Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781780232584)

In Beyond Words, Steven Connor seeks to understand spoken human language outside words, a realm that encompasses the sounds we make that bring depth, meaning, and confusion to communication. Plunging into the connotations and uses associated with particular groups of vocal utterances--the guttural, the dental, the fricative, and the sibilant--he reveals the beliefs, the myths, and the responses that surround the growls, stutters, ums, ers, and ahs of everyday language.

Beyond Words goes outside of linguistics and phonetics to focus on the popular conceptions of what language is, rather than what it actually is or how it works. From the moans and sobs of human grief to playful linguistic nonsense, Connor probes the fringes and limits of human language--and our definition of "voice" and meaning--to challenge our basic assumptions about what it is to communicate and where we find meaning in language. By engaging with vocal sounds and tics usually trivialized or ignored, Beyond Words presents a startling and fascinating new way to engage with language itself.

Author: Steven Connor
ISBN-10: 1780232586
ISBN-13: 9781780232584
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Language: English
Published: 02/15/2014
Pages: 224
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 8.73h x 5.86w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 09/01/2014 pg. 69