In this ground-breaking book, Johanna Nichols proposes means of describing, comparing, and interpreting linguistic diversity, both genetic and structural, providing the foundations for a theory of diversity based upon population science. This book will interest linguists, archaeologists, and population specialists. An awe-inspiring book, unequalled in scope, originality, and the range of language data considered. A brilliant pioneering study. Findlay, a social scientist, defines 151 terms from an anthropological, ethnographic, and sociolinguistic point of view.
Entries range from one or two paragraphs to several pages depending upon the topic.
Discourse analysis and gender differences, for example, are among the longest. The author presents complex concepts in cross-cultural communication in thoughtful, clear terms. He also makes clear why experiments are designed the way they are and the inferences drawn from the results. The originality of this volume is in its comparison of various sorts of language development from a number of linguistic-theoretic and empirical perspectives, using data from both speech and gestural modalities and from a diversity of acquisition environments. In turn, this comparison yields fresh insights on the mental bases of language creation.