This completely refers to the building elements of the living cell, too. It is by no means built up by the familiar from the inorganic chem- istry atoms and molecules, but rather — from packages. CC: Creative Commons License, The reaction between iron and oxygen in the environment of the living cell proceeds in a completely dif- ferent manner. It is a matter of the equally well-examined oxidation of haemoglobin.
Here the iron atom is tightly packed, besides in a double envelope. Its outer layer is a globular protein. Inside it, is positioned the hem — an organic substance, known also as porphyrin. And only inside the hem, in a specifically adjusted nest, is the iron atom itself.
Fe Figure 1: Oxidation of haemoglobin. It is seen how the iron atom is tightly packed in the Russian matryoshka type of structure of haemoglo- bin. It is no longer an ordinary chemical element, to which the atmospheric oxygen has a direct admission, but a package. A direct chemical reaction between the iron atom of the haemoglobin and the atmospheric oxygen is impossible. Their interaction is mediated through a cellular signal path, which includes hor- mones, mediators and receptors.
These agents cannot bind up directly, but only through chemical signals that are intercepted by specific receptors. No chemical agent can penetrate into the living cell, provided it is not intercepted by a — capable of recognizing it — receptor. Biochemical reactions inside the cell are between packages, communicating through chemical signals, intercepted by receptors. The same refers to the inter-cellular interactions. This has led a team of British researchers to the idea of depriving alcohol of all its side effects as: hard- ened coordination of motion, verbal and mental activity, headache, etc.
Dimitrov, A. They succeeded in blocking the receptors intercepting the harmful and undesir- able ingredients of alcohol and left active only these that capture the desirable and harmless chemical signals, it conveys. It seems that somehow the nestinars — here, in our country, and elsewhere — succeed in blocking psychically their thermo-receptors, so that the glowing coals are incapable of causing them any skin injuries.
Package 1 Signal Package 2 Figure 2: Package model of communication 1 - packages can communicate only through signals. A situation well familiar to the inhabitants of the cyberspace. The inhabitants of the separate packages are dynamic agents, yet they never act immediately, as physical objects do.
Through the signals they send out, they only demonstrate their real presence and aim at a rich expression of their qualitative potential. Packages, therefore, should be regarded as paradoxical, modal, ontological agents. Let us compare the crossing trajectories of billiard balls and the exquisite movements of dancing part- ners. Billiard balls are objects, which collide directly, governed by blind physical forces; while dance is a language, through which partners communicate as modalities.
Although they precisely express them- selves in the dance language, these modalities are present solely in the meaning this language conveys. It is definitely the second case.
And indeed, at a certain moment the packages can and have to be unwrapped. The whole meaning of the communication is precisely in specifying when and how it can take place. We deposit a package of clothes to dry cleaning; we wrap it up additionally with a proper verbal mes- sage and monetary signs; after a certain time, we receive another package.
In both cases, these are clothes, which are packed before the submission, and unpacked after the receipt. Packing and unwrapping, modality and reality are not divided by a precipice; they are constantly con- verted into one another and it is precisely what endows our behaviour with meaning. The problem is that we could deposit into the above-mentioned firm a coat and receive trousers — in other words, errors are quite possible in a communication. Since errors are excluded for the physical in- teractions, the problem evidently is… CC: Creative Commons License, The reply is simple, but its accomplishment is very hard.
A meaningful and productive communication starts with the spotting of universal processes and regularities. They could be the only basis for the pro- ducing of signals — precise and meaningful for the inhabitants of both packages. Indeed, in some cases, the objective may be just the opposite — communication may also be cheating.
Do Eskimos really have a lot of words for snow? No this is a myth. Children cannot learn a language by just watching television. In the sentence "It is raining" what does the word "it" refer to?
I've never thought of this. In Spanish, you can just say "Raining. This question does not come up in this book, but I thought I'd write it in this review anyway so I won't forget to think about it more later.
