This article argues that linguistically endangered minority groups often face endangerment due to structural linguistic injustice that arises from past injustices and ongoing unjust social processes. Language revitalization is often a justified way of reforming unjust social structures. I connect this discussion to another debate, namely, whether historical injustice (and the requirement for its correction) may be superseded. I ask: which changing circumstances might lead to the supersession of structural linguistic injustice? Of the many reasons to reform unjust (...) social structures, I focus on dignity-based concerns. Historically-sensitive dignity-based concerns are relevant for judging whether supersession of structural linguistic injustice has occurred. My view is largely present-oriented, but history still plays a role in deciding the strength of justificatory bases for structural reformation. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that about 7,000 languages are spoken across the world today and at least half may no longer be spoken by the end of this century. This state-of-the-art Handbook examines the reasons behind this dramatic loss of linguistic diversity, why it matters, and what can be done to document and support endangered languages. The volume is relevant not only to researchers in language endangerment, language shift and language death, but to anyone interested in (...) the languages and cultures of the world. It is accessible both to specialists and non-specialists: researchers will find cutting-edge contributions from acknowledged experts in their fields, while students, activists and other interested readers will find a wealth of readable yet thorough and up-to-date information. (shrink)

Awjila Berber is a highly endangered Berber variety spoken in eastern Libya. The minimal material available on it reveals that the language is in some respects very archaic and in others grammatically unique, and as such is of particular comparative and historical interest. Fieldwork has been impossible for decades due to the political situation. Recently, however, several inhabitants of Awjila have set up a Facebook group Ašal=ənnax (“our village”), posting largely in Awjili. Analysis of this partly conversational corpus makes (...) it possible to extend our knowledge of the language, yielding unattested words and constructions. Examination of its grammatical features also reveals that these posters’ usage is heavily influenced by Arabic, showing language attrition absent from earlier data; even subject-verb agreement has been extensively reworked. In both respects, this study casts light upon the uses and limits of social media as a source of linguistic material. (shrink)

The contemporary world is a harsh environment for many languages and cultures. Globalisation is one of the powerful forces that are increasing the pressure on some languages to become extinct. The questions that, therefore, arise for Bible translation include: Does it still make sense to translate the Bible into languages that are being threatened by extinction? Are there perhaps certain indicators that should be present for the translation of the Bible into endangered languages to make sense and to possibly also (...) contribute towards the revival of languages that are being threatened by extinction? The discussion of these and related questions is not new but has to continue because the issues can be viewed from a variety of angles. This article is offered as a biblical theological exploration of the issues. It is, therefore, also a biblical theological motivation for Bible translation into endangered languages. The article argues that the existence of a growing church that is committed to the use of the Bible in a particular translation should be viewed as one of the critical indicators when assessing the merits of such translation projects.Contribution: The primary contribution of this article is that it approaches the issues pertaining to language endangerment from a biblical theological angle; and demonstrates that the issues regarding language endangerment are connected to the core of the Bible’s message. Language endangerment is one of the results of Adam’s fall into sin. God’s redemptive work will end language endangerment when God’s gracious work of saving creation and fallen humanity is consummated at Christ’s return. (shrink)

This work presents the structure, distribution and semantic interpretation of quantificational expressions in languages from diverse language families and typological profiles. The current volume pays special attention to underrepresented languages of different status and endangerment level. Languages covered include American and Russian Sign Languages, and sixteen spoken languages from Africa, Australia, Papua, the Americas, and different parts of Asia. The articles respond to a questionnaire the editors constructed to enable detailed crosslinguistic comparison of numerous features. They offer comparable (...) information on semantic classes of quantifiers (generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, partitive), syntactically complex quantifiers (intensive modification, Boolean compounds, exception phrases, et cetera), and several more specific issues such as quantifier scope ambiguities, floating quantifiers, and binary (type 2) quantifiers. The book is intended for semanticists, logicians interested in quantification in natural language, and general linguists as articles are meant to be descriptive and theory independent. The book continues and expands the coverage of the Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language (2012) by the same editors, and extends the earlier work in Matthewson (2008), Gil and others (2013) and Bach et al (1995). (shrink)

