A Multimodal Language Faculty

Reviews / Votes

Cohn and Schilperoord propose a true paradigm shift in how language should be understood and studied. The authors boldly re-imagine the nature of language and re-frame its scientific study by including the full range of human expressive potential. A "must read" for language scientists! * Karen Emmorey, Distinguished Professor of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University, USA * This exciting book reformulates central problems in the structure of language, giving a coherent account of how sound, gesture, and graphic marks allow us to communicate. Building on Cohn's foundational studies of comics and Schilperoord's studies of time in language, it will captivate and edify specialists and linguistics newbies alike. -- Jeffrey M. Zacks, Washington University in Saint Louis, USA Beautifully written, this revolutionary book provides a significant step in re-shaping our notion of human language faculty, its uniqueness and evolution by shifting it from an amodal to a multimodal one - where speech, writing, gesture, sign, graphics and drawings are conceived as expressive behaviors of one cognitive and communicative system. -- Asli Ozyurek, Radboud University, the Netherlands A Multimodal Language Faculty, the product of two decades of research, unites all human expression under the umbrella of multimodal language. Especially innovative and insightful is the embrace of artistic expression (music, dance, and visual art) as emanating from the same uniquely human ability as language. * Mark Aronoff, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, Stony Brook University, USA * Linguistics has been rattling the bars of its monomodal cage for some time. Now it's out. Cohn and Schilperoord's unified framework for vocal, bodily, and graphic modalities reconfigures linguistics as essentially multimodal from the ground up, effectively capturing a far broader range of actual human communicative behaviour and cognition. * John Bateman, Professor of Linguistics, Bremen University, Germany * With its extensive and original attention to multimodality, i.e., the simultaneous mixing of different semiotic, communicative systems, this important book integrates modern linguistic and cognitive perspectives with innovating analyses of especially visual modes of expression, revealing significant structural analogies between these. A significant accomplishment. * Harry van der Hulst, Professor of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, USA *