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PODCAST

New Books in Language

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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All Episodes

32:05

Liora R. Halperin, “Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism,...

New Books in Language ·

2015/09/10

In Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (Yale University Press, 2015), Liora R. Halperin, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, argues that multilingualism persisted in Palestine after World War I despite the traditional narrative of the swift victory of Hebrew. Halperin looks at the intertwined nature of language, identity, and nationalism, and how language was a key

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62:42

Chad Engelland, “Ostension: Word Learning and the...

New Books in Language ·

2015/08/14

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 an object and associate that object with a word? Chad Engelland addresses these and related questions in Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 2015). Engelland, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, explores the way in which ostension crosses the Cartesian boundary between body and mind. Drawing on

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63:46

Colin McGinn, “Philosophy of Language: the Classics...

New Books in Language ·

2015/05/28

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 rely on the opinions of people who have read it. The danger is that the received wisdom can sometimes be unreliable, for one reason or another, either making something accessible sound rarefied, or making something subtle and elusive sound banal, or both. In his book, Philosophy of Language: the Classics Explained (MIT Press, 2015), Colin McGinn sets

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64:48

Terence Cuneo, “Speech and Morality: On the...

New Books in Language ·

2015/01/01

It is widely accepted that in uttering sentences we sometimes perform distinctive kinds of acts. We declare, assert, challenge, question, corroborate by means of speech; sometimes we also use speech to perform acts such as promising, commanding, judging, pronouncing, and christening. Yet it seems that in order to perform an act of, say, promising, one must have a certain kind of normative status; at the very least, one must be accountable. Similarly, in order to issue a command, one must, in some

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56:09

Thom Scott-Phillips, “Speaking Our Minds” (Palgrave...

New Books in Language ·

2014/12/13

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 one of the “major transitions in evolution”, placing it in exalted company alongside the evolution of multicellularity, sociality, sexual reproduction, and various other preoccupations of ours. But the nature of the transition is hotly disputed: is there a sudden shift involving the emergence of complex syntax, or is the process more gradual and

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49:06

Ruth Finnegan, “Communicating: the Multiple Modes of...

New Books in Language ·

2014/09/14

The name of the New Books in Language channel might hint at a disciplinary bias towards “language”. So in some sense Ruth Finnegan‘s Communicating: the Multiple Modes of Human Communication (2nd edition; Routledge, 2014) is a departure: central to her approach is the idea that, within a broader view of human communication, language (in the linguistic sense of the word) is over-emphasised. The book sets out many more ingredients to communication, spanning the gamut of sensory modalities (and hinting

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68:40

David Adger, “A Syntax of Substance” (MIT Press, 2013)

New Books in Language ·

2014/04/26

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 Syntax of Substance (MIT Press, 2013), David Adger tackles this question, as well as others that are just as fundamental to the way we think about syntax. The book takes nouns to specify “substances”, and Adger defends the view that nouns, unlike verbs, never take arguments. Moreover, he marshals evidence to show that some of the constituents that have been

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53:33

Vershawn Young et al., “Other People’s English”...

New Books in Language ·

2014/04/15

In linguistics, we all happily and glibly affirm that there is no “better” or “worse” among languages (or dialects, or varieties), although we freely admit that people have irrational prejudices about them. But what do we do about those prejudices? And what do we think the speakers of low-status varieties of language should do to overcome them? Take the case of African American English. An influential approach, code-switching, advises teachers to help their AAE-speaking students to identify the

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53:08

Alistair Knott, “Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural...

New Books in Language ·

2014/01/28

When big claims are made about neurolinguistics, there often seems to be a subtext that the latest findings will render traditional linguistics obsolete. These claims are often met with appropriate scepticism by experienced linguistics practitioners, either because experience tells them not to believe the hype, or (in a few cases) because they were already obsolete and were managing just fine anyway. Alistair Knott‘s claim in Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax (MIT Press, 2012) is

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61:36

David Bleich, “The Materiality of Language: Gender,...

New Books in Language ·

2013/11/07

David Bleich‘s book The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics and the University (Indiana University Press, 2013) is described as a wide-ranging critique of academic practice, which is almost an understatement. From the point of view of someone working in linguistics as (at least in principle) a scientific discipline, his thesis is interesting and provocative. He argues forcefully for the relevance of language, construed as a material entity, across a wide range of disciplines (and to life in

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52:34

Rodney H. Jones, “Health and Risk Communication: An...

