Mr Pinker.
There’s a very impressive collection of articles on the topic of communication over at Forbes Magazine (of all palces). Among the authors is Steven Pinker, a great hero of mine. There’s nothing China-specific about the report, but it has some fascinating articles on the topics of language and communication in general.
The link to the report is here.
Ken Carroll
MEANING THEN WORDS - I am re-discovering Pinker after having seen a reference on Sinosplice and recalling Ken’s reference quite a while back. The following articles are really fascinating, for me it has provided insight into my own ‘mentalese’ and efforts to study language. More and more I realize that I struggle first to ‘find meaning’ and then link words to it, it is almost always a lackluster/academic experience when I go the other direction, learn a word and then try to attach ‘meaning’ to it.
Here’s an excert from a series of interviews, I found Pinker remarkable in his ability to convey in simple terms mind-blowing concepts.
“If words and thoughts were the same thing it would be impossible to coin a new word. Where would the impetus to coin a word come from, if you didn’t have some idea that you needed to express? And also, when you’re speaking or writing, people often have the sense that they didn’t express themselves properly. They’ll say, “Oh no, that isn’t what I meant to say. Don’t misunderstand me. It came out wrong. What I really meant to say was such and such.”
http://www.williamjames.com/tr.....inker1.htm
http://www.williamjames.com/tr.....inker2.htm
http://www.williamjames.com/tr.....inker3.htm
http://www.williamjames.com/tr.....inker4.htm
If I might just add a little to your Cpod top-down, context-driven approach I think giving listeners more clues to the emotional words and visceral aspects of the upcoming dialogue may fire up more appropriate neurons and lexical connections that just providiing ‘context’ clues. For example saying “In this next dialogue, Jenny sheng qi le. She and her friend are struggling, they want to use words like tao yan, bie dong. Let’s listen to their frustrating afternoon of shopping.” I think you often do this, not sure if you’re explicity incorporating it into your practice though? Yoda-Ken, is it you do? Such purpose there is?