Thought-Based Linguistics

Wallace Chafe is Professor Emeritus and Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research has focused in part on the Seneca language in New York and the Caddo language in Oklahoma. He has investigated differences between speaking and writing; the functions of prosody in spoken language; the emotion underlying laughter and humor, ways in which language can be beautiful; and relations between language and thought.

Argues for the central role of thoughts in the design of language.

Prologue; Part I. Preliminaries: 1. Background; 2. Ground rules; Part II. Thoughts and their Properties: 3. The priority of thoughts; 4. The path from a thought to a sound; 5. How thoughts are structured; 6. How thoughts are experienced; 7. How thoughts are shared; 8. How thoughts flow through time; Part III. Verbalization Illustrated: 9. From a thought to a sound in English; 10. From a thought to a sound in a polysynthetic language; Part IV. Related Issues: 11. The translation paradox; 12. Repeated verbalizations of the same thought; 13. Rethinking Whorf; 14. Lessons from literature; Part V. Common Ways of Orienting Thoughts: 15. Small numbers and subitizing; 16. Thoughts and gender; 17. Time, tense, memory, and imagination; 18. Relating ideas to reality; Part VI. The Emotional Component of Thoughts: 19. Emotional involvement in a conversation; 20. The feeling of nonseriousness; 21. How language can be beautiful; Epilogue; Index.