商品簡介
With language, we can make things happen, we can influence, even manipulate other people. But language misunderstood can have disastrous consequences. July 1945: The mistranslation of Japan's answer to the US ultimatum may have been responsible for the atom bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki!
This book is a long overdue survey of all the effects of language on the three levels of evolution, system and discourse - and of what thinkers have written about them. From Plato's critique of Sophistry to Bacon's idola fori, Humboldt's 'language is energy', and finally Wittgenstein's 'language games' - this book deals critically with the power of language and what philosophers have said about it. A glossary of terms and an annotated list of thinkers make this book easy to use.
作者簡介
Alwin Frank Fill is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Graz, Austria. His previous books include The Ecolinguistics Reader (co-edited with Peter Muhlhausler, 2001).