View all 3 comments. Dec 12, Gary Bruff rated it it was ok Shelves: read-linguistics , reviews-language. I checked this one out from the town library. Imagine that, a book about syntax from the local library. I think the librarian who bought the book must have been convinced that syntax was really hard science this time, not likely to morph in each coming decade.
And anyway, according to Chomsky's latest, Chomsky is Galileo and Copernicus rolled into one. If you have read this far you have guessed that I don't much care for this book. For starters, it is dishonest. There is no periodic table of synt I checked this one out from the town library. There is no periodic table of syntactic parameters, nor will there ever be.
Despite the gallons of good rationalist ink spilled on the matter, we are getting farther--not closer--from discovering a universal core of syntax and sets of delineable variations. There have been astute characterizations of individual languages, new good ones each quarter.
But the honest academics are forced by the data to allow exceptions to the theory, modifying the framework to allow the language to be its own splendid self. Baker is not an honest academic. He grossly simplifies his argument to give it a sense of proportion, symmetry, and razor sharp simplicity.
Unfortunately the truth is a lot messier than that. It would be nice to claim incontrovertibly that all languages are configurational Chomsky , that all languages are subject-verb-object Kayne , that in all languages there are dozens of universal landing places in syntactic topology Cinque , that theta roles are the same in every language Baker. It would be nice to claim these things because they would simplify the problem of explaining the seemingly endless Babel of tongues.
Linguistics needs to be less conservative and allow languages to be themselves, not what our theory needs them to be. It could be that the only structural universal is structure itself. Not a very sexy universal, but it is the one we most likely will end up living with. Baker's Atoms of Language is nevertheless a good book for linguistics beginners, even if the periodic table nonsense is a bit of a parlor trick.
And it is short enough and well written enough to be an interesting sidebar to an introductory class on syntax.
Just don't treat parameters as though they are the science of tomorrow's brain 'chemistry. A better, more typologically valid book is Baker's Lexical Categories. If you know some linguistics, skip Atoms and head for Lexical Categories. It has some problems with mixed categories participial verbs acting like adjectives, gerunds and infinitive acting like nouns , and it does not yet abandon the universal theta role alignment, a theory that simply does not work.
A better introduction to the methods and findings of syntax can be found in the front chapters of Pinker's Language Instinct. Whatever his shortcomings, at least Pinker is honest. Feb 08, Quinton rated it it was amazing. I absolutely loved this book. The author is a riot!! I laughed aloud at least thirty times while reading this. Mark Baker is really quite an entertaining writer.
Really an outstanding job. The content was very interesting. It was not perfect -- there were a lot of strange examples of English, for example, and the Japanese was very unusual -- but all in all I thought it was very enlightening. Mark Baker did a good job of recognizing things that were imperfect or questionable as such. I appreciated I absolutely loved this book. I appreciated his self-awareness and willingness to admit when things were built on shaky foundations. I can't say enough how much I enjoyed, liked, and respected his tone in general.
I have a strong interest in linguistics, but do not have an advanced degree in the field. I had absolutely no trouble reading or understanding anything in the book. I would consider the book to be middle-of-the-road when it comes to accessibility, as it requires a certain level of education and familiarity, perhaps, but does not require expert knowledge. And even if one does not grasp some of the specifics, there is still much to be gleaned from the book that would make it worthwhile.
I'd recommend it just for the jokes! All in all I loved it and strongly recommend it. I am not going to claim that it is groundbreaking or indispensable, but it was definitely entertaining. Five stars from me Mar 09, Rachel rated it really liked it. Thought-provoking, original in my limited experience. Before reading this book, I only thought about the differences in language, but afterwards I see more similarities among languages, which I think is a good thing.
Humans do love categorization! I found the parameters a helpful way to think about grammatical language without getting bogged down by the differences in the lexicons. Worth a read, especially if you are interested in translation, natural language processing, or linguistics. Certainly a nice introduction to the world, but I found some of the examples strange.
