Keywords In and Out of Context

I worked in marketing at Cornell University Press in Ithaca while completing my dissertation years ago, and one book on our backlist there happened to be Walter Ong’s 1977 Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, which is one of the lesser-known of his several works on “the word” (his… Continue reading

One of the reasons that I chose to create this “post-book” blog is to have a place in which I can add important findings of which I was not aware while I was writing Keywords In and Out of Context. This allows me to live la bella vita as a professor emerita, by which I… Continue reading

Today is Earth Day, which I remember celebrating in my high school science class way back in 1970, though, as I recall, it mostly involved picking up trash around our school grounds (including cigarette butts from the “student smoking” area, which back then was an officially sanctioned part of school life.) In any event, I’m… Continue reading

The “tip of the tongue” phenomenon is a fairly common situation in which someone is unable to retrieve a known word (usually a noun or proper name) without a protracted series of attempts at associated words or ideas to prompt one’s memory. This has been the subject of substantial research, since the causes remain unknown.… Continue reading

I mentioned Chomsky’s “Merge” hypothesis briefly in Chapter 2, but this is another topic that merits (and has certainly received) many chapters (and books) of its own. Some of the more interesting recent articles that have dealt with aspects of “Merge” in reference to the evolution of language include: Hartmann’s 2020 “Language Change and Language… Continue reading

Terrence Deacon‘s 1997 The Symbolic Species is briefly mentioned in Chapter 3, but his body of work could undoubtedly have occupied multiple chapters (even if we didn’t mention his brilliant discussion of the limitations of Shannon’s information theory in “Information and Reference”) as he is a leader in the emergence of semiotic cognitive neuroscience, which… Continue reading

There is so much going on with animal communication research, particularly in relation to the evolution of human language (far more than the brief account that I provided in Chapter 2), that I thought I’d start this post with a link to Berthet and colleagues’ 2023 primer on “Animal Linguistics” in Biological Reviews, which provides… Continue reading

2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of C. K. (Charles Kay) Ogden and I. A. (Ivor Armstrong) Richards’ 1923 book, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language on Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, which the late Umberto Eco termed “A seminal book, whose merit was to say… Continue reading

Charles (“Chas”) Hockett of Cornell University was a towering figure in linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s, primarily as a leading proponent of Leonard Bloomfield’s approach to structural linguistics, which purported to offer a systematic, scientific approach to the study of languages, but which has suffered a dramatic decline in popularity in America during the… Continue reading

In Chapter Two, I very briefly mention one of the key figures in the study of cross-species communication: the late Thomas Sebeok. Born in Hungary, he came to the United States in 1937, graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree and from Princeton University with master’s and doctoral degrees. As a linguist,… Continue reading

One of the great pleasures of writing a book is having the opportunity to become more familiar with the work of those perhaps not directly in one’s own discipline (whatever that may be) but a knowledge of whose work may immeasurably enrich one’s own. Even though I had come across The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary… Continue reading

are the four fundamentals on which LIS is built, as I argue in Chapter 1, and yet the very complex physical components that underlie all of these abilities (sight, voice, hearing, memory) come in for almost no discussion within the field, though they obviously affect whether and how we can make use of information resources.… Continue reading

The “language of thought hypothesis” (LoTH), famously associated with the late Jerry Fodor and not particularly popular in recent years, appears to be recovering some ground, according to Mandelbaum and colleagues, whose “Problems and Mysteries of the Many Languages of Thought” I cited in Chapter 1. Mandelbaum develops this further with colleagues Quilty-Dunn and Porot… Continue reading

I mentioned Robert Worden’s “The Evolution of Language by Sexual Selection” in Chapter 1, as he offers an appealing hypothesis as to the role that language played in human evolution: that what may have begun as a very task-oriented method of communication for group activities only slightly advanced from that of other primates eventually became… Continue reading

is the subtitle of Brian O’Connor’s 1996 book Explorations in Indexing and Abstracting, which I wish I had read earlier in my doctoral studies, though it had a great impact on me when I did encounter it later (since much of my career had involved indexing and abstracting for various publishers). In any event, he… Continue reading

I didn’t include the human sense of smell in my list of key sensory capabilities in Chapter 1, because: 1. I was a victim of the common misconception, apparently first promulgated by French physician Pierre Paul Broca in the 19th century, that our olfactory bulbs are inferior to those of other mammals (see John McGann’s… Continue reading

Wilson and Golonka (2013) wrote a highly-cited theoretical article in Frontiers of Psychology using the title above, with an unusually wide coverage of “cognition” in animals, people, and robots, so it’s worth a look (though I believe that the “we” in the subtitle refers only to people!) The main topic of my own Chapter 1… Continue reading

“The Faculty of Language” by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch with its wonderful subtitle (“What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?”) has garnered so many citations since its 2002 publication in Science that it certainly doesn’t need one from me (though of course it got one) so here instead I would mention… Continue reading

I referred to Jerome Bruner’s “Routes to Reference” (1998) briefly in Chapter 1, but didn’t deal with it in the depth it deserves, with its drawing together of so many important threads, from infant pointing, to Peirce’s notion of “interpretant”, to “plot” as the connection between children’s narrative play and Aristotle’s concept of the “peripateia”… Continue reading

A surprisingly overlooked and undercited 2009 piece in American Art by University of Pennsylvania art historian Dr. Michael Leja is an early and eloquent investigation of the cultural role of the keyword in the online environment. He wrote, “We are entering a new phase in the commercialization and commodification of language, and as it increasingly… Continue reading