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Title: The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar by Mark C. Baker ISBN: 0-465-00522-5 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 08 October, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (7 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: The Excitement of Dry Categorization
Comment: The title of the book comes from the realization that the syntax of languages may be composed of true elements, like atoms which can normally combine only in particular ways so that certain kinds of langauges will not occur, or will do so for only for a short time before decomposing into a more stable type of language.
Linguists are still in the process of identifying these atoms and Baker is giving a popular account of the current state of investigation.
Mark C. Baker explains modern attempts to break down and categorize language by its syntax and by binary parameters that work thoughout each language providing rules that people following unconsciously in generating new utterances within any particular language.
He demonstrates that languages can be catagorized according to particular parameters which don't appear to have ANY relationship to the culture of the people speaking the language. For example, in building phrases within phrases most languages consistantly add new elements to phrases to create a larger phrase either always at the begnning of the smaller phrase or always at the end.
This seems to refute beliefs that differences in languages indicate fundamental differences in world views. Factually people of almost identical culture live side by side speaking languages that differ drastically syntactically.
So languages seemingly do NOT vary from each other in unlimited ways. Therefore there MUST be rules about what does and does not NORMALLY happen and presumably rules to the exceptions and to the exceptions to the exceptions.
These rules would be innate in human consciousness and would provide the foundations on which the actual syntax of a languages is based.
Languages can be classified syntactically according to type and sub-type and so forth entirely independantly of any genelogical relationships between them.
Baker's writing is lucid and transparent and he lets his subject matter and the puzzles it presents carry the excitement in the book.
Rating: 4
Summary: prett good introduction to linguistics
Comment: Language has always been of interest to me. In Baker's book, Atoms of Language, he compares linguistics to chemistry looking at patterns of words, syntax and verbs to show how languages can be grouped together. If we know that languages follow certain orders, then we know they follow others as well. He examines different groups of languages such as polysnthetic languages and different basic word order types such as subject-verb-object and verb-subject-object languages, those than can make verbs out of adjectives and so forth.
Rating: 3
Summary: If you like crossword puzzles you'll like this book
Comment: Baker looks for (and claims to have found) the fundamental elements of all language that can account for the apparently enormous differences among languages. The fact that people are kept apart by language is a perplexing mystery. We all share so much of life's experience, it seems outrageous that we are Balkanized by language into almost mutually exclusive cultures. Any clue to overcoming that absurd fact of the human condition would be welcome. Baker distinguishes well between the surface expression of language and the Chomskyan "deep structures." I read with interest and anticipation until about halfway through when the author confessed that he treats language purely as a formal system. That means he looks at it as a closed set of rules, like the rules of chess or Morse code, so that understanding and explanation of languages are taken as mere logical puzzles. What a disappointment! As a psychologist, I am convinced that language is a cognitive process, an expression of our mental faculties and our experience in the world. Language is not a self-contained logical puzzle, and the only way we will ever understand it is to connect it to experience. In the end, Baker's book is an exercise in puzzle-solving for the sake of puzzle-solving. His concluding list of universal language parameters, while clever and impressive in their own right, lack "psychological validity" and leave us no more able to scale the tower of Babel.
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Title: Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution by Ray Jackendoff ISBN: 0198270127 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: March, 2002 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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Title: On Nature and Language by Noam Chomsky, Adriana Belletti, Luigi Rizzi ISBN: 052101624X Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 10 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: The Power of Babel : A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter ISBN: 006052085X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Language Instinct : How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker ISBN: 0060958332 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 07 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language by Steven Pinker ISBN: 0060958405 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 15 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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