Functional Dimensions of Ape-Human Discourse

Functional Dimensions of Ape-Human Discourse
Author: Pamela J. Benson
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010-06-13
Genre: Bonobo
ISBN: 9781845536534

Functional Dimensions of Ape-Human Discourse asks the question 'what do interactions between apes and humans mediated by language tell us?'. In order to answer this question the authors explore language-in-context, drawing on a multi-leveled, multi-functional linguistics. The levels are context of culture, context of situation, semantics, lexicogrammar, and phonology; and the functions are ideational, interpersonal, and textual. Chapter One discusses a negotiation between the bonobo Kanzi and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh in terms of discourse-semantics and the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions of lexicogrammar. Chapter Two reinterprets Sue Savage-Rumbaugh et. al. Language Comprehension in Ape and Child (1993) in terms of the ideational metafunction, and provides corroborative evidence for Kanzi's symbolic processing abilities, opening a window into the consciousness of at least one non-human primate. Chapter Three compares three snapshots from comprehensive studies based on large amounts of data (monkey calls, language development in a human child, and a dialogue between Kanzi's sibling Panbanisha and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh) from an evolutionary perspective, showing different ways in which the level of grammar comes to be wedged in between semantics and expression. Chapter Four articulates a methodology incorporating public domain software for the comprehensive analysis of ape-human interaction. Although bonobo-human interaction is used as an example, the methodology could be utilized for studies of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans.

Semiotic Margins

Semiotic Margins
Author: Shoshana Dreyfus
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2011-02-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1441173226

A systemic functional linguistics study analysing how a wide range of modalities, other than language, make and communicate meaning. >

The World Told and the World Shown

The World Told and the World Shown
Author: Eija Ventola
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2009-10-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 023024534X

Positioned within the field of linguistics and multisemiotic discourse analysis, the theme of this book is the multifaceted interaction between text and image in different discourse genres, and it offers critical views on how we talk and show our experience of the world around us.

Biosocial Evolutionary Analysis

Biosocial Evolutionary Analysis
Author: Jonathan H. Turner
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2024-01-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1035310007

This authoritative book proposes a methodological and theoretical strategy for developing sociological explanations of the socio-cultural universe. Jonathan H. Turner and Alexandra Maryanski discuss the problems that persist in explaining the socio-cultural universe using only biological and psychological approaches and outline new strategies for understanding the evolution of human beings and their biological nature.

The Prehistory of Language

The Prehistory of Language
Author: Rudolf Botha
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2009-04-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199545871

Prominent linguists, cognitive scientists, archaeologists, primatologists, anthropologists, and natural scientists examine issues and advances in understanding language evolution, ranging from the co-evolution of language and music to the evolutionary biology of language. An important and stylish contribution to a fascinating area of research.

Homo Symbolicus

Homo Symbolicus
Author: Christopher S. Henshilwood
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2011-11-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9027284091

The emergence of symbolic culture, classically identified with the European cave paintings of the Ice Age, is now seen, in the light of recent groundbreaking discoveries, as a complex nonlinear process taking root in a remote past and in different regions of the planet. In this book the archaeologists responsible for some of these new discoveries, flanked by ethologists interested in primate cognition and cultural transmission, evolutionary psychologists modelling the emergence of metarepresentations, as well as biologists, philosophers, neuro-scientists and an astronomer combine their research findings. Their results call into question our very conception of human nature and animal behaviour, and they create epistemological bridges between disciplines that build the foundations for a novel vision of our lineage's cultural trajectory and the processes that have led to the emergence of human societies as we know them.

The Bloomsbury Companion to M. A. K. Halliday

The Bloomsbury Companion to M. A. K. Halliday
Author: Jonathan J. Webster
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2015-02-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1441197583

The Bloomsbury Companion to M. A. K. Halliday is a comprehensive and accessible reference resource to one of the world's leading and most influential linguists. Born in 1925, Halliday is the figure most responsible for the development of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The impact of his work extends beyond linguistics, into the study of stylistics, computation linguistics, visual narrative and multimodal communication. He is considered a founder of the field of social semiotics. Written by leading figures in the field, the volume provides readers with an authoritative overview of his early career, his most important theoretical findings and how his work has influenced linguistics as a discipline. From the publishers of his 'Collected Works' and 'The Essential Halliday', this is another must have book underlining Halliday's era-defining impact on the field of linguistics.

Halliday in the 21st Century

Halliday in the 21st Century
Author: M.A.K. Halliday
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-12-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1623567157

This is the eleventh volume in Professor M.A.K. Halliday's Collected Works. First published as a 10 volume set from 2002 to 2007, they have shown the sizeable and growing international interest across a number of disciplines in the systemic functional linguistics framework. Halliday's powerful theoretical approach to the study of language has contributed significantly not only to advances in our knowledge of how language works but also how linguistic insights may be practically applied across a wide spectrum of social concerns.

On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection

On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection
Author: Jonathan H. Turner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2015-11-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317255097

Kinship, religion, and economy were not "natural" to humans, nor to species of apes that had to survive on the African savanna. Society from its very beginnings involved an uneasy necessity that often stood in conflict with humans' ape ancestry; these tensions only grew along with later, more complex-eventually colossal-sociocultural systems. The ape in us was not extinguished, nor obviated, by culture; indeed, our ancestry continues to place pressures on individuals and their sociocultural creations. Not just an exercise in history, this pathbreaking book dispels many myths about the beginning of society to gain new understandings of the many pressures on societies today.