Gillian Brown - Böcker

Evolutionary theory is one of the most wide-ranging and inspiring of scientific ideas. It offers a battery of methods that can be used to interpret human behaviour. But the legitimacy of this exercise is at the centre of a heated controversy that has raged for over a century. Many evolutionary biologists, anthropologists and psychologists are optimistic that evolutionary principles can be applied to human behaviour, and have offered evolutionary explanations for a wide range of human characteristics, such as homicide, religion and sex differences in behaviour. Others are sceptical of these interpretations. Moreover, researchers disagree as to the best ways to use evolution to explore humanity, and a number of schools have emerged. Sense and Nonsense provides an introduction to the ideas, methods and findings of five such schools, namely, sociobiology, human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology, cultural evolution, and gene-culture co-evolution. In this revised and updated edition of their successful monograph, Laland and Brown provide a balanced, rigorous analysis that scrutinizes both the evolutionary arguments and the allegations of the critics, carefully guiding the reader through the mire of confusing terminology, claim and counter-claim, and polemical statements. This readable and informative introductory book will be of use to undergraduate and postgraduate students (for example, in psychology, anthropology and zoology), to experts on one approach who would like to know more about the other perspectives, and to lay-persons interested in evolutionary explanations of human behaviour. Having completed this book, the reader should feel better placed to assess the legitimacy of claims made about human behaviour under the name of evolution, and to make judgements as to what is sense and what is nonsense.

Gillian Brown's book probes the key relationship between domestic ideology and formulations of the self in nineteenth-century America. Arguing that domesticity institutes gender, class, and racial distinctions that govern masculine as well as feminine identity, Brown brilliantly alters, for literary critics, feminists, and cultural historians, the critical perspective from which nineteenth-century American literature and culture have been viewed. In this study of the domestic constitution of individualism, Brown traces how the values of interiority, order, privacy, and enclosure associated with the American home come to define selfhood in general. By analyzing writings by Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fern, and Gilman, and by examining other contemporary cultural modes--abolitionism, consumerism, architecture, interior decorating, motherhood, mesmerism, hysteria, and agoraphobia--she reconfigures the parameters of both domesticity and the patterns of self it fashions. Unfolding a representational history of the domestic, Brown's work offers striking new readings of the literary texts as well as of the cultural contexts that they embody.

In this book the authors examine the nature of spoken language and how it differs from written language both in form and purpose. A large part of it is concerned with principles and techniques for teaching spoken production and listening comprehension. An important chapter deals with how to assess spoken language. The principles and techniques described apply to the teaching of English as a foreign and second language and are also highly relevant to the teaching of the mother tongue

Discourse analysis is a term that has come to have different interpretations for scholars working in different disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it is concerned mainly with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation; for a psycholinguist, it is primarily concerned with the nature of comprehension of short written texts; for the computational linguist, it is concerned with producing operational models of text-understanding within highly limited contexts. In this textbook, first published in 1983, the authors provide an extensive overview of the many and diverse approaches to the study of discourse, but base their own approach centrally on the discipline which, to varying degrees, is common to them all - linguistics. Using a methodology which has much in common with descriptive linguistics, they offer a lucid and wide-ranging account of how forms of language are used in communication. Their principal concern is to examine how any language produced by man, whether spoken or written, is used to communicate for a purpose in a context.

Dr Brown examines the functions of different types of rules in the phonological component of a generative grammar with examples especially from Lumasaaba, a Bantu language of eastern Uganda.

This original collection revisits and re-evaluates Chomsky's classic competence/performance distinction from a wide variety of perspectives and areas of expertise. The discussion is placed within a broad framework, taking account of a view of language both as a societal construct and as internal, developing within the mind and/or brain. Renowned experts in the fields of lexis, sociolinguistics, connectionism, Universal Grammar, language testing and interlanguage draw together ideas from the most recent developments in second language learning and psychological theory. Germane to their debate is the question of whether it is helpful, or in principle possible, to draw a distinction between competence and performance in second language learning. The volume will be of interest to teachers, researchers and students of applied linguistics, education and general linguistics.

