Helping me to round out my summer vacation were the following books:
The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (John McWhorter, 2003)
This is similar to Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language, but focuses less on the mechanics of language change and more on the sociolinguistic factors which influence the evolution of languages. McWhorter spends less time than Deutscher discussing ancient languages, but has more pop culture references (apparently he’s a big fan of television). It’s an informative read, and I think a good prelude to my upcoming class on language contact between the Native Americans and Europeans. Unfortunately, McWhorter is no longer a professor at Berkeley, having given up tenure in favor of working at a conservative think tank.
Chapter Summary »
Prologue: Introduction to language change, and assertion that all languages most likely developed from a single Mother Language.
1) Principles of language change. This covers, very briefly, the bulk of the material in Deutscher’s book. McWhorter classifies changes as follows: Sound change; Extension (analogy); Expressiveness; Rebracketing (reanalysis of structure); and Semantic Change (drift of meaning, e.g. via reanalysis). Disappointingly, McWhorter fails to even mention metaphor. (And he was in the same department as George Lakoff? For shame. 
)
2) Dialects. Mostly a lengthy explanation “Why Dialects Are All There Is”–i.e. why from a strictly linguistic perspective, the slow nature of language change leaves no clear indicator of when a divergent dialect becomes its own language.
3) Language mixture. Borrowing and intertwined languages.
4) Pidginization & Creolization.
5) Complexity. “The Incredible Overzealousness of Language”—how more or less random changes gradually make a language more and more ornate, filling it with inflections and other such bells and whistles which are, strictly speaking, unnecessary for effective communication. An exception to this complexity: creoles, because they’re like newly-born languages. Interestingly enough, typologies of creoles are very consistent compared with more “mature” languages—they almost never have inflection or tones, regardless of the creole’s parent languages.
An example of a language in the “So Complex There’s No Point in Bothering Trying to Learn It” category is Fula. One quirk of Fula is that consonant changes accompanying affixation can leave inflected forms of words virtually unrecognizable—check out the following not-so-minimal pair, allegedly not particularly exceptional in the language (common root in bold):
| waa-ndu yeet-uru |
‘a living monkey’ |
| baa-ngel geet-el |
‘a little living monkey’ |
6) Writing. How written languagues change more slowly than nonwritten ones; how a written form of a language is different from the spoken variety (duh) and tends to be popularly regarded as the “real” language.
7) Language endangerment, death, and revival.
Epilogue: Mostly spent refuting the claim that it’s possible to reconstruct words from the Mother of All Languages by comparing words in many unrelated languages, this section ends by pointing out some of the features it was likely to have based on the features of creoles.
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (Steven Pinker, 1994)
TLI is a classic—perhaps the classic linguistics book written for a popular audience. Though much of the book is a survey of the Chomskyan approach to linguistics, its purpose is to reconcile what we know about language, the mind, and human behavior—that is, to explore why is language is natural for human beings. For anyone interested in language with or without a linguistics background, this is a worthwhile read. (I’m not so sure I agree with all of Pinker’s/Chomsky’s arguments, but the discussion is superb.)
What surprised me most about this book was what was not included: there was only a passing mention of metaphor, and no discussion of categories/frames—two concepts that are central, at least in the Lakoffian approach, to understanding how the mind and language work. I find it strange that these areas of research are barely acknowledged by a cognitive linguist discussing language and the mind.
Chapter Summary »
1) Introduction to linguistics; Chomsky and the Universal Grammar hypothesis
2) Our tendency towards language; dialects; linguistic grammaticality; pidgins and creoles; speech disorders
3) Language vs. thought; Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
4) Syntax/Semantics (sentence structure and meaning)
5) Morphology/the lexicon (words/prefixes/suffixes: how we learn them and how they combine)
6) Phonetics/Phonology (speech sounds and sound systems)
7) Language Understanding (parsing, pragmatics)
8) Diachronic linguistics (language change over time)
9) Language acquisition
10) Language, the brain, and genetics
11) Evolution of language
12) Prescriptivism
13) Language and human nature
Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea (George Lakoff, 2006)
Though I’ve become something of a Lakoff nut, I realize that his linguopoliticocognitive theory on American moral systems can be a bit difficult to grasp at first. Of his previous books on the subject, Don’t Think of an Elephant! is, I think, inadequate in explaining the some of the key details of the theory, and Moral Politics is too thorough and academic to appeal to a general audience. This new book, I feel, is the best starting point for those who want to learn more about the Strict Father/Nurturant Parent dichotomy and how it plays out in the American values debate. Focusing on the idea of freedom allows Lakoff to hit on a lot of issues (freedom involves not just civil liberties and foreign policy but also things like environmental protection and economics) within a unified discussion (what freedom means to progressives vs. conservatives). Plus, it’s short and easy to read—200 pages shorter than Moral Politics. Keep in mind that this book is primarily about an idea, not a tactic, so the practice of framing takes a backseat—though an understanding of core concepts like ‘freedom’ is the critical for framing.
Chapter Summary »
Chapter titles are pretty self-explanatory. Chapters are grouped into the following parts:
I) Uncontested Freedom: the core parts of freedom that everyone agrees on
II) Contested Freedom: progressive vs. conservative models and repective understandings of freedom; causation
III) Forms of Freedom: Personal Freedom & Populism, Economics, Religion, Foreign Policy
IV) Ideas and Action: Bush’s “Freedom”, Taking Back Freedom
