New Books in Language and Translation
Episodes
Jennifer Glaser, “Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination” (Rutgers UP, 2016)
07 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Jennifer Glaser, Associate P...
Sali Tagliamonte, “Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
26 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Teenagers get a lot of bad press. Whether it’s how they look, how they dress, the things they say, the way they say it – it sometimes seems as if ...
Ellen Mayock, “Gender Shrapnel in the Academic Workplace” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
13 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Recent controversies surrounding sexual harassment and assault on college campuses have sparked heated discussions surrounding the everyday experience...
Ingrid Piller, “Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics” (Oxford UP, 2016)
03 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
According to the blurb, Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics (Oxford University Press, 2016) “explor...
Simon Critchley, “ABC of Impossibility” (Univocal Publishing, 2015)
07 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
From its opening fragment on “Fragments” to its “Possibly dolorous tropical lyrical coda,” Simon Critchley‘s new book is a pleasure to hold ...
Prakash Mondal, “Language, Mind and Computation” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
17 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
My instinct as a researcher is usually to shy away from confrontation about foundational issues in the philosophy of language, which is probably why I...
Aviya Kushner, “The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible” (Spiegel and Grau, 2015)
16 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking family, reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and debating its meaning over the dinner table. She knew m...
Kenneth L. Marcus, “The Definition of Anti-Semitism” (Oxford UP, 2015)
12 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press, 2015), Kenneth L. Marcus, the President and General Counsel of the Louis D. Brandeis Cent...
Geoffrey Sampson, “Writing Systems” (Equinox, 2015)
08 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
It’s not always been clear how the study of written language fits into linguistics. As a relatively recent historical development, it’s tempting t...
Kate Pahl, “Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited” (Bloomsbury, 2014)
06 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Literary practices are often associated with specific social groups in particular social settings. Kate Pahl‘s Materializing Literacies in Communiti...
Liora R. Halperin, “Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948” (Yale UP, 2014)
10 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (Yale University Press, 2015), Liora R. Halperin, an Assistant Pro...
Chad Engelland, “Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind” (MIT Press, 2015)
14 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
How do we learn our first words? What is it that makes the linguistic intentions of others manifest to us, when our eyes follow a pointing finger to a...
James Turner, “Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities” (Princeton University Press, 2014)
10 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Notre Dame University. His book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanit...
Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis, “The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
21 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Who were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old...
Colin McGinn, “Philosophy of Language: the Classics Explained” (MIT Press, 2015)
28 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
I must admit that my relationship to philosophy of language is a bit like my relationship to classic literature: I tend to admire it from afar, and re...
Naomi S. Baron, “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World” (Oxford UP, 2015)
01 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Screens are ubiquitous. From the screen on a mobile, to that on a tablet, or laptop, or desktop computer, screens appear all around us, full of conten...
Jason Stanley, “How Propaganda Works” (Princeton UP, 2015)
01 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Propaganda names a familiar collection of phenomena, and examples of propaganda are easy to identify, especially when one examines the output of total...
Pieter Seuren, “From Whorf to Montague: Explorations in the Theory of Language” (Oxford UP, 2013)
18 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
A colleague once told me that people in linguistics could be divided into two groups: sheep and snipers. I’m not sure whether this is a proper dicho...
Seana Shiffrin, “Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law” (Princeton UP, 2014)
02 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
It is generally accepted that lying is morally prohibited. But theorists divide over the nature of lying’s wrongness, and thus there is disagreement...
Terence Cuneo, “Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking” (Oxford,
01 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
It is widely accepted that in uttering sentences we sometimes perform distinctive kinds of acts. We declare, assert, challenge, question, corroborate ...
Daniel Cloud, “The Domestication of Language” (Columbia UP, 2014)
16 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most puzzling things about humans is their ability to manipulate symbols and create artifacts. Our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom–...
Thom Scott-Phillips, “Speaking Our Minds” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
13 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
I hope I’m not being species-centric when I say that the emergence of human language is a big deal. John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary rate it as...
Anne Curzan, “Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
29 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Language change is like a river. When people tell you how to use language, and how not to use it, they’re attempting to build a dam that will put a ...
Ruth Finnegan, “Communicating: the Multiple Modes of Human Communication” (Routledge, 2014)
14 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The name of the New Books in Language channel might hint at a disciplinary bias towards “language”. So in some sense Ruth Finnegan‘s Communicati...
Julia Sallabank, “Attitudes to Endangered Languages: Identities and Policies” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
10 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
As linguists, we’re wont to get protective about languages, whether we see them as data points in a typological analysis or a mass of different ways...
John H. McWhorter, “The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language” (Oxford UP, 2014)
18 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think – sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – has had an interesting his...
Ian Haney Lopez, “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class” (Oxford UP, 2014)
30 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Ian Haney Lopez is the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford UP 2014). ...
Peter Gardenfors, “The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces” (MIT Press, 2014)
09 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
A conceptual space sounds like a rather nebulous thing, and basing a semantics on conceptual spaces sounds similarly nebulous. In The Geometry of Mean...
