Literacy teaching tends to take a structural approach to language, focusing on auditory products or skills such as sounds, morphemes, words, sentences, and vocabulary. However, new research suggests that the majority of English speakers actually think and learn in visual concepts, and that there is a cultural and linguistic mismatch between auditory teaching methods and the way students think and learn. This has important implications for all educators including those who work with students with neurogenic disabilities, such as autism spectrum disorders and ADHD. In her new book, Dr. Ellyn Lucas Arwood outlines a revolutionary four-tiered model of how a learner acquires language, and suggests ways to impose visual language functions onto an auditory language like English in order to improve learning for both neurotypical learners and those with neurogenic disabilities. Dr. Arwood provides tried-and-tested intervention strategies that work with all levels of ability, giving readers the knowledge and confidence to teach learners to become more literate in a way that raises learners' abilities to think and problem solve. This book takes a fresh look at how language and literacy interact, and will be of interest to educators and special educators, speech and language pathologists, and other professionals who support language learning and development.

The two basic approaches to linguistics are the formalist and the functionalist approaches. In this engaging monograph, Frederick J. Newmeyer, a formalist, argues that both approaches are valid. However, because formal and functional linguists have avoided direct confrontation, they remain unaware of the compatability of their results. One of the author's goals is to make each side accessible to the other. While remaining an ardent formalist, Newmeyer stresses the limitations of a narrow formalist outlook that refuses to consider that anything of interest might have been discovered in the course of functionalist-oriented research. He argues that the basic principles of generative grammar, in interaction with principles in other linguistic domains, provide compelling accounts of phenomena that functionalists have used to try to refute the generative approach.

In their subject matter and in their theoretical orientation all the papers in this volume reflect the powerful influence of T. Givón. Most of them deal with questions of morphosyntactic typology, pragmatics, and grammaticalization theory. Many of them are directly based on extensive fieldwork on local languages of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Others are based on statistical analyses of extensive written and spoken corpora of texts.

The present volume, originally prepared to celebrate Jan Firbas' 80th birthday, unfortunately is presented only belatedly, to commemorate one of the most outstanding personalities of functional and structural linguistics. Its contributors have been inspired by the richness and penetrating invention of Firbas, contained in his analysis of functional sentence perspective and of many other aspects of sentence and discourse.

Karl Bühler (1879–1963) was one of the leading theoreticians of language of the twentieth century. Although primarily a psychologist, Bühler devoted much of his attention to the study of language and language theory. His masterwork Sprachtheorie (1934) quickly gained recognition in the fields of linguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language and the psychology of language. This new edition of the English translation of Bühler’s theory begins with a survey on ‘Bühler’s legacy’ for modern linguistics (Werner Abraham), followed by the Theory of Language, and finally with a special ‘Postscript: Twenty-five Years Later ...’ (Achim Eschbach). Bühler’s theory is divided into four parts. Part I discusses the four axioms or principles of language research, the most famous of which is the first, the organon model, the base of Bühler's instrumental view of language. Part II treats the role of indexicality in language and discusses deixis as one determinant of speech. Part III examines the symbolic field, dealing with context, onomatopoeia and the function of case. Part IV deals with the elements of language and their organization (syllabification, the definition of the word, metaphor, anaphora, etc).The text is accompanied by an Introduction (Achim Eschbach); Translator's preface (Donald Fraser Goodwin); Glossary of terms; and a Bibliography of cited works.

“A cunning, often hilarious mystery for the Mensa set and fans of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies—struck by a laundry van—after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it wasn’t an accident at all? What if Barthes was . . . murdered? In The Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet spins a madcap secret history of the French intelligentsia, starring such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva—as well as the hapless police detective Jacques Bayard, whose new case will plunge him into the depths of literary theory (starting with the French version of Roland Barthes for Dummies). Soon Bayard finds himself in search of a lost manuscript by the linguist Roman Jakobson on the mysterious “seventh function of language.” A brilliantly erudite comedy, The Seventh Function of Language takes us from the cafés of Saint-Germain to the corridors of Cornell University, and into the duels and orgies of the Logos Club, a secret philosophical society that dates to the Roman Empire. Binet has written both a send-up and a wildly exuberant celebration of the French intellectual tradition. “Binet juxtaposes car chases with highbrow in-jokes and ruminations. The book is a love letter to the power of language—the most dangerous weapon is the tongue.” —The New Yorker “An affectionate send-up of an Umberto Eco–style intellectual thriller that doubles as an exemplar of the genre, filled with suspense, elaborate conspiracies, and exotic locales.” —Esquire