Language and Reality: Selected Writings of Sydney Lamb

Language and Reality presents selected writings of Professor Sydney Lamb, including five new works and several which have been reworked for this publication. Professor Lamb's work in linguistics over the past four decades has been concerned with exposing illusions about language and with finding realities, including neurological realities, behind the linguistic abstractions that others have dwelt upon. His name is synonymous with certain landmarks in the development of linguistic theory, including stratificational grammar, relational network theory and, more recently, neurocognitive linguistics. Although he is a leading figure in linguistic science, many of the papers included here are far from well known, some of them having appeared only in more obscure venues of publication and, until now, unavailable to the wider linguistics community. The book is divided in to four parts, the first of which includes papers offering insight into the man behind this pioneering approach to linguistics that might best be summed up as 'linguistics to the beat of a different drummer'.The papers in Part II explore the theoretical origins of Lamb's ideas about language that have often been described as ahead of their time. Part III includes more recent writings outlining work done in neurocognitive linguistics. Studies of the interconnectedness of language with other kinds of human experience and with history are presented in Part IV. Sydney Lamb is Arnold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Rice University in Texas, Jonathan J. Webster is Head of the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics at the City University of Hong Kong.

Table of Contents:
Part I The Road Less Traveled By; 1 On The Aims of Linguistics; 2 Linguistics to the Beat of a Different Drummer; 3 Mary Haas: Lessons in and out of the Classroom; 4 Translation and the Structure of Language; Part II The Structure of Language; 5 Epilegomena to a Theory of Language; 6 Lexicology and Semantics; 7 Some Types of Ordering; 8 Language as a Network of Relationships; 9 Mutations and Relations; 10 Descriptive Process; 11 Using Language and Knowing How; Part III Neurocognitive Linguistics; 12 Language as a Real Biological System; 13 Neurocognitive Structure in the Interplay of Language and Thought; 14 Interpreting Discourse; 15 Learning Syntax: A Neurocognitive Approach; 16 Dimensions of the Territory of Neurolinguistics; 17 Questions of Evidence in Neurocognitive Linguistics; 18 On the Perception of Speech. Part IV Language in the Real World; 19 Linguistic Diversification and Extinction in North America; 20 Language: Uniquely human?; 21 Long-Range Relationships; 22 What is a Language?; 23 Linguistics, Semiotics, and the Human Information System; 24 Viewing Language Broadly; 25 Re examining the Family Tree Model of Linguistic Classification; 26 Saussure's Error: Objects of Study in Linguistics and other Sciences; 27 Meaning in Language and Meaning in Music; 28 Philosophical Differences and Cognitive Styles.