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Have you ever wondered how the principles behind Shannon's groundbreaking Information Theory can be interwoven with the intricate fabric of linguistic communication? This book takes you on a fascinating journey, offering insights into how humans process and comprehend language. By applying Information Theory to the realm of natural language semantics, it unravels the connection between regularities in linguistic messages and the cognitive intricacies of language processing. Highlighting the intersections of information theory with linguistics, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and computer science, this book serves as an inspiration for anyone seeking to understand the predictive capabilities of Information Theory in modeling human communication. It elaborates on the seminal works from giants in the field like Dretske, Hale, and Zipf, exploring concepts like surprisal theory and the principle of least effort. With its empirical approach, this book not only discusses the theoretical aspects but also ventures into the application of Shannon's Information Theory in real-world language scenarios, strengthened by advanced statistical methods and machine learning. It touches upon challenging areas such as the distinction between mathematical and semantic information, the concept of information in linguistic utterances, and the intricate play between truth, context, and meaning. Whether you are a linguist, a cognitive psychologist, a philosopher, or simply an enthusiast eager to dive deep into the world where language meets information, this book promises a thought-provoking journey.

Embark on a surprising journey from A to Z in this “passionate and funny” history of the alphabet perfect for linguistics enthusiasts and history nerds (Boston Globe)! “Fascinating tidbits of information . . . It’s like Oliver Jeffers’ Once Upon an Alphabet for grown–ups.” —Library Journal How on Earth did we fix upon our 26 letters, what do they really mean, and how did we come to write them down in the first place? Michael Rosen takes you on an unforgettable adventure through the history of the alphabet in 26 vivid chapters, fizzing with personal anecdotes and fascinating facts. Starting with the mysterious Phoenicians and how sounds first came to be written down, he races on to show how nonsense poems work; pins down the strange story of “OK”; traces our 5 lost letters; and tackles the tyranny of spelling, among many, many other things. His heroes of the alphabet range from Edward Lear to Phyllis Pearsall (the inventor of the A–Z), and from the two scribes of Beowulf to rappers. Each chapter takes on a different subject—whether it's codes, umlauts or the writing of dictionaries. Rosen's enthusiasm for letters positively leaps off the page, whether it's the story of his life told through the typewriters he's owned or a chapter on jokes written in a string of gags and word games. This is the book for anyone who's ever wondered why Hawaiian only has a 13–letter alphabet or how exactly to write down the sound of a wild raspberry.

Regimes of Description responds to the perception—however imprecise—that forms of knowledge in every sector of contemporary culture are being fundamentally reshaped by the digital revolution: music, speech, engineering diagrams, weather reports, works of visual art, even the words most of us write are now subject, as Lyotard points out in The Inhuman, to a logic of the bit, the elemental unit of electronic information. It is now possible to slice, graft, and splice this knowledge in ways never before imagined using technologies that treat vast bodies of information as a stream of data bits. Programs and technical algorithms specify the criteria for discriminating between the data stream of a Mozart string quartet and the CAT scan of a diseased organ. But are these machine instructions and design parameters descriptions, or merely mechanical filters? And if the latter, what constitutes a description of digitally encoded knowledge? As a group, the essays in this volume pose that question as a first attempt to write the archaeology of the nature and history of description in the digital age.

"Quite definitely addictive . . . a must-read, written with wit and humor and peopled with multidimensional characters. What more could a reader ask for?" —Mary Balogh, New York Times bestselling author The phone call Rachel Gold received from a nervous CPA almost seemed routine. Rosenthal wanted to meet with her to discuss something confidential about a corporate merger. Hardly an unusual request of a lawyer. But Rosenthal never made it to the meeting—and when his corpse is discovered, it was clear he had died under circumstances too bizarre to believe. Having never even met the murdered CPA, Rachel is willing to let the police try to close the case. But that all changes with the next victim—someone so dear to Rachel that the hunt for the killer becomes her personal vendetta. What lethal facts did the slain accountant find buried in the books of Armstrong Bioproducts while doing the pre-merger due diligence? Was there any connection between that pharmaceutical company and the presidential campaign of Rachel's political hero, Dr. Douglas Armstrong? Armstrong, the founder of Armstrong Bioproducts, is now the junior senator from Missouri. And what was the significance, if any, of the yellowed typewritten lists of names of residents of two St. Louis nursing homes that had gone out of business decades earlier? Teaming up again with her best friend, Benny Goldberg, Rachel seeks her own measure of vengeance. As other corpses show up, her pursuit will take her from the upper strata of St. Louis society to the elaborate network of limestone caves far beneath the streets of St. Louis, where the answers to the mystery—along with the murderers themselves—await her arrival.

The escalation in violence over the last few years expressed in xenophobia, racism and nationalism in several European countries is analyzed in the contributions of this book. Representatives of disciplines of the various social sciences dedicated to understanding violence attempt to determine possible causes and motives for this increase. The European aspect is examined using case study results from several countries.

