Books about Language

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521559677/qid=1044305430/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3_3/026-5101041-0610836

also recommended by Amazon alngside this offering:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005M0WC/qid=1044305430/sr=10-/ref=sr_10_3_/026-5101041-0610836

Ferdinand de Saussure was executive producer, apparently.

That should get you started. McWhorter is pretty far-flung & entertaining, Bryson deals with English specifically (but compares it to lots of other languages along the way) and Ruhlen is pretty academic about it.

Words in the mind: An introduction to the mental lexicon. 3rd edition (1st edition 1987). Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 2003.

Language change: Progress or decay? 3rd edition (1st edition1981). Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

The articulate mammal: An introduction to psycholinguistics.4th edition (1st edition 1976). London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

The language web: The power and problem of words. 1996 BBC Reith lectures. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

The seeds of speech: Language origin and evolution. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (Also, with new extended introduction, in C.U.P. Canto series, 2000.)

historically, my favourite (better than Saussure, and not just for political reasons) is "Marxism and the Philosophy of Langauge" by V.N. Volosinov

i have a question, a kind of unformed question, & couldn't decide whether to use a language thread or the rolling philosophy thread. i think it's about linguistics but that i need to read some theory. & i'm posting this in a book thread but maybe i would just go read the affiliated wikipedia articles, if anybody had any guidance.

i get pretty lost in language, or maybe in the kind of reasoning that arises from its constructs. there was a new yorker piece recently, a memoir, by a guy whose mother was deaf, the guy discussing the ways in which this was socially limiting & the other ways in which she socially excelled. & one of the things he talked about as a deficit, the woman having been raised without sign languages or anything else 'replacing' speech in her education, was her logical reasoning, whether she could syllogise or work within linguistic frameworks. i'm so undereducated about the mechanics of language & the degree to which it differs from, & rearranges, thought. or what thought is underneath language. i don't know who the Theory Guys are for this. i think myself into corners & then remember that the corner is created just by the implicit logic of constructed sentences, rather than anything more natural or real. like it's limiting as well as it's permitting. i know how vague i'm being. maybe i can blame ... language. but does anyone know the first thing i should be googling or reading, to explore this? does anybody know which subject area this is?

rather than throw book titles at you, or theorists, maybe we can narrow in on your particular question.

i'm so undereducated about the mechanics of language & the degree to which it differs from, & rearranges, thought. or what thought is underneath language.

are you interested in the notion of a pre-linguistic consciousness? or more how does language effect/shape/dictate the direction of thought and even what it is possible to think? and this is understanding "language" in distinction from systems of power, history, etc. which may or may not determine it?

aside from language, you can also have more general questions about sign making (ie, semiotics or "communication theory") which would, i should think, include logic.

writing on my cell, so further truncating an articulate rendering of all this, but those are such useful parameters: thanks, ryan. & yeah i think i do specifically mean the second thing: how it dictates thought, & maybe how the limits of language maybe control or restrict outcomes. it feels that way to me, anyway, that there's maybe a dissatisfaction or a tension that arises between the tidy resolution affored by logic, or eg syllogisms, & then something underlying that's different from those things, or just that reflects the one-dimensionality of logic. i would imagine there are illuminating comparisons between languages in terms of what they permit or give weight to, but i think i must be thinking about a part that resists language & rejects it as irrelevant sometimes. i feel like maybe what we can work towards here is just some kind of chomsky-centric google search string madlib.

my sense for what you're after is less language qua language than something more like the ever-in-question distinction between language and consciousness. of course that problem gets resolved any number of ways in the history of philosophy, not least of which is the "subject," of course.

if you're interested in how communication systems are constructed/deconstructed (ie, how to think yourself into something and then out of it) I can't recommend niklas luhmann enough. that's a big hill to climb, though. however, for something like an intro he has an essay called, I think, "how does the mind communicate" which is both pretty rigorous and beautifully elliptical.

a possibly obscure and definitely old book by anthony wilden called "system and structure" is also a favorite. sort of a synthesis of lacan and cybernetics (ie, bateson).