In Third Digital Documentary: A Theory and Practice of Transmedia Arts Activism, Critical Design and Ethics Anita Chang offers a theory and methodology of transmedia arts activism within the technocultural and sociopolitical landscape of expanded documentary production, distribution, reception and participation. Through a detailed analysis of her transmedia project on indigenous and minority language endangerment and revival that consists of the feature-length documentary Tongues of Heaven, and the companion web application Root Tongue: Sharing Stories of Language Identity (...) and Revival, she reveals the layers and depths that comprise a critical arts practice when confronted with complex sociopolitical issues while working with multiple communities across territorial/national boundaries. In the context of the growing field of transmedia documentaries, Chang discusses the potentials and benefits of a critical design practice and production ethics that can transform this field to pilot new collaborations in documentary and digital media platforms towards a third digital documentary. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn postcolonial countries the bilingual/bicultural elite played an undeniable role in the propagation of a modernist ideology about the nation and national identity. In Tunisia and in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, this ideology has been seriously challenged by opposing discourses. Focusing on newspaper articles published by Tunisian Francophones, this article investigates the discursive strategies employed by this group to defend this ideology and its emergent national identity. Analysis is based on an inventory of the referential/predicational strategies developed (...) within the Discourse Historical Approach to represent Self-Other identities [Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R.. Discourse and Discrimination. London: Routledge]. Findings indicated a staunch defense of a de-ethninicized, de-racialized, multilingual and secular Tunisia. Attributes of Arabism/islamism are consistently problematized; they are primitivized, religionized, de-intellectualized and negatively ideologized. By contrast, elements of Frenchness are championed on the basis of the modernist ideology they are thought to uphold. Frenchness is predicated on a continuum of Enlightenment, historicity, aesthetics,, religious reformism and economic progress. This triumphalist rhetoric is, however, undermined by a discourse of language endangerment whereby the Francophiles deplore the possible loss of French in Tunisia. It is argued that while Frenchness will survive as part of Tunisian national identity and discourse tradition due to its strong anchoring in many domains, it seems that this Frenchified modernist identity politics has been transformed into a version which disavows its politicized, contingent and debatable nature. (shrink)

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is the third edition of Chomsky's outstanding collection of essays on language and mind, first published in 2006. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory. This edition complements them with an additional chapter and a new preface, bringing Chomsky's influential approach into the twenty-first century. Chapters 1-6 present Chomsky's early work on the nature and acquisition of language as a genetically endowed, biological system, through the rules and principles (...) of which we acquire an internalized knowledge. Over the past fifty years, this framework has sparked an explosion of inquiry into a wide range of languages, and has yielded some major theoretical questions. The final chapter revisits the key issues, reviewing the 'biolinguistic' approach that has guided Chomsky's work from its origins to the present day, and raising some novel and exciting challenges for the study of language and mind. (shrink)

A dissertation in the tradition of logical positivism includes a discussion of the functions and methods of philosophy and a critique of ethics and theology.

Who a manager is, as a person of moral character, has been only of tangential interest in social science definitions of management, which have focused on functions, roles, behaviors, and environmental influences. But how do managers themselves speak of managerial excellence? This paper answers this for a particular corporation, based on a three-phased research process that deliberately imposes no descriptive or normative categories, but allows the answer to emerge, listening to what managers themselves say when discussing excellent managers and their (...) behaviors. This approach finds that: (1) virtue ethics and virtue language is fluently used by practicing managers, (2) virtue language is important to understanding managerial excellence, and (3) whereas the set of virtues defining the excellent manager can be expected to be dependent on the societal, industry, and organizational context, such a set of manager virtues can be identified and prioritized within a particular organizational milieu. The implication is that, once an organization's management better understands the meaning of the excellent manager in terms of the virtue language already used by its own employees, it is better equipped to implement a practical ethic of virtues, one helpful toward recognizing and developing excellent managers. Ethics researchers are challenged to increase their understanding of extant virtue language as the basis for a renewed development of virtue ethics theory and applications. (shrink)

