Otros títulos publicados No.9

Xaverio BALLESTER:

40 Antidotes to the Poisons of Traditional Linguistics

2021. 98 pp. ISBN 978-84-92628-80-0.

PVP: 12 euros.

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Summary:
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Preface to the English version
I. Language and Humankind
1) Languages do not exist without speakers
2) Trying to explain language by language is as absurd as trying to explain art by art
3) Linguistics is a sub-discipline of Anthropology. Any problem with that?
4) Linguistics belongs to the honourable sciences of the inexact
5) Speakers are lazy, selfish and self-serving
6) The good government of a language requires a strong ministry of economics
7) I am a human speaker; so nothing human is alien to me
II. Language and environment
8) Languages are ecological: they respect the environment and adapt to it
III. Language and Mind
9) Languages are mutable ideologies and immutable psychology
IV. Language and Environment and Mind
10) Languages reveal the environment and mentality of their speakers
11) Speaking is translating from sight to hearing
12) If all our references were sound, we would speak by means of onomatopoeia
13) Metaphor and metonymy guide linguistic innovations
14) Ellipsis is a lost metaphor or a forgotten metonymy
V. Language and Grammar
15) Language is varied, great and free
16) Languages are not systems nor is there any good reason for them being so
17) With languages, the anti-system rules
18) The most important category of languages is the proper noun. Any problem?
19) Words are not arbitrary, the only thing that is arbitrary, alas, are some structuralists
20) Language is logical even when it leads to something absurd
21) Phonology and semantics are the chicken and the egg of language
VI. Language and Space
22) Languages themselves do not exist, what really exist are dialects
VII. Language and Speech
23) All languages are Creole and have extra-patrimonial relationships
24) Nothing accelerates linguistic evolution more than linguistic cross pollination
25) The purest languages are the most bastard ones
26) Languages do not lend, they copy; banks lend, languages copy
27) Caricature is a strong antidote to lexical demotivation
VIII. Language and Time
28) True linguistic science is etymology
29) To explain languages by synchrony is like to explain a movie by a frame
30) Languages are river basins. They are not like eternally divergent tree branches
31) Languages are neither created nor destroyed, they can only be transformed
32) The meanings of words move from the here to the hereafter
33) Speakers have the right to usucaption
IX. Language, Time and Grammar
34) The only linguistic law without exception is that there is no linguistic law without exception
35) In language, what is most used, changes most quickly
36) Languages do not evolve at fixed speed but by pushes, jerks and stumbles
X. Language and Origin
37) First and most pressing linguistic problem is silence; that is, why do we speak?
38) In the beginning was not the verb but the demonstrative
XI. Language and Society
39) The subject matter of language is time; the subject matter of writing, space
40) No one speaks their own language badly
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