Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language

Units, rules, codes, systems: this is how most linguists study language. Integrationalists such as Michael Toolan, however, focus instead on how language functions in seamless tandem with the rest of human activity. In Total Speech, Toolan provides a clear and comprehensive account of integrationali...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Toolan, Michael (Author)
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:English
Published: Durham Duke University Press [1996]
Series:Post-Contemporary Interventions
Subjects:
Online Access:DE-1043
DE-1046
DE-858
DE-859
DE-860
DE-739
DE-473
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Summary:Units, rules, codes, systems: this is how most linguists study language. Integrationalists such as Michael Toolan, however, focus instead on how language functions in seamless tandem with the rest of human activity. In Total Speech, Toolan provides a clear and comprehensive account of integrationalism, a major new theory of language that declines to accept that text and context, language and world, are distinct and stable categories. At the same time, Toolan extends the integrationalist argument and calls for a radical change in contemporary theorizing about language and communication.In every foundational area of linguistics-from literal meaning and metaphor to the nature of repetition to the status of linguistic rules-Toolan advances fascinating and provocative criticisms of received linguistic assumptions. Drawing inspiration from the writings of language theorist Roy Harris, Toolan brings the integrationalist perspective to bear on legal cases, the reception of Salman Rushdie, poetry, and the language of children. Toolan demonstrates that the embeddedness of language and the situation-sensitive mutability of meaning reveal language as a tool for re-fashioning and renewal.Total Speech breaks free of standard linguistics' fascinated attraction with "cognitive blueprints" and quasi-algorithmic processing to characterize language anew. Toolan's reflections on the essence of language, including his important discussion of intention, have strong implications for students and scholars of discourse analysis, literature, the law, anthropology, philosophy of language, communication theory, and cognitive science, as well as linguistics
Item Description:Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 12. Dez 2020)
Physical Description:1 online resource (352 pages)
ISBN:9780822379843
DOI:10.1515/9780822379843

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