David Adger, “A Syntax of Substance” (MIT Press, 2013)
26 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Nouns are the bread and butter of linguistic analysis, and it’s easy not to reflect too hard on what they actually are and how they work. In A Synta...
Vershawn Young et al., “Other People’s English” (Teacher’s College Press, 2013)
15 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In linguistics, we all happily and glibly affirm that there is no “better” or “worse” among languages (or dialects, or varieties), although we...
Aneta Pavlenko, “The Bilingual Mind And What It Tells Us about Language and Thought” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
29 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Big ideas about language often ignore, or abstract away from, the individual’s capacity to learn more than one language. In a world where the majori...
Andrea Bachner, “Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture” (Columbia UP, 2014)
23 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Andrea Bachner‘s wonderfully interdisciplinary new book explores the many worlds and media through which the Chinese script has been imagined, repre...
Alistair Knott, “Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax” (MIT Press, 2012)
28 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
When big claims are made about neurolinguistics, there often seems to be a subtext that the latest findings will render traditional linguistics obsole...
David Bleich, “The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics and the University” (Indiana UP, 2013)
07 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
David Bleich‘s book The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics and the University (Indiana University Press, 2013) is described as a wide-rangin...
Rodney H. Jones, “Health and Risk Communication: An Applied Linguistic Perspective” (Routledge, 2013)
25 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists – and I claim to include myself in this category – sometimes seem to be disparaging about the ability of people in general to understan...
Mikhail Kissine, “From Utterances to Speech Acts” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
14 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The recognition of speech acts – classically, things like stating, requesting, promising, and so on – sometimes seems like a curiously neglected t...
Jody Azzouni, “Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a Common Language Arises and Persists” (Oxford UP, 2013)
01 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
A common philosophical picture of language proposes to begin with the various kinds of communicative acts individuals perform by means of language. ...
Anne Cutler, “Native Listening: Language Experience and the Recognition of Spoken Words” (MIT Press, 2012)
01 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
One of the risks of a telephone interview is that the sound quality can be less than ideal, and sometimes there’s no way around this and we just hav...
Patrick Hanks, “Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations” (MIT Press, 2013)
10 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
It’s tempting to think that lexicography can go on, untroubled by the concerns of theoretical linguistics, while the rest of us plunge into round af...
Stephen Crain, “The Emergence of Meaning” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
30 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
It’s not surprising that human language reflects and respects logical relations – logic, in some sense, ‘works’. For linguists, this represent...
John E. Joseph, “Saussure” (Oxford UP, 2012)
20 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamen...
Perry Link, “An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics” (Harvard UP, 2013)
13 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Rhythm, metaphor, politics: these three features of language simultaneously enable us to communicate with each other and go largely unnoticed in the c...
Jonathan Bobaljik, “Universals of Comparative Morphology” (MIT Press, 2012)
06 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Morphology is sometimes painted as the ‘here be dragons’ of the linguistic map: a baffling domain of idiosyncrasies and irregularities, in which H...
Stephen E. Nadeau, “The Neural Architecture of Grammar” (MIT Press, 2012)
13 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Although there seems to be a trend towards linguistic theories getting more cognitively or neurally plausible, there doesn’t seem to be an imminent ...
Stanley Dubinsky and Chris Holcomb, “Understanding Language Through Humor” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
15 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
A problem with doing linguistics is that once you start, it’s kind of inescapable – you see it everywhere. At some point a few months back, I was ...
Elly van Gelderen, “The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty” (Oxford UP, 2011)
01 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
In language, as in life, history is constantly repeating itself. In her book The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty (Oxford Un...
Willem J. M. Levelt, “A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era” (Oxford UP, 2012)
19 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The only disappointment with A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford UP, 2012) is that, as the subtitle says, the story it te...
Nick J. Enfield, “The Anatomy of Meaning: Speech, Gesture, and Composite Utterances” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
16 Jan 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Linguists are apt to get excited when a language is identified that exhibits exotic properties, and gladly travel halfway round the world to document ...
James R. Hurford, “The Origins of Grammar (Language in the Light of Evolution, Vol. 2)” (Oxford UP, 2012)
21 Dec 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Building upon The Origins of Meaning (see previous interview), James R. Hurford‘s The Origins of Grammar (Language in the Light of Evolution, Vol. 2...
James R. Hurford, “The Origins of Meaning (Language in Light of Evolution, Vol. 1)” (Oxford UP, 2007)
16 Dec 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Evolutionary approaches to linguistics have notoriously had a rather chequered history, being associated with vague and unfalsifiable claims about the...
Tony Veale, “Exploding the Creativity Myth: The Computational Foundations of Linguistic Creativity” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012)
03 Dec 2012
Contributed by Lukas
In these days of increasing automation, the prospect of obsolescence is an alarming one for those of us who make a living by stringing words together ...
