The Speaking Self, 2nd edition, by Michael Shapiro

The Speaking Self: Language Lore and English Usage
Second Edition, by Michael Shapiro

Shapiro has long applied Peircean insights to linguistics.

Series: Springer Texts in Education. From the publisher's page at
http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319516813 :

Offers a substantive analysis of contemporary American English speech

Contains unique examples of comparative data from foreign languages

Gives synoptic presentations of speech data in their cultural and social contexts

This book aims to explain social variation in language, otherwise the meaning and motivation of language change in its social aspect. It is the expanded and improved 2nd edition of the author’s self-published volume with the same title, based on revised and adapted posts on the author’s Language Lore blog.

Each vignette calls attention to points of grammar and style in contemporary American English, especially cases where language is changing due to innovative usage. In every case where an analysis contains technical or recondite vocabulary, a Glossary precedes the body of the essay, and readers can also consult the Master Glossary which contains all items glossed in the text.

The unique form of the book’s presentation is aimed at readers who are alert to the peculiarities of present-day American English as they pertain to pronunciation, grammar, and style, without “dumbing down” or compromising the language in which the explanations are couched.

Praise for the First Edition

“Michael Shapiro is one of the great thinkers in the realm of linguistics and language use, and his integrated understanding of language and speech in its semantic and pragmatic structure, grammatical and historical grounding, and colloquial to literary stylistic variants is perhaps unmatched today. This book is a treasure to be shared.” Robert S. Hatten, The University of Texas at Austin

“Jewel of a book. . . . a gift to us all from Michael Shapiro. Like a Medieval Chapbook it can be a kind of companion whose vignettes on language use can be randomly and profitably consulted at any moment. Some may consider these vignettes opinionated. That would be to ignore how deeply anchored each vignette is in Shapiro’s long and rare polyglot experience with language. It could well serve as a night table book, taken up each night to read and reflect upon ––to ponder––both in the twilight mind and in the deeper reaches of associative somnolence. There is nothing else like it that I know of.” James W. Fernandez, The University of Chicago

More reviews of the 1st edition.

About the author

Michael Shapiro, Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Semiotic Studies at Brown University, was born in 1939 in Yokohama (Japan) and grew up speaking Russian, Japanese, and English. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1952 and was educated in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. His career as a teacher and scholar spans over half a century. He has taught at several universities, including the University of California (Los Angeles and Berkeley) and Princeton, and served as president of the Charles S. Peirce Society in 1991. He is the co-author, with his late wife the medievalist and Renaissance scholar Marianne Shapiro, of Figuration in Verbal Art (1988) and The Sense of Form in Literature and Language (2nd ed., 2009).

Among Shapiro's many publications are five volumes of The Peirce Seminar Papers.

He blogs at Language Lore.

My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge

The Peircean linguist Michael Shapiro wrote a novel My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge.

Publisher's description:

In My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge, Michael Shapiro devises a storied diary that views the world through the eyes of an inimitable woman whose being and essence are determined by her superlative and penetrating intellect. Inspired by the great Japanese literature by upper-class women writers of the mid-Heian period, eighty-four masterfully woven sections alternate prose, poetry, social commentary and haiku-like vignettes to tell a fascinating tale of betrayal, revenge and undying love. Cruelly and unjustly exiled, Lady Murasaki, accompanied by her consort, Prince Towa no Ai, is the virtuoso author of learned discourses on the Western literary heritage, especially the Divine Comedy and Provençal poetry. The narrator's skein moves the characters along a topography that has them migrating asynchronously between contemporary California and interwar Tokyo, Budapest and Moscow, ancient Israel and the medieval Romance world, Freiburg and New York, rural Alabama and Vermont. Characters and chronologies are scrambled and reconstituted, real and imaginary events and places commingled, as Lady Murasaki brings her vast knowledge of art and literature to bear on explorations of medieval and Renaissance literature and the labyrinthine fictions of Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Nabokov. Her dialogues engage interlocutors that run the gamut from Satan and Pontius Pilate to Dante himself, as well as a giant humanoid cat. Through it all and to the end, including her final attainment of retributive justice, Lady Murasaki is wedded to Prince Towa no Ai, and it is their real-life love story that animates everything.

Vincent Colapietro:

When academics or intellectuals turn their hand to fiction or even narrative forms such as memoirs or histories, all too often character, scene, and drama are sacrificed to abstract ideas and theoretical positions long defended in some disciplinary context. Characters tend to be thin illustrations (often utterly eviscerated examples) of preconceived theories, scenes artificially staged confrontations in which human drama is more or less absent. Michael Shapiro has, in marked contrast to this, proven himself to have a storyteller's ear and a novelist's eye for the seemingly insignificant, yet ultimately fateful detail. One has the sense, when confronted with his portrayal of persons, of being in the presence of singular, complex, and indeed palpable beings whose lives are dramatically intertwined. For this imaginative and erudite scholar and theorist to be as well such a keen observer of character and adept narrator of events seems hardly fair. Should one person possess, at this level of mastery, such diverse and demanding talents?