To Pass On a Good Earth is the candid and compelling new biography of one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive and influential scholars. The legendary "Great God beyond the Sierras," Carl Ortwin Sauer is America’s most famed geographer, an inspiration to both academics and poets, yet no book-length biography of him has existed until now. This Missouri-born son of German immigrants contributed to many fields, with a versatility rare in his time and virtually unknown today. Sauer explored plant and animal domestication, the entry of Native Americans into the continent, their transformation of the land into prairies and cultivated fields, and subsequent European enterprise that fueled prosperity but also triggered environmental degradation and the loss of cultural diversity. Providing profound and invaluable insights into the human occupance, cultivation--and often ruination--of the earth, Sauer revolutionized our understanding of the impact of European conquest of the New World. Author and fellow geographer Michael Williams had access to Sauer’s voluminous correspondence in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley and in family collections. Enlivened by these intimate letters to family and colleagues, To Pass On a Good Earth reveals the rare qualities of mind and heart that made Sauer one of America’s most treasured--as well as troubled--intellectual pioneers. He brought both historical rigor and humanistic understanding to the burgeoning environmental movement and ceaselessly championed an ecumenical approach in an age of increasing specialization.

Well into the 20th century, one in four newborns failed to survive their first year of life. It was after World War II that medicine "discovered" the newborn as a human being entitled to medical treatment and prioritised care. Since its definition by Alexander Schaffer in 1960, neonatology has evolved into a mature, innovative, and ethical field. A large number of medical professionals' care for neonates, yet no definitive medical history of the newborn has been available until now. The Oxford Textbook of the Newborn: A Cultural and Medical History offers readers a unique and authoritative resource on the 3000-year history of the newborn within Western societies. Written by Professor Michael Obladen, a leading voice in neonatology, this book reflects on our perception of newborns, from the earliest days of human thought, through to the traces that remained in medieval life and persist today. It unearths ideas and evidence of societies' perceptions of newborns through a beautifully illustrated, impressive and often never-seen-before set of historical sources from libraries, archives, churches, excavation fields, and hospital charts around the world. Split into 8 sections which each cover aspects of the natural lifecycle of a neonate, this book demonstrates the impact of religion, law, ethics, philosophy and culture on newborns' quality of life, and covers fascinating topics such as the rites of passage for the newborn, infanticide, opium use, breastfeeding, and artificial feeding. Each chapter is written in an accessible style and includes high-quality historical illustrations which really bring the subject to life.

Michael K. Rosenow investigates working people's beliefs, rituals of dying, and the politics of death by honing in on three overarching questions: How did workers, their families, and their communities experience death? Did various identities of class, race, gender, and religion coalesce to form distinct cultures of death for working people? And how did people's attitudes toward death reflect notions of who mattered in U.S. society? Drawing from an eclectic array of sources ranging from Andrew Carnegie to grave markers in Chicago's potter's field, Rosenow portrays the complex political, social, and cultural relationships that fueled the United States' industrial ascent. The result is an undertaking that adds emotional depth to existing history while challenging our understanding of modes of cultural transmission.

Diathesis ("valency alternation") is a sentence structure that reshapes the roles of a verb. The prototypical example of such a diathesis is the well-known passive. However, there are very many other such role-remappings, like antipassives, applicatives, causatives, etc. This book presents an encyclopaedic survey of diathesis in German. The objective is to catalogue all diatheses that exist in this language. Currently almost 250 different German diatheses are described in this book, some highly productive, some only attested for a handful of verbs. The main goal of this book is to present this wealth of grammatical possibility in a unified manner, while at the same time attempting to classify and organise this diversity. A summary of the about 80 most prominent diatheses is also provided, including many newly-minted German names, because most these diatheses did not have a German name yet. It might come as a surprise that there are so many different diatheses in German, but my impression is that in this respect German is no exception among the world's languages. I expect that all languages have a similar abundance of different ways in which to construe a sentence around a lexical predicate. In a sense, a diathesis allows for the expression of a distinct perspective on the event described, something that is arguably a common desire of any language user. Except for diathesis this book also aims to completely catalogue its counterpart: epithesis. An epithesis is a derived sentence structure in which the marking of the verb roles remains constant. Basically, these are the grammaticalised constructions expressing tense-aspect-mood-evidentiality in German. The list of major epitheses is also quite long (about 40 constructions), but it is quite a bit smaller than the list of major diatheses (about 80 constructions). This indicates that from a purely grammatical perspective, diathesis ("grammatical voice") is about a two-times more elaborate topic than epithesis ("tense-aspect-mood marking") in German.

"Culture" is a term we commonly use to explain the differences in our ways of living. In this book Michael A. Elliott returns to the moment this usage was first articulated, tracing the concept of culture to the writings -- folktales, dialect literature, local color sketches, and ethnographies -- that provided its intellectual underpinnings in turn-of-the-century America. The Culture Concept explains how this now-familiar definition of "culture" emerged during the late nineteenth century through the intersection of two separate endeavors that shared a commitment to recording group-based difference -- American literary realism and scientific ethnography. Elliott looks at early works of cultural studies as diverse as the conjure tales of Charles Chesnutt, the Ghost-Dance ethnography of James Mooney, and the prose narrative of the Omaha anthropologist-turned-author Francis La Flesche. His reading of these works -- which struggle to find appropriate theoretical and textual tools for articulating a less chauvinistic understanding of human difference -- is at once a recovery of a lost connection between American literary realism and ethnography and a productive inquiry into the usefulness of the culture concept as a critical tool in our time and times to come.