Languages differ from one another in bewildering and seemingly arbitrary ways. For example, in English, the verb precedes the direct object ('understand the proof'), but in Japanese, the direct object comes first. In some languages, such as Mohawk, it is not even possible to establish a basic word order. Nonetheless, languages do share certain regularities in how they are structured and used. The exact nature and extent of these "language universals" has been the focus of much research and is one of the central explanatory goals in the language sciences.   During the past 50 years, there has been tremendous progress, a few major conceptual revolutions, and even the emergence of entirely new fields. The wealth of findings and theories offered by the various language-science disciplines has made it more important than ever to work toward an integrated understanding of the nature of human language universals. This book is the first to examine language universals from a cross-disciplinary perspective. It provides new insights into long standing questions such as: What exactly defines the human capacity for language? Are there universal properties of human languages and, if so, what are they? Can all language universals be explained in the same way, or do some universals require different kinds of explanations from others? Language Universals is unique in starting with the assumption that the best way to approach these and related questions is through a dialogue between a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, computer science and biology.

Language Universals

Reference

Collins, Christopher

Edelman, Shimon

Christiansen, Morten H.

Words, Language & Grammar

Oxford University Press

Languages differ from one another in bewildering and seemingly arbitrary ways. For example, in English, the verb precedes the direct object ('understand the proof'), but in Japanese, the direct object comes first. In some languages, such as Mohawk, it is not even possible to establish a basic word order. Nonetheless, languages do share certain regularities in how they are structured and used. The exact nature and extent of these "language universals" has been the focus of much research and is one of the central explanatory goals in the language sciences. During the past 50 years, there has been tremendous progress, a few major conceptual revolutions, and even the emergence of entirely new fields. The wealth of findings and theories offered by the various language-science disciplines has made it more important than ever to work toward an integrated understanding of the nature of human language universals. This book is the first to examine language universals from a cross-disciplinary perspective. It provides new insights into long standing questions such as: What exactly defines the human capacity for language? Are there universal properties of human languages and, if so, what are they? Can all language universals be explained in the same way, or do some universals require different kinds of explanations from others? Language Universals is unique in starting with the assumption that the best way to approach these and related questions is through a dialogue between a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, computer science and biology.

Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination

Christopher Collins introduces an exciting new field of research traversing evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and literary study. Paleopoetics maps the selective processes that originally shaped the human genus millions of years ago and prepared the human brain to play, imagine, empathize, and engage in fictive thought as mediated by language. A manifestation of the "cognitive turn" in the humanities, Paleopoetics calls for a broader, more integrated interpretation of the reading experience, one that restores our connection to the ancient methods of thought production still resonating within us. Speaking with authority on the scientific aspects of cognitive poetics, Collins proposes reading literature using cognitive skills that predate language and writing. These include the brain's capacity to perceive the visible world, store its images, and retrieve them later to form simulated mental events. Long before humans could share stories through speech, they perceived, remembered, and imagined their own inner narratives. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Collins builds an evolutionary bridge between humans' development of sensorimotor skills and their achievement of linguistic cognition, bringing current scientific perspective to such issues as the structure of narrative, the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, the relation of rhetoric to poetics, the relevance of performance theory to reading, the difference between orality and writing, and the nature of play and imagination.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Columbia University Press

The quest to understand the evolution of the literary mind has become a fertile field of inquiry and speculation for scholars across literary studies and cognitive science. In Paleopoetics, Christopher Collins's acclaimed earlier title, he described how language emerged both as a communicative tool and as a means of fashioning other communicative tools―stories, songs, and rituals. In Neopoetics, Collins turns his attention to the cognitive evolution of the writing-ready brain. Further integrating neuroscience into the popular field of cognitive poetics, he adds empirical depth to our study of literary texts and verbal imagination and offers a whole new way to look at reading, writing, and creative expression. Collins begins Neopoetics with the early use of visual signs, first as reminders of narrative episodes and then as conventional symbols representing actual speech sounds. Next he examines the implications of written texts for the play of the auditory and visual imagination. To exemplify this long transition from oral to literate artistry, Collins examines a wide array of classical texts―from Homer and Hesiod to Plato and Aristotle and from the lyric innovations of Augustan Rome to the inner dialogues of St. Augustine. In this work of "big history," Collins demonstrates how biological and cultural evolution collaborated to shape both literature and the brain we use to read it.

Neopoetics: The Evolution of the Literate Imagination

Reading the Written Image is a study of the imagination as it is prompted by the verbal cues of literature. Since every literary image is also a mental image, a representation of an absent entity, Collins contends that imagination is a poiesis, a making-up, an act of play for both author and reader. The "willing suspension of disbelief," which Coleridge said "constitutes poetic faith," therefore empowers and directs the reader to construct an imagined world in which particular hypotheses are proposed and demonstrated.Although the imagination as a central concept in poetics emerges into critical debate only in the eighteenth century, it has been a crucial issue for over two millennia in religious, philosophical, and political discourse. The two recognized alternative methodologies in the study of literature, the poetic and the hermeneutic, are opposed on the issue of the written image: poets and readers feel free to imagine, while hermeneuts feel obliged to specify the meanings of images and, failing that, to minimize the importance of imagery. Recognizing this problem, Collins proposes that reading written texts be regarded as a performance, a unique kind of play that transposes what had once been an oral-dramatic situation onto an inner, imaginary stage. He applies models drawn from the psychology of play to support his theory that reader response is essentially a poietic response to a rule-governed set of ludic cues.

