Language and Reality: Selected Writings of Sydney Lamb

Language and Reality presents selected writings of Professor Sydney M. Lamb, including six new works and several which have been re-worked for publication here. Although he is a leading figure in linguistic science, many of the papers are far from well known, some of them having appeared in more obscure venues of publication, and for the most part unavailable to the wider linguistic community. The book is divided into four parts, the first of which includes papers offering insight into the man behind this pioneering approach to doing linguistics that might best be summed up as linguistics to the beat of a different drummer. The papers in Part II explore the theoretical origins of Lamb’s ideas about language that have often been described as ahead of their time. Part III includes more recent writings outlining work done in Neurocognitive Linguistics. Studies of the interconnectedness of language with other kinds of human experience and with history are presented in Part IV.