Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations

by Steven Connor

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.

Genres: Language, Linguistics

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Director of the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Among his many books are explorations of aspects of the cultural history of the senses, including Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000), The Book of Skin (2004), and Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (2014). His most recent books are Dream Machines (2017), The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowledge (2019), and Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (2019).

Reviews

[Oskar Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Flights of fancy through the alphabet and the voice.

‘We might almost see the speaking of English as involving the cohabitation of two mouths in the space of one, the muddy gutturals of the Caliban mouth alternating with the tight, bright, Ariel-like Tinkerbell tones of the Latinate tongue and teeth, tripping its light fantastick toe.’