Building on the author's earlier work, this paper argues that language is a key issue in understanding human emotions and that treating English emotion terms as valid analytical tools continues to be a roadblock in the study of emotions. Further, it shows how the methodology developed by the author and colleagues, known as NSM (from Natural Semantic Metalanguage), allows us to break free of the “shackles” (Barrett, 2006) of English psychological terms and explore human emotions from a culture-independent perspective. (...) The use of NSM makes it possible to study human emotions from a genuinely cross-linguistic and cross-cultural, as well as a psychological, perspective and thus “opens up new possibilities for the scientific understanding of subjectivity and psychological experience” (Goddard, 2007). (shrink)

This text is a translation of an article of B.L. Whorf “Language, mind and reality" (first published in 1941). The text was originally written for the journal Theosophist (India) during the last year of Whorf's life. The article contains a formulation of the principle of linguistic relativity that relates to the idea of that the world picture of a user of a language depends on the grammar of the language she is using. The article also contains a (...) critique of the Western science from Whorf's theosophist perspective. The paper was translated in Russian by Andrey A. Veretennikov. (shrink)

Andy Clark has argued that language is “in many ways the ultimate artifact” (Clark 1997, p.218). Fuelling this conclusion is a view according to which the human brain is essentially no more than a patterncompleting device, while language is an external resource which is adaptively fitted to the human brain in such a way that it enables that brain to exceed its unaided (pattern-completing) cognitive capacities, in much the same way as a pair of scissors enables us to (...) “exploit our basic manipulative capacities to fulfill new ends” (Clark 1997, pp.193-4). How should we respond to this bold reconceptualization of our linguistic abilities? First we need to understand it properly. So I begin by identifying and unpacking (and making a small “Heideggerian” amendment to) Clark’s main language-specific claims. That done I take a step back. Clark’s approach to language is generated from a theoretical perspective which sees cognition as distributed over brain, body, and world. So I continue my investigation of Clark’s incursion into linguistic territory by uncovering and illustrating those key ideas from the overall distributed cognition research programme which are particularly relevant in the present context. I then use this analysis as a spring-board from which to examine a crucial issue that arises for Clark’s account of language, namely linguistic inner rehearsal. I argue that while there is much to recommend in Clark’s treatment of this issue, some significant difficulties remain to be overcome. Via this critique of Clark’s position, alongside some proposals for how the revealed problems might be addressed, I hope to edge us that bit closer to a full understanding of our linguistic abilities. (shrink)

What constitutes our number concept? What makes it possible for us to employ numbers the way we do; which mental faculties contribute to our grasp of numbers? What do we share with other species, and what is specific to humans? How does our language faculty come into the picture? This 2003 book addresses these questions and discusses the relationship between numerical thinking and the human language faculty, providing psychological, linguistic and philosophical perspectives on number, its evolution and its (...) development in children. Heike Wiese argues that language as a human faculty plays a crucial role in the emergence of systematic numerical thinking. She characterises number sequences as powerful and highly flexible mental tools that are unique to humans and shows that it is language that enables us to go beyond the perception of numerosity and to develop such mental tools. (shrink)

Historically, interjections have been treated in two different ways: as part of language, or as non-words signifying feelings or states of mind. In this paper, I assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of two contemporary approaches that reflect the historical dichotomy, and suggest a new analysis which preserves the insights of both. Interjections have a natural and a coded element, and are better analysed as falling at various points along a continuum between ‘showing’ and ‘saying’. These two notions are (...) characterised in theoretical terms, and some implications of the proposed approach are considered. (shrink)

Historically, interjections have been treated in two different ways: as part of language, or as non-words signifying feelings or states of mind. In this paper, I assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of two contemporary approaches that reflect the historical dichotomy, and suggest a new analysis which preserves the insights of both. Interjections have a natural and a coded element, and are better analysed as falling at various points along a continuum between `showing' and `saying'. These two notions are (...) characterised in theoretical terms, and some implications of the proposed approach are considered. (shrink)

A philosophical refashioning of the Language of Thought approach and the related computational theory of mind.

