If you find yourself wanting to savor a little more of the summertime AND also ease yourself into the semester mindset, you might like to take a look at the reading list introduced in an article on the BLC website, “Late Summer Reads“. Comments and additions are welcome there, if you’ve got readings [...]

Want to know what kinds of jokes ancient Romans enjoyed? Well, you’re in luck! Prof. Mary Beard has just published a collected volume of more than 260 jokes, some 1,600 years old. According to Beard, the volume explodes the popular stereotype of Romans as “pompous, bridge-building toga wearers.” What comic figures are the jokes [...]

Have you seen any new or old books out that are worth taking a look at? I’ve been keeping my eye on the LinguistList over the last several days and these look pretty interesting:

Language Teaching, edited by Michael Toolan. A collection of chapters in Roy Harris’ integrational linguistics tradition that says it debunks [...]

“There is no difference between marks and words in the sense that there is between observation and accepted authority, or between verifiable fact and tradition. The process is everywhere the same: that of the sign and its likeness, and this is why nature and the word can intertwine with one another to infinity, forming, for [...]

So in Claire Kramsch’s Language and Power class we just got done reading an essay from John Austin, the British philosopher who gained much fame in the 1960s for speech act theory. And while there must be much to say about that even today (though somehow it seems so obvious once you think about it [...]