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A central pillar of contemporary communication research is the analysis of filmed interactions between people. The techniques employed in such analysis first took on a recognizably modern form in the 1970s, but their roots go back to the earliest days of motion picture technology in the late nineteenth century. This book presents original essays accompanied by written responses which together create a dialogue exploring early efforts at audio-visual sequence analysis and their common goal to capture the "whole" of the communicative situation. The first three chapters of this volume look at the film-based research of Gestalt psychologists in Berlin as well as psychologists in the orbit of Kar...
Each of the 21 chapters in this volume reflects a view of language as a dynamic phenomenon with emergent structure, and in each, gesture is approached as part of language, not an adjunct to it. In this, all of the authors have been influenced by David McNeill's methods for studying natural discourse and by his theory of the human capacity for language. The introductory chapter by Adam Kendon contextualizes McNeill s research paradigm within a history of earlier gesture studies. Chapters in the first section, Language and Cognition, emphasize what McNeill refers to as the intrapersonal plane. Many of the chapters adduce evidence for McNeill's claim that gestures can serve as a window onto the speaker's mind. Chapters in the second section, Environmental Context and Sociality, emphasize the interpersonal plane and exemplify McNeill's focus on how moment-to-moment language use is determined by contextual factors. The final section of the volume, Atypical Minds and Bodies, concerns lessons to be learned from studies of aphasic patients, autistic children, and artificial humans.
Definitions of language cluster around two non-contradictory views: one that language is a shared code, a social entity, and the other that language is the knowledge that enables a native speaker to produce and understand speech. In examining the language and culture of the Tojolabal (Mayan) Indians of Mexico, this book argues that language is a cognitive system, as is culture, of which language is but a part. The author is most interested in the interfaces between language and social phenomena and between language and other systems of culture, and demonstrates that research on the dialectic between language and social context, and that between language and other systems of culture, leads to fruitful generalizations about the nature of language as a human capacity.
Dispersed and out-of-print for fifty years, more than 350 reports from the Maya program are now available in this single volume. Reports from the institution's annual Year Books and other materials collected here tell the history of Maya research through firsthand accounts by participating scholars and reveal the progression of Mesoamerican
The volumes in this set, originally published between 1969 and 1990, draw together research by leading academics in the area of the rural history and provide an examination of related key issues. The volumes examine social change in rural communities approaching the industrial revolution, whilst also providing an overview of the history of rural populations in England, France, Germany, Mexico and the United States. This set will be of particular interest to students of history, business and economics.
This volume is devoted to a major chapter in the history of linguistics in the United States, the period from the 1930s to the 1980s, and focuses primarily on the transition from (post-Bloomfieldian) structural linguistics to early generative grammar. The first three chapters in the book discuss the rise of structuralism in the 1930s; the interplay between American and European structuralism; and the publication of Joos's Readings in Linguistics in 1957. Later chapters explore the beginnings of generative grammar and the reaction to it from structural linguists; how generativists made their ideas more widely known; the response to generativism in Europe; and the resistance to the new theory by leading structuralists, which continued into the 1980s. The final chapter demonstrates that contrary to what has often been claimed, generative grammarians were not in fact organizationally dominant in the field in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.
In this title, first published in 1984, the author examines the social and political forces surrounding the practice of anthropology at different periods in the history of Mexico since 1917. She does this by analysing and tracing the development of competing anthropological perspectives, from ethnographic particularism and functionalism through indigenismo, cultural ecology, Marxism and the dependency paradigm, to the historical structuralism of the 1970s. This book provides the basis for a systematic analysis of peasant studies in Mexico, and discusses in stimulating terms the theoretical and empirical difficulties of the profession of anthropology itself.
The Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200–900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. This unique resource is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mayan languages and linguistics. Written by a team of experts in the field, The Mayan Languages presents in-depth accounts of the linguistic features that characterize the thirty-one languages of the family, their historical evolution, and the social context in which they are spoken. The Mayan Languages: provides detai...