Peter Trudgill, “Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity” (Oxford UP, 2011)
18 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
If you had to bet your life on learning a language in three months, which language would you choose? Peter Trudgill’s first choice wouldn’t be Far...
Avner Baz, “When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy” (Harvard University Press, 2012)
31 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
In When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2012), Avner Baz sets out to make a case for the re...
Joshua Miller, “Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism” (Oxford UP, 2011)
10 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Recent political debates around language have often been controversial, sometimes poorly informed, and usually unedifying. It’s striking to consider...
Sherry Simon, “Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory” (Routledge, 2012)
22 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
The idea that bilingualism can be enriching and beneficial for an individual is a popular one. But what about for a city? Here the associations are le...
Bart Geurts, “Quantity Implicatures” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
24 Jul 2012
Contributed by Lukas
It’s now well over 100 years since John Stuart Mill noted that, if I say “I saw some of your children today”, you get the impression that I didn...
Sam Leith, “Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama” (Basic Books, 2012)
03 Jul 2012
Contributed by Lukas
What’s the connection between Sarah Palin and Plato? The response that leaps to mind is that they’ve both never heard of one another. But another ...
Alexander Maxwell, “Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language, and Accidental Nationalism” (Tauris Academic Studies, 2009)
15 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
On 1 January 1993 Slovakia became an independent nation. According to conventional Slovak nationalist history that event was the culmination of a roug...
Alexander Clark and Shalom Lappin, “Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
08 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
In linguistics, if a book is ever described as a “must read for X”, it generally means that (i) it is trenchantly opposed to whatever X does and (...
Margaret Thomas, “Fifty Key Thinkers on Language and Linguistics” (Routledge, 2011)
21 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
In the preface to Fifty Key Thinkers on Language and Linguistics (Routledge, 2011), devoted to short but attentively researched biographical sketches ...
Tore Janson, “The History of Languages: An Introduction” (Oxford UP, 2012)
16 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a sobering thought that, but for the spread of English, I wouldn’t be able to do these interviews. In particular, I don’t speak Swedish, a...
Jeanne Fahnestock, “Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion” (Oxford UP, 2011)
15 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
A thing I enjoy about this job is being encouraged to read books that unexpectedly turn out to be profoundly relevant to my own interests. Jeanne Fahn...
Robert F. Barsky and Noam Chomsky, “Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism” (MIT Press, 2011)
07 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Zellig Harris’s name is famous in linguistics primarily for his early work on transformational grammar and his influence on his most famous student,...
Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson, “Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You” (Wiley, 2011)
24 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve never been in a more crowded marketplace, with more corporations shouting for our attention and custom. Yet this choice is an illusion, as det...
Theo van Leeuwen, “The Language of Colour: An Introduction” (Routledge, 2011)
10 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Theo van Leeuwen comes to the academic discipline of social semiotics – the study of how meanings are conveyed – from his previous career as a fil...
Jonathan Green, “Green’s Dictionary of Slang” (Hodder Education, 2010)
26 Jan 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last thirty years, Jonathon Green has established himself as a major figure in lexicography, specialising in English slang. During this time ...
Keith Gilyard, “True to the Language Game: African American Discourse, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy” (Routledge, 2011)
22 Dec 2011
Contributed by Lukas
In the preface to this book, Keith Gilyard describes his career as 30 years of roaming the areas of rhetoric, composition, sociolinguistics, creative ...
Debra Aarons, “Jokes and the Linguistic Mind” (Routledge, 2011)
01 Dec 2011
Contributed by Lukas
I favour any book that applies the logic of Wittgenstein to quotes from the Goon Show. (Often in linguistics the reverse is true.) So I was delighted ...
Neil Smith, et al., “The Signs of a Savant: Language Against the Odds” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
15 Nov 2011
Contributed by Lukas
“Every once in a while Nature gives us insight into the human condition by providing us with a unique case whose special properties illumine the spe...
Peter Ludlow, “The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics” (Oxford UP, 2011)
15 Nov 2011
Contributed by Lukas
The human capacity for language is always cited as the or one of the cognitive capacities we have that separates us from non-human animals. And lingui...
Ron Christie, “Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010)
26 Sep 2011
Contributed by Lukas
In his new bookActing White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), former White House aide Ron Christie recounts the histor...
Adam Hodges, “The ‘War on Terror’ Narrative” (Oxford UP, 2011)
06 Sep 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Many entries in our lexicon have an interesting history, but it’s very seldom the case that the currency of a phrase has global repercussions. In hi...
David Crystal, “Just a Phrase I’m Going Through: My Life in Language” (Routledge, 2009)
15 Aug 2011
Contributed by Lukas
In an enormously prolific writing and editing career, David Crystal has excelled in supplying volumes hitherto missing from the field: here a balanced...
Robert Lane Greene, “You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws and the Politics of Identity” (Delacorte Press, 2011)
11 Jul 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Isn’t it odd how the golden age of correct language always seems to be around the time that its speaker was in high school, and that language has be...