Vincent Colapietro
Liberal Arts Research Professor
Department of Philosophy
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA
[Comment left on June 24, 2009 at 7:44 pm in the Guest Book at Shapiro's website.]

In addition, the novel contains a character "Charley Peirce," which I take as an additional excuse to post about the novel at the Peirce Blog.

Links:

• On the novel at Michael Shapiro's website.
• Guest Book at Shapiro's website.
• Kindle edition at Amazon.com.
• Paperback at Amazon.com.

Michael Shapiro keynote - "Style as a Cognitive Category" (update)

Originally posted on January 28, 2014, 6:49 p.m. E.S.T.

UPDATE: Keynote address has been re-scheduled to April 11, 2014. End of update.

Michael Shapiro (Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Semiotic Studies, Brown University;
Adjunct Professor, Society of Senior Scholars, Columbia University)

"Style as a Cognitive Category"

Keynote address, panel on "Semiotic Perspectives on the Arts and Cognition"
Winthrop University, February 14, 2014

SUMMARY

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is the modern founder of the theory of signs, otherwise known as SEMIOTICS. This theory takes signs as anything that is capable of signifying a MEANING, thereby placing meaning (what Peirce called semeiosis) and COGNITION at the center of human inquiry. Peirce's whole philosophy, of which his semiotics is the capstone, is an immense synthesis of the key ideas of modern science with the classical logical paradigm that traces its origins from Aristotle through the Stoics, Locke, and Kant. Peirce's great achievement is the addition of the THEORY OF INTERPRETATION, of which his conception of the interpretant as a law or rule, invariably instantiated in individual signs, is his most radical advance and provides a systematic understanding of the way signs signify.

Although Peirce was a mathematician, logician, and scientist, his sign theory recognizes the importance of feeling, emotion, sensation, sentiment, action. Put another way, his semiotics not only enables us to understand science as a human enterprise but offers us an approach to literature and the arts, to religion, to society, to the whole of the world that lies between the private incommunicable interior and the vast spaces of the exterior universe.

Peirce's concept of the interpretant, with its emphasis on significative effects, provides just the conceptual bridge necessary for style to be understood in a global sense encompassing all its manifestations. Style suffuses so much of what it means to be human and has been the subject of so much analysis that in order to move style away from problems of introspection and self-awareness one needs to redirect the age-old discussion into a more public arena where the contrast with custom allows insight into the STRUCTURE OF HUMAN ACTIVITY IN GENERAL. This can be accomplished when style as a phenomenon that cuts across disciplinary boundaries is viewed TROPOLOGICALLY as a fundamentally cognitive category.

About the speaker

Michael Shapiro was born in Yokohama, spent World War II in Japan, and grew up speaking Russian, Japanese, and English. He earned degrees in Slavic Languages and Literatures at UCLA (A.B., ‘61) and Harvard (A.M., ‘62; Ph. D. ‘65). Besides Brown and Columbia, he has taught at UCLA, Princeton, UC Berkeley, and Green Mountain College, in a career that now spans half a century. He is the co-author, with his late wife the medievalist and Renaissance scholar Marianne Shapiro, of Figuration in Verbal Art (1988) and The Sense of Form in Literature and Language (2nd ed., 2009). His 2007 book, Palimpsest of Consciousness, is a set of authorial annotations of his only work of fiction, the novel My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki’s Revenge (2006). His most recent book, The Speaking Self: Language Lore and English Usage, was published in 2012.

[more information at http://www.marianneandmichaelshapiro.com/ and http://www.languagelore.net/ ]

Shapiro on Christakis on the social sciences

Here is Michael Shapiro's letter (which went unpublished) to the New York Times editor about the essay "Let's Shake Up the Social Sciences."

TO THE EDITOR:

            Nicholas A. Christakis's essay, "Let's Shake Up the Social Sciences" ("Gray Matter," Sunday Review, July 21st, p.12), is only the latest installment in a series of recent attempts to reorient the study of human beings in society by examining the biological basis of behavior along lines pursued in the new century by neuroscience. It is noteworthy that Dr. Christakis does not mention linguistics among the social sciences that need retooling, even though language is the basis of human thought and communication, and has been during the last 200,000 years of evolution. As with psychology, the recent vogue for the label 'cognitive' among linguists has given rise to the idea that there is something genuinely scientific only to disciplines conducted under the cover of this label, as if the exploration of the neurophysiological processes involved in speech (both its production and understanding) were the key to language and its use. But as Charles Sanders Peirce, America's greatest philosopher-scientist and the modern founder of sign theory, emphasized, the sign has no chemistry. As social beings, we transact our behavior by thinking in and exchanging signs, a process Peirce called 'semeiosis'. Semeiosis is always at bottom a matter of interpretation, the ability to assign and understand meaning. If we are to explain the thought processes that underlie intentionality and purposive behavior, which are at the root of the social sciences, it will only be by developing sign theory in the spirit of Peirce's whole philosophy, including his great achievement, the working out of the theory of interpretation. No matter how deep our knowledge of neural networks, synapses, and the prefrontal cortex, such knowledge will always be fundamentally beside the point because it will explain neither semeiosis nor interpretation.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO
Manchester Center, Vt.
The writer is an emeritus professor of Slavic and semiotic studies at Brown University.

