Reviews for Social Influences on Vocal Development

The average rating for Social Influences on Vocal Development based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-04-30 00:00:00 Douglas Dishauzi This book presents a giant corpus on voice and other related grammatical constructions such as 'passive', 'anti-passive', 'ergative', etc. I can classify world's languages into two classes in terms of morphosyntactic alignments: 1. Ergative-absolutive languages 2. Nominative-accusative languages Generally, in the first class, the ergative stands in opposition with three forms: Aboslutive in Erg-Abs alignment, Anti-passive again in erg-abs, and passive in nom-acc alignment, in other words, the ergative absolutive case marking is similar to agentive passive in nom-acc, and its counterpart in erg-abs, i.e. antipassive is more similar to active in nom-acc. This book is basically a typological study of different languages, most of these that would be classified as complicated languages are those with the label 'ergative'. But at some point, linguists have arrived to the conclusion that even ergative system is a development from passive towards accusative in a form of continuum. Philippine languages have the following properties: Ergativity has two main forms, goal-topic constructions, and actor-topic constructions. The first is closely related to passive and the second goes more with anti-passive. Add to this the ergative form marked basically for case. Austronesian languages often exhibit an acute disagreement regarding the status of the subject. In Tagalog, topics are subjects because only they can undergo 'quantifier floating'. In slavic languages, the passive may bear any semantic role other than the agent. Slavic have two passive forms: the first is a periphrastic passive which is personal and has 'be' and a past participle as English. The second one is reflexive passive. In Chinese, there is a passive form with 'bei' verb corresponding to the prepositional phrase in English passives as 'by ..' which has the ability to bring in the agent however being demoted. This form is often argued to be of predicative nature and residing in an embedded structure. In Ute language, passive can be marked both with a suffix -ta or -ka. This language has only the agent deletion passive. Finally, I'd like to comment on the article by Estitivan and Myhill in which they discussed the development of ergative from passive and never vice versa. Here, the authors focused on the similarities of the distribution between ergative and passive. All of them, syntactic, morphological, functional, and even pragmatic. I find this work at its beginning. And if it's true the case that ergative has originated diachronically from passive, them it would add more to the obscure nature and its paradoxical idiosyncrasy (to use Milner's terms, 1986).

Review # 2 was written on 2012-04-13 00:00:00 Joy Antes شار أحد المحررين في صحيفة الغارديان إلى قيمة هذا الكتاب، بأسلوب صحفي موجز قال فيه: "إن كنت لا تميز بين دولوز ودريدا، أو بين باتاي وبوروديو، أو بين لاكان وليوتار، أو إن كنت لا تزال فعليا متشبثا ببنيامين وموس، وأدورنو وسوسور، وهم الذين تعرفهم جميعا ، فإن هذا الكتاب هو الذي يساعدك على التمييز بينهم" مراجعتي : "50 مفكرا معاصرا من البنيوية إلى ما بعد الحداثة" لجون ليتشه، كتاب بيوغرافي، يسرد سيرا مقتضبة لخميسن مفكرا معاصرا، كان لهم أكبر الأثر _من وجهة نظر المؤلف_ في تشكيل الخارطة الثقافية الغربية ، من لحظة البنيوية إلى لحظة ما بعد الحداثة. مع تسليط الضوء على أعمالهم وإسهاماتهم الفكرية، تحت مجهر النقد السريع. لفت انتباهي، أن كثيرا من المفكرين الذي ترجم لهم المؤلف في الكتاب، كانت تربطهم صداقات فكرية وطيدة، وثمة شهادة أكاديمية مرموقة سعى كثير منهم للحصول عليها ، وهي شهادة الكفاءة التعليمية، بيد أن أكثر ما أثار حنقي هو انخراط بعضهم في الخدمة العسكرية، لبلدانهم الاستعمارية !! من المصادفات الطريفة أني وجدت بعض هؤلاء المفكرين الأفذاذ، قد بزغ نجمهم الفكري في سن الرابعة والعشرين _ وهي نفس سني الآن