I demonstrate that a "speech act" theory of meaning for imperatives is—contra a dominant position in philosophy and linguistics—theoretically desirable. A speech act-theoretic account of the meaning of an imperative !φ is characterized, broadly, by the following claims. -/- LINGUISTIC MEANING AS USE !φ’s meaning is a matter of the speech act an utterance of it conventionally functions to express—what a speaker conventionally uses it to do (its conventional discourse function, CDF). -/- IMPERATIVE USE AS PRACTICAL !φ's CDF is to (...) express a practical (non-representational) state of mind—one concerning an agent's preferences and plans, rather than her beliefs. -/- Opposed to speech act accounts is a preponderance of views which deny that a sentence's linguistic meaning is a matter of what speech act it is used to perform, or its CDF. On such accounts, meaning is, instead, a matter of "static" properties of the sentence—e.g., how it depicts the world as being (or, more neutrally, the properties of a model-theoretic object with which the semantic value of the sentence co-varies). On one version of a static account, an imperative 'shut the window!' might, for instance, depict the world as being such that the window must be shut. -/- Static accounts are traditionally motivated against speech act-theoretic accounts by appeal to supposedly irremediable explanatory deficiencies in the latter. Whatever a static account loses in saying (prima facie counterintuitively) that an imperative conventionally represents, or expresses a picture of the world, is said to be offset by its ability to explain a variety of phenomena for which speech act-theoretic accounts are said to lack good explanations (even, in many cases, the bare ability to offer something that might meet basic criteria on what a good explanation should be like). -/- I aim to turn the tables on static accounts. I do this by showing that speech act accounts are capable of giving explanations of phenomena which fans of static accounts have alleged them unable to give. Indeed, for a variety of absolutely fundamental phenomena having to do with the conventional meaning of imperatives (and other types of practical language), speech act accounts provide natural and theoretically satisfying explanations, where a representational account provides none. (shrink)

It is often said that the best system account of laws (BSA) needs supplementing with a theory of perfectly natural properties. The ‘strength’ and ‘simplicity’ of a system is language-relative and without a fixed vocabulary it is impossible to compare rival systems. Recently a number of philosophers have attempted to reformulate the BSA in an effort to avoid commitment to natural properties. I assess these proposals and argue that they are problematic as they stand. Nonetheless, I agree with their (...) aim, and show that if simplicity is interpreted as ‘compression’, algorithmic information theory provides a framework for system comparison without the need for natural properties.A menudo se dice que la explicación de las leyes del mejor sistema (BSA) requiere ser completada con una teoría de las propiedades perfectamente naturales. La ‘fuerza’ y la ‘simplicidad’ de un sistema son relativas a un lenguaje y sin un vocabulario fijo es imposible comparar sistemas rivales. Recientemente, varios filósofos han intentado reformular la BSA en un esfuerzo por evitar el compromiso con las propiedades naturales. Aquí valoro estas propuestas y argumento que son problemáticas en su forma actual. Sin embargo, comparto su objetivo y muestro que si la simplicidad es interpretada como ‘compresion’, la teoría algoritmica de la información proporciona un marco para la comparación sin necesidad de apelar a propiedades naturales. (shrink)

It is often said that the best system account of laws needs supplementing with a theory of perfectly natural properties. The ‘strength’ and ‘simplicity’ of a system is language-relative and without a fixed vocabulary it is impossible to compare rival systems. Recently a number of philosophers have attempted to reformulate the BSA in an effort to avoid commitment to natural properties. I assess these proposals and argue that they are problematic as they stand. Nonetheless, I agree with their aim, (...) and show that if simplicity is interpreted as ‘compression’, algorithmic information theory provides a framework for system comparison without the need for natural properties. (shrink)

Toni Morrison suggests that storytelling is a highly effective way of structuring knowledge, and that the harnessing of a clever allegory, the search for well-patterned language is a constant, provocative engagement with the contemporary world. This article considers the ways poetry, imagination, and well-patterned language are utilized in the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Rorty, and Leonard Harris. The author notes that there are apparent similarities between Rorty and Harris, but one should also notice that there are (...) significant differences in these two philosophical positions. The author ultimately argues that Harris's move toward poetry and well-patterned language is extremely powerful and needed if people wish to move beyond a well-established set of values and norms. Harris prods us to tell thought-provoking, engaging stories—to intricately tuck knowledge into allegory and well-patterned language—but do it without being an apologist for the prevailing bourgeois liberal democratic tradition. In this manner, the harnessing of metaphor and clever allegory, the creative engagement with poetry and well-patterned language (in philosophy) is a provocative means of engaging the oppression, dispossession, and immiseration of the contemporary world. (shrink)

