This 1952 study is an investigation into the nature of language that focuses on reinterpreting Hamann's theories of language in light of twentieth century linguistic philosophy. One of the first studies of Hamann to be presented in English, it poses many questions of universal concern and interest.
Unlike other multi-ethnic nations, such as Myanmar and India, where official language policy has sparked bloody clashes, Thailand has maintained relative stability despite its eighty languages. In this study of the relations among politics, geography, and language, William A. Smalley shows how Thailand has maintained national unity through an elaborate social and linguistic hierarchy. Smalley contends that because the people of Thailand perceive their social hierarchy as the normal order, Standard Thai, spoken by members of the higher levels of society, prevails as the uncontested national language. By examining the hierarchy of Thailand's diverse languages and dialects in light of Thai history, education, culture, and religion, Smalley shows how Thailand has been able to keep its many ethnic groups at peace. Linguistic Diversity and National Unity explores the intricate relationship between language and power and the ways in which social and linguistic rank can be used to perpetuate order.
John Collins presents an analysis of the problem of the unity of the proposition - how propositions can be both single things and complexes at the same time. He surveys previous investigations of the problem and offers his own solution, which is defended from both philosophical and linguistic perspectives.
The Permanent International Committee of Linguists (Comité International Permanent des Linguistes, CIPL) has organized the 18th Congress of Linguists in Seoul (July 21-26, 2008), in close collaboration with the Linguistic Society of Korea. In this book one finds the invited talks which address hot topics in various subdisciplines presented by outstanding and internationally well known experts. In addition, the state-of-the-art papers provide an overview of the most important research areas of contemporary linguistics.
Ideal in introductory courses dealing with grammatical structure and linguistic analysis, Introduction to Typology overviews the major grammatical categories and constructions in the world's languages. Framed in a typological perspective, the constant concern of this primary text is to underscore the similarities and differences which underlie the vast array of human languages.
The central focus of each chapter is language policy and how it accomplishes-or fails to accomplish-the task of maintaining national unity in the face of linguistic diversity. Included among the nations considered are examples of postcolonial cultures, as well as nations that have sheltered linguistic minorities within their borders throughout their history, countries fragmented into tribal groups, and those divided by a plethora of local dialects.
Summary Manning's bestselling and highly recommended Unity book has been fully revised! Unity in Action, Second Edition teaches you to write and deploy games with the Unity game development platform. You'll master the Unity toolset from the ground up, adding the skills you need to go from application coder to game developer. Foreword by Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Build your next game without sweating the low-level details. The Unity game development platform handles the heavy lifting, so you can focus on game play, graphics, and user experience. With support for C# programming, a huge ecosystem of production-quality prebuilt assets, and a strong dev community, Unity can get your next great game idea off the drawing board and onto the screen! About the Book Unity in Action, Second Edition teaches you to write and deploy games with Unity. As you explore the many interesting examples, you'll get hands-on practice with Unity's intuitive workflow tools and state-of-the-art rendering engine. This practical guide exposes every aspect of the game dev process, from the initial groundwork to creating custom AI scripts and building easy-to-read UIs. And because you asked for it, this totally revised Second Edition includes a new chapter on building 2D platformers with Unity's expanded 2D toolkit. What's Inside Revised for new best practices, updates, and more! 2D and 3D games Characters that run, jump, and bump into things Connect your games to the internet About the Reader You need to know C# or a similar language. No game development knowledge is assumed. About the Author Joe Hocking is a software engineer and Unity expert specializing in interactive media development. Table of Contents PART 1 - First steps Getting to know Unity Building a demo that puts you in 3D space Adding enemies and projectiles to the 3D game Developing graphics for your game PART 2 - Getting comfortable Building a Memory game using Unity's 2D functionality Creating a basic 2D Platformer Putting a GUI onto a game Creating a third-person 3D game: player movement and animation Adding interactive devices and items within the game PART 3 - Strong finish Connecting your game to the internet Playing audio: sound effects and music Putting the parts together into a complete game Deploying your game to players' devices
In this innovative comparison of Gadamer and Wittgenstein, the author explores their common concern with the relation of language to reality. Patrick Horn's starting point is the widely accepted view that both philosophers rejected a certain metaphysical account of that relation in which reality determines the nature of language. Horn proceeds to argue that Gadamer never completely escaped metaphysical assumptions in his search for the unity of language. In this respect, argues Horn, Gadamer's work is nearer to the earlier rather than to the later Wittgenstein. The final chapter of the book highlights the work of Wittgenstein¿s pupil Rush Rhees, who shows that Wittgenstein's own later emphasis on language games, while doing justice to the variety of language, does less than justice to the dialogical relation between speakers of a language, wherein the unity of language resides. Contrasting Rhees's account of the unity of language with those given by Gadamer and the early Wittgenstein brings out the importance of understanding reality in terms of the life that people share rather than in terms of what philosophers say about reality.
The volume contains a selection of papers originally presented at the symposium on “Areal patterns of grammaticalization and cross-linguistic variation in grammaticalization scenarios” held on 12-14 March 2015 at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. The papers, written by leading scholars combining expertise in historical linguistics and grammaticalization research, study variation in grammaticalization scenarios in a variety of language families (Slavic, Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Bantu, Mande, "Khoisan", Siouan, and Mayan). The volume stands out in the vast literature on grammaticalization by focusing on variation in grammaticalization scenarios and areal patterns in grammaticalization. Apart from documenting new grammaticalization paths, the volume makes a methodological contribution as it addresses an important question of how to reconcile universal outcomes of grammaticalization processes with the fact that the input to these processes is language-specific and construction-specific.
Unity and Plurality presents novel ways of thinking about plurality while casting new light on the interconnections among the logical, philosophical, and linguistic aspects of plurals. The volume brings together new work on the logic and ontology of plurality and on the semantics of plurals in natural language. Plural reference, the view that definite plurals such as 'the students' refer to several entities at once (the individual students), is an approach favoured by logicians and philosophers, who take sentences with plurals ('the students gathered') not to be committed to entities beyond individuals, entities such as classes, sums, or sets. By contrast, linguistic semantics has been dominated by a singularist approach to plurals, taking the semantic value of a definite plural such as 'the students' to be a mereological sum or set. Moreover, semantics has been dominated by a particular ontological view of plurality, that of extensional mereology. This volume aims to build a bridge between the two traditions and to show the fruitfulness of nonstandard mereological approaches. A team of leading experts investigates new perspectives that arise from plural logic and non-standard mereology and explore novel applications to natural language phenomena.