Bateson being the "first order" systems theory of which Luhmann is the "second order" revision.

ah it's "how can the mind participate in communication."

hey schlump, spitballing here: it sounds like what you're interested in usually falls under

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

aka 'sapir-whorf hypothesis' in linguistics and related fields like psychology and cognitive science.

part of the interest in the early analytic philosophy mentioned in that article in the issue of whether thought is constituted by language had to do with philosophy's traditional interest in the theory of judgment or in forms of judgment. a lot of traditional thought about that was guided by essentially linguistic hints: if you look at aristotle's 'categories' (where he works up a set of the fundamental distinctions in terms of which we talk about the world, say how things really are, speak the truth etc) you will find an argument that starts out from certain facts about the grammatical structures of simple assertive sentences like 'socrates is pale' to end up making the kinds of distinctions that run through e.g. early modern philosophy (descartes to kant, say) like 'substance' and 'property' and 'quality' and 'quantity' and such. aristotle's analysis of syllogistic reasoning relies on a similar way of conceiving relations among things (i.e. relations between judgments about things), and for a long time it and complementary developments like stoic logic were basically regarded as determining a standard of good reasoning.

some of the interest in modern logic during the development of early analytic philosophy had to do with the prospects of using it to effect clearer distinctions between language or essentially linguistic structures, and the principles governing sound reasoning. basically, it looked like they finally had a way of getting behind language so that the traditional problems about the nature of reality etc etc could be framed in the appropriate way.

(results were inconclusive)

(a similar spiel could be given for continental philosophers from kant, or pre-kant, up through heidegger and after. e.g. it is a recurring theme in nietzsche, though not obviously worked out or in effect in clear ways, that language serves the needs of social and animal communication / accomodation first and foremost and that thought follows language in that regard, to dumbening moralizing effect. thought is always something darker/deeper for him, probably because of its connection with his idea of what 'drives' and thus human beings are.)

there were big changes, obviously, with the more intensive focus on actual language and actual reasoning that all the new postwar sciences made possible. then the issues have more to do with how you ultimately construe scientific models of human behavior, human thought, human language etc. as a matter of information processing, symbol manipulation, neural adaptation, etc. i know very little about the details but it seems to me like the more scientific a question it becomes, the more deferred and diffuse any answer ('is thought linguistic?' etc.) becomes. if i wanted to start educating myself i would probably begin with kahneman's 'thinking, fast and slow', whose overlap (via psychology, behavioral economics, rational choice theory etc.) with the older traditions i mentioned would come in the (unmentioned) stuff on habit and probable/probabilistic reasoning you can find in the early moderns and also running back in some form to plato and other skeptical schools. (basically: if habitual judgments are expressed linguistically—seems apt and convenient—then their liabilities would have to do with evidence we don't yet have, things we haven't yet noticed, things we can't perceive, things our current judgments blind us to, desires and needs which bias our judgments or lead us to act prematurely, etc. etc., i.e. all sorts of ways in which unthought realities—plausibly not essentially linguistic ones—are apt to reinstate the same fundamental question as before, from the obviously language-logic focused part of the tradition.)

that's great stuff j.! may check out the kahneman myself.

hey, j. & r: i can't say thank you enough for this. i've amassed some of what's mentioned & have it in front of me, or waiting at the library to somehow at least smuggle out before i graduate. the ta-nehisi coates piece got me kinda waylaid last night but i'm so hyped to dig into this all. i remember it took me several years between starting & finishing a hito steyerl essay, i have a hard time with the a/rhythm of theory, but thinking of the luhmann piece as something to bounce myself against however productively feels enriching. & i've been tiptoeing around the kahneman book since reading the intro in a bookstore. promise to bump this thread once i've entirely solved all problems raised by these texts.

I actually went to check on that luhmann essay to see if it's not too inside baseball, but my copy is back in texas. anyway--inside baseball or not he says some typically provocative things that'll give you some food for thought even if the rest recedes in a theoretical fog.

thing is, I don't know if there's a "right answer" here, so I would kind of just take the philistine approach of telling you read philosophers who make you think and write in a style that appeals to you... hell I dug Rousseau on 'Origins of Language' even if it contained obvious absurdities like the binary of north/cold/scarcity/logic vs. south/warmth/abundance/poetry

also, just speaking for myself, I sometimes feel as if I learned a lot (and I mean A LOT) more from certain 20th-century poets than I did from philosophers... the liminal 'concepts' involved in trying to define the scope of linguistic consciousness are so damnably slippery that one often needs a strong image to hang them on, like Wallace Stevens' first hundred flakes of snow / Out of a storm we must endure all night (from "Man Carrying Thing")

Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is an obvious suggestion but you should still read it. hell, so should I!