Why Language?
eBook - ePub

Why Language?

What Pragmatics Tells Us About Language And Communication

  1. 261 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Why Language?

What Pragmatics Tells Us About Language And Communication

About this book

There is, at present, no book introducing the general issue of why language is specific to human beings, how it works, why language is not communication and communication is not language, why languages vary and how they evolved.
Based on the most recent works in linguistics and pragmatics, Why Language? addresses many questions that everyone has about language.

Starting from false claims about language and languages, showing that language is not communication and communication is not language, the first part (Language and Communication) ends by proposing a difference between linguistic rules and communicative principles. The second part (Language, Society, Discourse) includes domains of language and language uses which are generally taken as extrinsic to language, such as language variety, discourse and non-ordinary (literary) usages. Special attention is given to figures of discourse (metaphor, metonymy, irony) and literary usages such as narration and free indirect style.

The reader, either specialist or amateur in language science, will find a first and unique synthesis about what we know today about language and what we have yet to learn, sketching what could be the future of linguistics in the next decades.

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Yes, you can access Why Language? by Jacques Moeschler in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Linguistics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright
  3. Contents
  4. Foreword
  5. Caveats
  6. Introduction
  7. Part I: Language and communication
  8. Part II: Language, society, and discourse
  9. Glossary
  10. Name index
  11. Subject index