Wow! eBook
"The" Fifth Modality: On Languages that Shape our Motivations and Cultures: 17
Author(s): Carl Roberts (Author)
- Publisher: Brill
- Publication Date: 22 Aug. 2008
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 220 pages
- ISBN-10: 9004162356
- ISBN-13: 9789004162358
Book Description
This is a book about how people understand each other. Like Simmel’s writings and works written by Foucault and Goffman toward the ends of their careers, this book depicts interactions as behavioral forms. Its novelty is that it grounds these forms in linguistic structure, particularly in the ubiquitous presence of modality in discourse within all mass societies. Its concluding argument is that all persons, situations, and cultures have mutual significance in accordance with four fundamental modal forms: ability (most common in the United States), necessity (most common in the socialist countries of Western Europe and Scandinavia), obligation (most common in ancient Chinese and Indic societies), and permission (most common in the Islamic world).
Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
This is a book about how people understand each other. Like Simmela (TM)s writings and works written by Foucault and Goffman toward the ends of their careers, this book depicts interactions as behavioral forms. Its novelty is that it grounds these forms in linguistic structure, particularly in the ubiquitous presence of modality in discourse within all mass societies. Its concluding argument is that all persons, situations, and cultures have mutual significance in accordance with four fundamental modal forms: ability (most common in the United States), necessity (most common in the socialist countries of Western Europe and Scandinavia), obligation (most common in ancient Chinese and Indic societies), and permission (most common in the Islamic world).
About the Author
Carl W. Roberts, Ph.D. (1983) in Sociology, SUNY at Stony Brook, is Professor of Sociology and Statistics at Iowa State University. He has done much empirical research on cultural variations in language use, and has written extensively on linguistic structure, e.g., in his Text Analysis for the Social Sciences (Erlbaum, 1997)