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

‘Language and End Time’ is a translation of Sections I, IV and V of ‘Sprache und Endzeit’, a substantial essay by Günther Anders that was published in eight instalments in the Austrian journal FORVM from 1989 to 1991. The original essay was planned for inclusion in the third volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings. ‘Language and End Time’ builds on the diagnosis of ‘our blindness toward the apocalypse’ that was advanced in the first volume of The Obsolescence (...) in 1956. The essay asks if there is a language that is capable of making us fully comprehend the looming ‘man-made apocalypse’. In response to this, it offers a critique of philosophical jargon and of the putatively ‘objective’ language of science, which are both dismissed as unsuitable. Sections I, IV and V introduce this core problematic. The selection of this text for inclusion in this special journal issue responds to present-day realities that inscribe Anders’s reflections on nuclear science and the nuclear situation into new contexts. The critique that ‘Language and End Time’ advances resonates with the way in which the decisions of a few companies and individuals are shaping the future of life on earth. At the same time, the wider stakes of Anders’s turn against the language employed by scientists are newly laid bare by the realities and politics of climate change and fake news. In this new context, the language of science is all too readily dismissed as if it were a mere idiom that can be ignored without consequence. It is against the backdrop of a future that is, if anything, more uncertain than at the time of Anders’s writing, that the essay’s reflections on popularisation, the limits of language and the nature of truth gain added significance. (shrink)

Philosophy’s place, at the intersection of the scientific and humanities disciplines, makes it an interesting test case for the role of English and other languages and cultures in our contemporary knowledge economy. The humanities’ attention to the richness of the world’s languages and cultures is in tension with the science’s essentially cosmopolitan project. This tension is perhaps especially evident in ‘analytic’ or ‘Anglo-American’ philosophy. Despite complementarity in earlier stages of the discipline, the humanities and scientific tendencies are now clashing with (...) undesirable results. This is in an important part due to analytic philosophy’s underexamined focus on a single vehicular language. One symptom of this malaise is that the voices of non-native-speaking philosophers are significantly less heard than those of native speakers. Especially problematic is, I argue, the current emphasis given to aesthetic considerations, and in particular linguistic form or style, as a sign of scientific rigour in the analysis of philosophical problems. I discuss this emphasis critically, arguing that it is not justifiable, in part because it deprives contemporary analytic philosophy of a wider variety of philosophical perspectives arising from different languages and cultures. I conclude by briefly presenting a recent attempt to make contemporary philosophy more linguistically inclusive. (shrink)

Derrida’s autobiographical and philosophical text Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin is a partial recounting of his own childhood and upbringing in Algeria at a time when it was a colony of France. It is on one level a reflection on matters related to colonialism, and especially on the effects of the imposition of colonial language upon schooling and wider practices of education and coming into the world. Yet Derrida’s text also opens onto structural questions about (...) estrangement, unsettledness and Unheimlichkeit such as they pertain to and characterise life in language more generally. This paper puts Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other into relation with contemporary discussions of multilingualism and language learning in the context of the global education agenda. The result, as we shall see, is the destabilising of assumptions that underpin multilingualism and the global education agenda and foreclose their democratic and ethical aims. At the same time, as we shall also see, Derrida’s text opens ways in which the education of language subjects can be reconstructed in relation to a new conception of ethics and the humanities. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's notoriously elusive later writings are dominated by remarks on language. However, while the textual analysis of Wittgenstein's writings is presently a booming industry, the tendency is to focus narrowly on exegetical matters with little attention to their bearing on philosophy at large. Moreover, one finds in contemporary philosophy of language various ideas with a distinctively Wittgensteinian ring to them but whose pedigree is uncertain. This volume brings together distinguished Wittgenstein scholars and renowned philosophers of language (...) in order to examine just what Wittgenstein has to say about language and to assess its significance for current philosophy. The topics discussed include the connection between the meaning of a word and its use, the bearing the context of utterance has on how words are to be understood, the role of rules in the employment of language and whether Wittgenstein's reflections on these issues encourage sceptical or relativist thoughts."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)