Reading the Written Image: Verbal Play, Interpretation, and the Roots of Iconophobia

Penn State University Press

Reading the Written Image is a study of the imagination as it is prompted by the verbal cues of literature. Since every literary image is also a mental image, a representation of an absent entity, Collins contends that imagination is a poiesis, a making-up, an act of play for both author and reader. The "willing suspension of disbelief," which Coleridge said "constitutes poetic faith," therefore empowers and directs the reader to construct an imagined world in which particular hypotheses are proposed and demonstrated. Although the imagination as a central concept in poetics emerges into critical debate only in the eighteenth century, it has been a crucial issue for over two millennia in religious, philosophical, and political discourse. The two recognized alternative methodologies in the study of literature, the poetic and the hermeneutic, are opposed on the issue of the written image: poets and readers feel free to imagine, while hermeneuts feel obliged to specify the meanings of images and, failing that, to minimize the importance of imagery. Recognizing this problem, Collins proposes that reading written texts be regarded as a performance, a unique kind of play that transposes what had once been an oral-dramatic situation onto an inner, imaginary stage. He applies models drawn from the psychology of play to support his theory that reader response is essentially a poietic response to a rule-governed set of ludic cues.

Since 9/11, America has presented itself to the world as a Christianist culture, no less antimodern and nostalgic for an idealized past than its Islamist foes. The master-narrative both sides share might sound like this: Once upon a time, the values of the righteous community coincided with those of the state. Home and land were harmoniously united under God. But through intellectual pride (read: science) and disobedience (read: human rights), this God-blessed homeland was lost and is now worth every drop of blood it takes, ours and others’, to recover.
For Americans, the prime source for this once-and-future-kingdom myth is the Bible, with its many narratives of blessings gained, lost, and regained: the garden of Eden, the covenant with Abraham, the bondage in Egypt, the exodus under Moses, the glory of David and Solomon’s realm, the coming of the promised Messiah, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven, his apocalyptic return at the end of history, and his establishment of the earthly kingdom of God. As Homeland Mythology shows, these biblical narratives have, over time, inspired a multitude of nationalist narratives, myths ingeniously spun out to justify a number of decidedly unchristian policies and institutions—from Indian genocide, the slave trade, and the exploitation of immigrant workers to Manifest Destiny, imperial expansionism, and, most recently, preemptive war.
On March 25, 2001, George W. Bush shared a bit of political wisdom: “You can fool some of the people all of the time—and those are the ones you have to concentrate on.” The cynical use of religion to cloak criminal behavior is always worth exposing, but why our leaders lie to us is no longer a mystery. What does remain mysterious is why so many of us are disposed to believe their lies. The unexamined issue that this book addresses is, therefore, not the mendacity of the few, but the credulity of the many.

Homeland Mythology: Biblical Narratives in American Culture

History

Americas

Since 9/11, America has presented itself to the world as a Christianist culture, no less antimodern and nostalgic for an idealized past than its Islamist foes. The master-narrative both sides share might sound like this: Once upon a time, the values of the righteous community coincided with those of the state. Home and land were harmoniously united under God. But through intellectual pride (read: science) and disobedience (read: human rights), this God-blessed homeland was lost and is now worth every drop of blood it takes, ours and others’, to recover.For Americans, the prime source for this once-and-future-kingdom myth is the Bible, with its many narratives of blessings gained, lost, and regained: the garden of Eden, the covenant with Abraham, the bondage in Egypt, the exodus under Moses, the glory of David and Solomon’s realm, the coming of the promised Messiah, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven, his apocalyptic return at the end of history, and his establishment of the earthly kingdom of God. As Homeland Mythology shows, these biblical narratives have, over time, inspired a multitude of nationalist narratives, myths ingeniously spun out to justify a number of decidedly unchristian policies and institutions—from Indian genocide, the slave trade, and the exploitation of immigrant workers to Manifest Destiny, imperial expansionism, and, most recently, preemptive war.On March 25, 2001, George W. Bush shared a bit of political wisdom: “You can fool some of the people all of the time—and those are the ones you have to concentrate on.” The cynical use of religion to cloak criminal behavior is always worth exposing, but why our leaders lie to us is no longer a mystery. What does remain mysterious is why so many of us are disposed to believe their lies. The unexamined issue that this book addresses is, therefore, not the mendacity of the few, but the credulity of the many.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Collins, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Collins, Christopher

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Collins, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Language Universals

Language Universals

Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination

Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination

Neopoetics: The Evolution of the Literate Imagination

Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination

Reading the Written Image: Verbal Play, Interpretation, and the Roots of Iconophobia

Reading the Written Image: Verbal Play, Interpretation, and the Roots of Iconophobia

Homeland Mythology: Biblical Narratives in American Culture

Homeland Mythology: Biblical Narratives in American Culture