Some explanations could have been clearer too. Some nice ideas, but still somewhat in the land of conjecture. Dec 27, Ushan rated it liked it Shelves: linguistics. Linguistics knows of about languages. Each has a unique grammar, which native speakers more or less learn by age 5.
Now, say Baker, Chomsky and other Chomskian linguists, each language has too many peculiar grammatical features that set it apart from other languages; it would have made more sense if there were Boolean "parameters": when a child learns the value of a parameter, he knows several grammatical features at once.
English is a head-first language; in English, a verb usually comes Linguistics knows of about languages. English is a head-first language; in English, a verb usually comes before its direct object "bit the man" in "The dog bit the man" , before a phrase that starts with a preposition "ran to the doghouse" in "The dog ran to the doghouse" , and before a that-clause "said that the dog bit him" in "The man said that the dog bit him".
Japanese is a head-final language; in Japanese a verb usually comes after all three. Also, in English a preposition comes before its noun phrase, and in Japanese a postposition comes after its; in English a noun usually comes before a prepositional phrase, a complementizer "if", "whether", etc.
Presumably, a child can easily find out, whether its native language is like Japanese or like English, and learn all seven features at once. Baker has studied Mohawk, an Iroquoian language spoken in Quebec, Ontario and Upstate New York, which is polysynthetic: a verb can combine with its object into a single word, similarly to currying in functional programming languages like the English "to baby-sit", but much more productively.
Baker says that whether or not a language is polysynthetic is even more important than whether it is head-first or head-final, and if it is, then several things are true about its grammar at once, and if it isn't, then they are all false at once. Well, an expert on Basque reviewed the book; he says that all these things are true about Mohawk and false about English, but only some are true about Basque, and others are false. Baker himself mentions Amharic, a language related to head-first Semitic languages but surrounded by head-final Cushitic languages, where verbs come after their direct objects but there are prepositions instead of postpositions.
He says that such languages are rare. I can't propose anything better, but the practice of counting languages with or without some grammatical feature looks suspect to me. Japan sans the Ryukyu Islands has had political unity since the times of Amaterasu, so there is only one Japanese language as opposed to Okinawan and other Ryukyuan languages.
In contrast, Italy was politically disunited from the 5th till the 19th century CE, so there are approximately 15 Romance languages native to Italy. If you match Japanese with Venetian, Sicilian, Piedmontese etc. Mar 03, Bowman Dickson rated it really liked it Shelves: linguistics. Solid, interesting book about linguistics. A little heady and academic, and full of a few too many examples, but fascinating nonetheless.
Feb 21, Tabitha rated it it was ok Shelves: linguistics , makes-you-think , mystery , recommended-to-me , non-fiction. Good thoughts; but I felt like there were too many exceptions that prove the rule to actually prove the rule. Or maybe I just didn't get it? Feb 21, Marije rated it really liked it.
Goed boek, deed me weer inzien waarom ol taal zo leuk vind. Op het einde volgde ik 'm niet helemaal meer, maar dat had waarschijnlijk meer met vermoeidheid te maken dan zijn redenaties Jul 17, Matt rated it it was ok Shelves: linguistics , thinking.
This could have been a much better book. If the author had left conjecture aside and tread lightly with the language-as-chemistry metaphor I might have been able to hang in there the whole way. Part of this is my fault though, I'm sure: My interest in grammar exists but is finite.
Oct 05, Josh rated it really liked it. In short, I thought this book was excellent While there are a lot of sub-texts in the book, the major issue is that of the parameterization of language.
Specifically, how do we give a scientific ish account for the diversity of language we see. Further, how, given the fact that languages appear so different from one another, are we able to effectively more or less translate from one to another.
The In short, I thought this book was excellent The answer, I'm now convinced, is the concept of a parameter. This idea basically posits that there are pieces of grammar that can be set in one of a limited number of ways that interact with one another to produce a finite amount of variation among the worlds grammatical structures.
