals and the language acquisition device.
Download or read book Opening Minds written by Peter Johnston and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing a spelling test to a student by saying, 'Let' s see how many words you know,' is different from saying, 'Let's see how many words you know already.' It is only one word, but the already suggests that any words the child knows are ahead of expectation and, most important, that there is nothing permanent about what is known and not known. Peter Johnston Grounded in research, Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Livesshows how words can shape students' learning, their sense of self, and their social, emotional and moral development. Make no mistake: words have the power to open minds – or close them. Following up his groundbreaking book, Choice Words, author Peter Johnston continues to demonstrate how the things teachers say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for the literate lives of students. In this new book, Johnston shows how the words teachers choose can affect the worlds students inhabit in the classroom. He explains how to engage children with more productive talk and how to create classrooms that support students' intellectual development, as well as their development as human beings.
Download or read book Roads to Reference written by Mario Gómez-Torrente and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is it that words come to stand for the things they stand for? Is the thing that a word stands for - its reference - fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words like 'water', 'three', and 'red' refer to appropriate things, just as the word 'Aristotle' refers to Aristotle? If so, which things are these, and how do they come to be referred to by those words? In Roads to Reference, Mario Gómez-Torrente provides novel answers to these and other questions that have been of traditional interest in the theory of reference. The book introduces a number of cases of apparent indeterminacy of reference for proper names, demonstratives, and natural kind terms, which suggest that reference-fixing conventions for them adopt the form of lists of merely sufficient conditions for reference and reference failure. He then provides arguments for a new anti-descriptivist picture of those kinds of words, according to which the reference-fixing conventions for them do not describe their reference. This book also defends realist and objectivist accounts of the reference of ordinary natural kind nouns, numerals, and adjectives for sensible qualities. According to these accounts these words refer, respectively, to 'ordinary kinds', cardinality properties, and properties of membership in intervals of sensible dimensions, and these things are fixed in subtle ways by associated reference-fixing conventions.
Download or read book Language Creation and Language Change written by Michel DeGraff and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1999 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research on creolization, language change, and language acquisition has been converging toward a triangulation of the constraints along which grammatical systems develop within individual speakers--and (viewed externally) across generations of speakers. The originality of this volume is in its comparison of various sorts of language development from a number of linguistic-theoretic and empirical perspectives, using data from both speech and gestural modalities and from a diversity of acquisition environments. In turn, this comparison yields fresh insights on the mental bases of language creation.The book is organized into five parts: creolization and acquisition; acquisition under exceptional circumstances; language processing and syntactic change; parameter setting in acquisition and through creolization and language change; and a concluding part integrating the contributors' observations and proposals into a series of commentaries on the state of the art in our understanding of language development, its role in creolization and diachrony, and implications for linguistic theory.Contributors : Dany Adone, Derek Bickerton, Adrienne Bruyn, Marie Coppola, Michel DeGraff, Viviane D�prez, Alison Henry, Judy Kegl, David Lightfoot, John S. Lumsden, Salikoko S. Mufwene, Pieter Muysken, Elissa L. Newport, Luigi Rizzi, Ian Roberts, Ann Senghas, Rex A. Sprouse, Denise Tangney, Anne Vainikka, Barbara S. Vance, Maaike Verrips.
Download or read book Language Change written by Jean Aitchison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a lucid and up-to-date overview of language change. It discusses where our evidence about language change comes from, how and why changes happen, and how languages begin and end. It considers both changes which occurred long ago, and those currently in progress. It does this within the framework of one central question - is language change a symptom of progress or decay? It concludes that language is neither progressing nor decaying, but that an understanding of the factors surrounding change is essential for anyone concerned about language alteration. For this substantially revised third edition, Jean Aitchison has included two new chapters on change of meaning and grammaticalization. Sections on new methods of reconstruction and ongoing chain shifts in Britain and America have also been added as well as over 150 new references. The work remains non-technical in style and accessible to readers with no previous knowledge of linguistics.
Download or read book Millennia of Language Change written by Peter Trudgill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-16 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together Peter Trudgill's essays on the sociolinguistic aspects of historical linguistics for the first time.
Download or read book Language Change written by Anna Mauranen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through integrating different perspectives on language change, this book explores the enormous on-going linguistic upheavals in the wake of the global dominance of English. Combining empirical research with theoretical approaches, it will appeal to researchers and graduate students of English, and also of other languages studying language change.
Download or read book Language Change written by Adrian Beard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-07-31 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Intertext series has been specifically designed to meet the needs of contemporary English Language Studies. Working with Texts: A Core Introduction to Language Analysis (second edition 2001) is the foundation text, which is complemented by a range of 'satellite titles. These provide students with hands-on practical experience of textual analysis through special topics, and can be used individually or in conjunction with Working with Texts. Language Change: examines the way external factors have influenced and are influencing language change, focusing on how changing social contexts are reflected in language use explores the attitudes, values and assumptions that shape the way we use language looks at how language change operates within different genres, such as problem pages, sports reports and recipes provides lively examples from everyday communication, including letters, emails, postcards and text messages includes a unit on how new words are formed and features a full glossary.
Download or read book Understanding Language Change written by Kate Burridge and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2 Changes to the lexicon -- Introduction -- 2.1 Gaining words - lexical addition -- 2.1.1 Compounding -- 2.1.2 Affixation -- 2.1.3 Backformation -- 2.1.4 Conversion -- 2.1.5 Abbreviation -- 2.1.6 Acronyms -- 2.1.7 Blending -- 2.1.8 Commonization -- 2.1.9 Reduplication -- 2.1.10 Borrowing -- 2.1.11 Sound symbolism -- 2.1.12 A final word on the processes -- 2.2 Losing words - lexical mortality -- 2.2.1 Obsolescence -- 2.2.2 "Verbicide"--2.2.3 Reduction -- 2.2.4 Intolerable homonymy -- 2.3 Etymology - study of the origin of words -- Summary -- Further reading -- Exercises
