Marshall’s Comments (group member since Mar 15, 2012)

Marshall’s comments from the New Books Network group.

Listen to an interview with the author on New Books in Language.

When big claims are made about neurolinguistics, there often seems to be a subtext that the latest findings will render traditional linguistics obsolete. These claims are often met with appropriate scepticism by experienced linguistics practitioners, either because experience tells them not to believe the hype, or (in a few cases) because they were already obsolete and were managing just fine anyway.

Alistair Knott's claim in Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax (MIT Press, 2012) is extremely atypical: it is that at least one strand of traditional linguistics, namely Minimalist syntax, is in fact more relevant than even its defenders believed. He argues that the necessary constituent steps of a reach-to-grasp action are, collectively, isomorphic to the syntactic operations that are required to describe the action with a sentence. Although this particular case is the focus of his discussion here, he also believes that the parallelism is more widespread, and that in fact Minimalism may have articulated a profound and general truth about the way human cognition works.

To defend the parallel, this book surveys a wealth of research, covering both the neuropsychology of the relevant sensorimotor processes and the motivation for the linguistic analysis. In our interview, we discuss some of the particular challenges of positing this interdisciplinary synthesis, and look (perhaps optimistically) at the potential for the resolution of long-standing debates about the nature of the human syntactic capability.

Listen to an interview with the author on New Books in Law.

Patrick Weil is the author of The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He is a visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center in the University of Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. The Sovereign Citizen is an historical study of denaturalization in the United States. It tells the story of what Weil believes is a revolution in the concept of citizenship, through exhaustive archival research. But is also a story about the actors that have made law what it is – immigrants, political radicals, criminal defense lawyers, bureaucrats, and judges.

Interview with the author on New Books in East Asia Studies

In The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (Duke UP, 2013), Daisuke Miyao explores a history of light and its absence in Japanese cinema. A commentary on the history of modernity, the book considers how an aesthetics of shadow emerged from a Japanese modern that was fundamentally transnational. A fascinating history of film, the book guides readers through the emergence and transformations of new dramatic genres and new ways of being a movie star in modern Japan. A corrective to the tendency to valorize directors in cinematic histories, the book gives voice to the cinematographers and other craftsmen of light and shadow who shaped the cinema of Japan through the mid-twentieth century. It is a wonderful story of flashing swords, sensual glances, battling movie studios, and tensions between technologies and aesthetics of illumination that alternately concealed and revealed. The Aesthetics of Shadow also treats us to close readings of some wonderful Japanese films that were a revelation for this reader: have YouTube handy as Miyao introduces you to Crossways (Jujiro) and That Night’s Wife, guiding your eye to visual traces that reveal broader histories of blindness, surveillance, and the tactile. Enjoy!

You can listen to an interview with the the author on New Books in History.

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