Baker does a really excellent job making this otherwise very technical topic both interesting and understandable. His approach uses humor to elucidate points and is generally very effective. The only complain I have, and I honestly don't see a way that Baker could have gotten around it, is the technicality of some of the examples. Obviously, not having a background in Mohawk or indeed, the polysynthetic language type it is a member of , made the explanation of concepts applicable to that language type rather daunting at points.
If one sticks with it, however, they will be rewarded with what I believe is a pretty amazing exposition of language. Not only does it provide a fairly comprehensive explanation of how languages come to be the way they are, in terms of grammar, but it offers some thoughts on more philosophical issues such as cognition and meaning.
I would only mention one other shortcoming in the book and that is its general lack of mention of grammatical semantics. While it does receive a very slight bit of attention in later chapters essentially just noting that grammar assists with semantics , I would have like to see the concept of parameterization more fully applied to the semantic realm.
So, to conclude, I would recommend this book to anyone who has a real interest in linguists or an interest in how the language faculty works and has some patience for technical examples. Aug 21, Cynical rated it really liked it. I see that some have called this book dull, and I can understand why--it's not for everyone. I can also see why the technical aspects of the book might put some off, but that wasn't the effect it had on me.
I only had a semester of linguistics in college, and this was easy enough for me to follow. But, again, you'll need to be a serious language geek to care about this stuff. Luckily, that's what I am. Baker's conceptual frame of parameters and the language parallels to Mendeleyev's early work on I see that some have called this book dull, and I can understand why--it's not for everyone.
Baker's conceptual frame of parameters and the language parallels to Mendeleyev's early work on the Periodic Table strike me as compelling and potentially useful ways in which to examine how languages develop. To what purpose this new way of thinking can be put is a mystery to me, but apparently Baker isn't sure about that either. He just hopes that it will be useful. If it is, then this is important work. Bottom line--if the technical aspects of language and language acquisition interest you, then you'll probably appreciate this book.
If not, then it will put you right to sleep. Apr 14, Guido Fierlbeck rated it really liked it. Very good introductory book - the idea of parameters has lost some of its ground in recent years with the advent of the Minimalist Program and Biolinguistics at large.
But as Ian Roberts is now thinking about the Minimalist Parameter and about parameter hierarchies and macroparameters it is certainly worthwile to go back to this text written by one of the foremost theoreticians and practicioners of parametric syntax.
The book is well written, alternating storytelling about the Navajo code break Very good introductory book - the idea of parameters has lost some of its ground in recent years with the advent of the Minimalist Program and Biolinguistics at large. The book is well written, alternating storytelling about the Navajo code breakers, etc. The last feature might be very useful for those with a different intellectual background - but not really for me..
Jun 29, Arukiyomi added it. Dec 26, Amanda rated it really liked it. Well-written and interesting, although I'm not sure I would have been able to stick with it without the framework of my linguistics class. Baker tends to veer off into the very abstract without much warning but if you are interested in universal principles of language but take crazy old papa Chomsky with a grain of salt - not to mention very committed to bearing with Baker - this is the book for you.
Overall this is a great introduction into contemporary issues in linguistics. Aug 23, amy rated it really liked it. Obviously there is more to linguistics despite what this book presents as a universal framework for understanding language, but this seems as good a place to start as any. I found the concluding "Why Parameters? Oct 11, Dan Slimmon rated it really liked it Shelves: linguistics , non-fiction , syntax.
The book is a gentle-but-not-too-gentle overview of the theory of parameters. After finishing it, I find myself intrigued and excited to dive deeper into the study of syntax. Jun 07, Catfish rated it really liked it. Really not for those not interested in grammar and parameters. It's a good primer for one studying general linguistics, semantics, applied linguistics, or cognitive linguistics.
It opened up a whole new way of looking at language for me. I thoroughly enjoyed it but it would take a couple reads to understand it fully. Dec 18, Smellsofbikes rated it it was amazing. The bio says that this is the author's first non-academic book. It didn't need to say that: this is a tough read.
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