Stephen R. Anderson

How many languages are there? Are new languages still being discovered? Why are so many languages disappearing? In this Very Short Introduction, eminent linguist Stephen Anderson addresses such questions as he illuminates the science behind languages. Considering a wide range of different languages and linguistic examples, Anderson provides the basic facts about the world's major families of spoken languages and their distribution around the globe. He explores the basis for linguistic classification and raises questions about how we identify a language. Considering signed languages as well as spoken, Anderson also examines the wider social issues of losing languages, and their impact on vanishing cultures and peoples.

Languages: A Very Short Introduction

Annotation Dr. Dolittle--and many students of animal communication--are wrong: animals cannot use language. This fascinating book explains why. Can animals be taught a human language and use it to communicate? Or is human language unique to human beings, just as many complex behaviors of other species are uniquely theirs? This engrossing book explores communication and cognition in animals and humans from a linguistic point of view and asserts that animals are not capable of acquiring or using human language. Stephen R. Anderson explains what is meant by communication, the difference between communication and language, and the essential characteristics of language. Next he examines a variety of animal communication systems, including bee dances, frog vocalizations, bird songs, and alarm calls and other vocal, gestural, and olfactory communication among primates. Anderson then compares these to human language, including signed languages used by the deaf. Arguing that attempts to teach human languagesor their equivalents to the great apes have not succeeded in demonstrating linguistic abilities in nonhuman species, he concludes that animal communication systems--intriguing and varied though they may be--do not include all the essential properties of human language. Animals can communicate, but they can't talk. "Written in a playful and highly accessible style, Anderson's book navigates some of the difficult territory of linguistics to provide an illuminating discussion of the evolution of language."--Marc Hauser, author of "Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think.

Animals and the Uniqueness of Human Language

Doctor Dolittle's Delusion

Amy L. Jablonski

Marcus L. Thomeer

Learning self-help skills -- eating, dressing, toileting, and personal hygiene -- can be challenging for people with autism, but is essential for independence. This book thoroughly describes a systematic approach that parents (and educators) can use to teach basic self-care to children, ages 24 months to early teens, and even older individuals. With an encouraging tone, the authors -- behaviour analysts and psycholo-gists -- emphasise that it's worthwhile to devote the extra time and effort now to teach skills rather than have your child be forever dependent on others. The many case studies throughout the book depict individuals with deficits in specific self-care tasks, and demonstrate how a coordinated and system-atic approach is effective in teaching more complex skills. For example, a 12-year-old with the self-feeding skills of a toddler, who was excluded from the school cafeteria, is taught to stay at the table to eat a full meal using utensils. A chapter is devoted to each of the four skill areas (eating, dressing, toileting, personal hygiene) offering detailed insight and specific instruction strategies. Ap-pendices contain forms to complete for task analyses, instructional plans, and data collection. With the information in this book, parents can immediately start teaching their child, or refer back to the book to fine-tune skills as their child develops.

A Systematic Teaching Approach

Self-help Skills for People with Autism

Professor Stephen R Anderson

In A-Morphous Morphology, Stephen Anderson presents a theory of word structure which relates to a full generative grammar of language. He holds word structure to be the result of interacting principles from a number of grammatical areas, and thus not localized in a single morphological component. Dispensing with classical morphemes, the theory instead treats morphology as a matter of rule-governed relations, minimizing the non-phonological internal structure assigned to words and eliminating morphologically motivated boundary elements. Professor Anderson makes the further claim that the properties of individual lexical items are not visible to, or manipulated by, the rules of the syntax, and assimilates to morphology special clitic phenomena. A-Morphous Morphology maintains significant distinctions between inflection, derivation, and compounding, in terms of their place ina grammar. It also contains discussion of the implications of this new A-Morphous position analysis of word structure.

A-Morphous Morphology

Can animals be taught a human language and use it to communicate? Or is human language unique to human beings, just as many complex behaviours of other species are uniquely theirs? This engrossing book explores communication and cognition in animals and humans from a linguistic point of view and asserts that animals are not capable of acquiring or using human language. Stephen Anderson explains what is meant by communication, the difference between communication and language, and the essential characteristics of language. Next he examines a variety of animal communication systems, including bee dances, frog vocalizations, bird songs, and alarm calls and other vocal, gestural, and olfactory communication among primates. Anderson then compares these to human language, including signed languages used by the deaf. Arguing that attempts to teach human languages or their equivalents to the great apes have not succeeded in demonstrating linguistic abilities in nonhuman species, he concludes that animal communication systems, intriguing and varied though they may be, do not include all the essential properties of human language. Animals can communicate, but they can't talk.

Louis de Saussure

This volume presents two works elaborating a general theory of words and their structure written by René de Saussure, younger brother of Ferdinand de Saussure. Although originating in René de Saussure's concerns for the structure of Esperanto, these essays are clearly intended to articulate a general account of word formation in natural language. They appear here in the French original with facing English translations, accompanied by some remarks on René de Saussure's life and followed by essays on the Esperantist background of his analysis (by Marc van Oostendorp), the contemporary relevance of his morphological theory (by Stephen Anderson), and the semantic theory of words underlying his analysis (by Louis de Saussure). These two works have remained essentially unknown to the community of scholars in general linguistics since their publication in 1911 and 1919, respectively, although Esperantists have been aware of them. They develop in quite explicit form a theory of what would later be called morphemic analysis, based primarily on data from French (with some material from German and English, as well as occasional examples from other Indo-European languages). In its fundamental aspect, René's view of word formation differed significantly from that of his brother, who saw the structure of complex words as revealed not through their decomposition into smaller "atomic" units but rather in the relations between words, relations which could be presented in analogical form and which anticipate rule-based theories of morphological structure. The contrast between the two brothers' views thus anticipates basic issues in current theorizing about word structure.

René de Saussure and the theory of word formation

Stephen R.. Anderson

Theories of Rules and Theories of Representations

Phonology in the Twentieth Century

This is the first book to cover the grammar of clitics from all points of view, including their phonology and syntax and relation to morphology. In the process, it deals with the relation of second position clitics to verb-second phenomena in Germanic and other languages, the grammar of contracted auxiliary verbs in English, noun incorporation constructions, and several other much discussed topics in grammar. Stephen Anderson includes analyses of a number of particular languages, andsome of these - such as Kwakw'ala ("Kwakiutl) and Surmiran Rumantsch - are based on his own field research. The study of clitics has broad implications for a general understanding of sentence structure in natural language. Stephen Anderson's clearly-written, wide-ranging, and original account will be of wide interest to scholars and advanced students of phonology, morphology, and syntax.

Stephen R. Anderson

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