In this book Gillian Brown draws on a wide range of examples of discourse analysis to explore the ways in which speakers and listeners use language collaboratively to talk about what they can see in front of them and about a series of events. She examines the conditions under which communication is successful, and the conditions under which it sometimes fails. The focus of her attention is upon the listener's role, as the listener tries to make sense of what the speaker says in a highly constrained context; her cognitive/pragmatic approach to discourse analysis both complements and challenges the sociological/anthropological perspectives on the subject which currently predominate. Gillian Brown is co-author of the well-known textbook Discourse Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

The main topic of this revised and updated edition is the comprehension of the spoken language. Subjects covered include the function of intonation and paralinguistic features, while revisions made include a new section on `pause' and how this interacts with rhythm,

What made the United States what it is began long before a shot was fired at a redcoat in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1775. It began quietly in homes and schoolrooms across the colonies in the reading lessons women gave to children. Just as the Protestant revolt originated in a practice of individual reading of the Bible, so the theories of reading developed by John Locke were the means by which a revolutionary attitude toward authority was disseminated throughout the British colonies in North America that would come to form in the United States. Gillian Brown takes us back to the basics to understand why Americans value the right to individual self-determination above all other values. It all begins with children.Locke crucially linked consent with childhood, and it is his formulation of the child's natural right to consent that eighteenth-century Americans learned as they learned to read through Lockean-style pedagogies and textbooks. Tracing the Lockean legacy through the New England Primer and popular readers, fables, and fairy tales, Brown demonstrates how Locke's emphasis on the liberty--and difficulty--of individual judgment became a received notion in the American colonies.After the revolution, American consent discourse features a different prototype of individuality; instead of wronged children, images of seduced or misguided women predominate postrevolutionary culture. The plights of these women display the difficulties of consent that Locke from the start realized. Individuals continually confront standards and prejudices at odds with their own experiences and judgments. Thus, the Lockean legacy to the United States is the reminder of the continual work to be done to endow every individual with consent and to make consent matter.What emerged in America was a new and different attitude toward authority in which authority does not belong to the elders but to the upcoming generations and groups. To effect this dramatic a change in the values of humankind took a grassroots revolution. That's what this book is about.

For those who are familiar with the first edition, it will be convenient to have some indication of where the main changes lie. Chapter one has been largely rewritten to give an outline of current approaches to a model of comprehension of spoken language. Chapter two has a new initial section but otherwise remains as it was. Chapter three incorporates a new section on "pause" and how this interacts with rhythm, and rather more on the function of stress. Chapter four has an extended initial section but otherwise remains largely as it was. Chapter five on intonation contains several sections which have been rewritten to varying extents. Chapter six of the first edition has disappeared: in 1977, very little work had been published on "fillers" and it seemed worthwhile incorporating a chapter that sat rather oddly with the phonetic/phonological interests of the rest of the book. Not that there is a great industry of descriptions of the forms and functions of these and similar phenomena there seems no reason to retain this early but admittedly primitive account. The chapter on "paralinguistic vocal features", now chapter six, has some rewriting in the early part but considerable rewriting in the last sections. The final chapter on "teaching listening comprehension" has grown greatly in length. It still incorporates some material from the original chapter but most of it is completely rewritten.

First published in 1980, this book questions many of the assumptions that have accumulated around the subject of intonation as it occurs in spontaneous speech, as well as texts read aloud. The book suggests alternative ways of examining the subject and primarily uses data derived from Edinburgh speech, which is explicitly compared with descriptions of standard southern English.The book critically examines many conventional assumptions made about the formal features of intonation, particularly ‘tonic’ or primary stress’, and about the functions of intonation, specifically rising intonation. A model of intonation is presented which demonstrates that the limited resources of intonation are exploited by several different expressive systems. This approach is justified in detailed analysis of extensive stretches of speech, supported by instrumental analysis as well as by experiments which elicit judgements by both naïve and phonetically trained judges.This book will be of interest to students of linguistics, English Language, speech therapy, and English as a Foreign Language, as well as historians interested in the history of language.

First published in 1980, this book questions many of the assumptions that have accumulated around the subject of intonation as it occurs in spontaneous speech, as well as texts read aloud. The book suggests alternative ways of examining the subject and primarily uses data derived from Edinburgh speech, which is explicitly compared with descriptions of standard southern English (RP).The book critically examines many conventional assumptions made about the formal features of intonation, particularly ‘tonic’ or primary stress’, and about the functions of intonation, specifically rising intonation. A model of intonation is presented which demonstrates that the limited resources of intonation are exploited by several different expressive systems. This approach is justified in detailed analysis of extensive stretches of speech, supported by instrumental analysis as well as by experiments which elicit judgements by both naïve and phonetically trained judges.This book will be of interest to students of linguistics, English Language, speech therapy, and English as a Foreign Language, as well as historians interested in the history of language.