New Books in Language ·

2013/09/25

Scientists – and I claim to include myself in this category – sometimes seem to be disparaging about the ability of people in general to understand and act upon quantitative data, such as information about risk in the medical domain. There’s also an extensive literature on humans’ irrationality. And it’s grist to the mill when we notice people engaging in wantonly risky behaviour in the face of sound medical or scientific advice. Rodney H. Jones persuasively challenges this analysis of ‘irrational’

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52:29

Anne Cutler, “Native Listening: Language Experience...

New Books in Language ·

2013/07/01

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 have to try to press on with it. Under those conditions, although I get used to it, I can’t help wondering whether the result will make sense to an outside listener. I mention this now because Anne Cutler‘s book, Native Listening: Language Experience and the Recognition of Spoken Words (MIT Press, 2012), is an eloquent and compelling justification of my

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56:12

Patrick Hanks, “Lexical Analysis: Norms and...

New Books in Language ·

2013/06/10

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 after round of bloody internecine strife. For better or worse, as Patrick Hanks makes clear in Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations (MIT Press, 2013), this is no longer true: lexicographers must respond to theoretical and practical pressures from lexical semantics, and this lexicographer has very interesting things to say about that discipline

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66:43

Perry Link, “An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor,...

New Books in Language ·

2013/05/13

Rhythm, metaphor, politics: these three features of language simultaneously enable us to communicate with each other and go largely unnoticed in the course of that communication. In An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Harvard University Press, 2013), Perry Link mobilizes more than three decades of reading, writing, listening, and speaking in the service of a profoundly transdisciplinary exploration of the particular anatomy of the Chinese language within the larger species of human

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64:15

Jonathan Bobaljik, “Universals of Comparative...

New Books in Language ·

2013/05/06

Morphology is sometimes painted as the ‘here be dragons’ of the linguistic map: a baffling domain of idiosyncrasies and irregularities, in which Heath Robinson contraptions abound and anything goes. In his new book, Universals of Comparative Morphology: Suppletion, Superlatives, and the Structure of Words (MIT Press, 2012), Jonathan Bobaljik reassesses the terrain, and argues that there are hard limits on the extent to which languages can vary in the morphological domain. The book is a comparative

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62:38

Stephen E. Nadeau, “The Neural Architecture of...

New Books in Language ·

2013/04/13

Although there seems to be a trend towards linguistic theories getting more cognitively or neurally plausible, there doesn’t seem to be an imminent prospect of a reconciliation between linguistics and neuroscience. Network models of various aspects of language have often been criticised as theoretically simplistic, custom-made to solve a single problem (such as past tense marking), and/or abandoning their neurally-inspired roots. In The Neural Architecture of Grammar (MIT Press, 2012), Stephen

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61:42

Nick J. Enfield, “The Anatomy of Meaning: Speech,...

New Books in Language ·

2013/01/16

Linguists are apt to get excited when a language is identified that exhibits exotic properties, and gladly travel halfway round the world to document it, particularly if they think it’s going to support a pet theory of theirs. Nick Enfield‘s fieldwork in Laos differs from this paradigm in at least three respects. First, his choice of location reflects a prior interest in the culture of the region; second, the object of his study is gesture rather than just speech; and third, it’s quite possible that

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54:22

Tony Veale, “Exploding the Creativity Myth: The...

New Books in Language ·

2012/12/03

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 instead of doing something demonstrably useful. From this perspective, it’s tempting to think of “computers”, “language” and “creativity” as the constituents of a literary behemoth that writes that brilliant novel, and a million others besides, only in seconds and for no money, while human authors starve in their garrets. The future as envisaged by

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61:16

Sherry Simon, “Cities in Translation: Intersections...

New Books in Language ·

2012/08/22

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 less positive, particularly if we automatically think of cities whose linguistic divisions echo the political or religious divisions between two communities unable to communicate. In Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (Routledge, 2012), however, Sherry Simon develops an account of how civic plurilingualism can be a powerful

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55:13

Sam Leith, “Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from...

New Books in Language ·

2012/07/03

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 similarity is their scepticism about high-flown rhetoric as a tool used to pull the wool over the eyes of the common man. One possible difference is whether they respond to this with sound logical reasoning or with an ‘anti-rhetorical’ rhetorical attack of their own. Sam Leith’s book Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama (Basic

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