Shapiro to the NYT on irony

Michael Shapiro sent to me some days ago for The Peirce Blog a copy of a letter that he wrote to the New York Times about its article "How to Live Without Irony." The Times has chosen not to publish it. Here is the letter along with his comments in his post "The Promiscuousness of Irony as a Rhetorical Label" at his blog Language Lore:

Nowadays, in the print and broadcast media everything is all-too-promiscuously labeled irony and/or ironic, to the point where in its November 18th edition The New York Times gave a grotesque amount of space to an essay entitled "How to Live Without Irony" in its Sunday Review section. This low-brow divagation elicited a letter to the editor from your humble blogger, which the newspaper—characteristically—chose not to publish, so here it is for the record:

“ TO THE EDITOR:

Christy Wampole's 'How to Live Without Irony' (November 18) offers food for thought but, for all its prolixity, entirely misses stating what is at the core of irony as a rhetorical strategy, namely its negativity, its inability to signify anything of positive value. In terms developed by the modern founder of sign theory (semiotics), the American philosopher-scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), irony can never go beyond being an index, merely calling attention to itself and always necessarily falling short of being a symbol, which is the only kind of sign that encompasses positive meaning.

Worse yet, irony always tends toward masking the judgmental nature of what is being paraded as fact or the inefficacy of an effete judgment. The ironic statement thus runs the risk of ending up as just another cliché. That is precisely why the contemporary generation of "temporary sophisticates" (in Wayne Booth's apt characterization of those who assume the ironic stance), with their heavy reliance on digitally-bound signification, can only comment on the object of their ironizing without ever contributing to its real substance.

”

Apropos, only the most dogged literalist, without any real-life experience of the situational use of the proverb cited in the preceding post ("Language as an Aesthetic Object"), could comment that the mother must have "taken umbrage" at having her child's provenience ascribed to adultery, thereby implying some kind of misplaced cosmic irony in her expressed admiration withal of the proverb's poetic form and of its utterer.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The Speaking Self, by Michael Shapiro

Michael Shapiro has just published a book The Speaking Self: Language Lore and English Usage (Amazon link). It draws upon his blog posts and "is an attempt to reconceive linguistics in the light of pragmaticism," as he said in a message to me. He has variously authored and edited a number of books, including the Peirce Seminar Series.

Here is the book's official description:

This book is not a usage manual in the conventional sense. It is a sui generis series of compact, self-contained essays arranged into chapters by broad topic categories of problematic points of linguistic usage in contemporary American speech and writing and cast in an uncompromisingly analytical style that is nevertheless accessible to any educated reader with a love of words, an inquisitiveness about language, and an appetite for exegesis. The bias of the author is unabashedly prescriptivist. It is formed by a long-standing theoretical interest in and empirical observation of English usage, oral and written. Much of the material for analysis is drawn from the language of contemporary media, both print and broadcast. The discussion of examples frequently opens out on a perspective that takes in deeper questions of value and society in America as revealed by present-day language use. The essays that comprise the chapters are what might be called linguistic vignettes. They call attention to points of grammar and style in contemporary American English, especially in cases where the language is changing due to innovative usage, including what older generations of speakers would consider errors in speech and writing.

Anybody who has read his posts at Language Lore will be acquainted with his analysis of linguistic phenomena wherein, again and again, he brings into relief the difference made by a pragmaticist approach with its attention not just to the more obviously or narrowly linguistic factors in language but to conceivable practical implications and to real generals in their sometimes lively interplay affecting the phenomena.

Quotes on the book's back cover:

Michael Shapiro is one of the great thinkers in the realm of linguistics and language use, and his integrated understanding of language and speech in its semantic and pragmatic structure, grammatical and historical grounding, and colloquial to literary stylistic variants is perhaps unmatched today.

Who might be interested in this book? Certainly linguists, language scholars, literary theorists, novelists, poets, essayists, journalists--but also those who find the dictionary entertaining reading (there are surprisingly many of us), or simply those whose fascination with the inner workings of language knows no bounds. This book is a treasure to be shared.

— Robert S. Hatten, The University of Texas at Austin

"Michael Shapiro provides a critical review of contemporary American English usage in a richly multifarious analytical context. The result is both provocative and illuminating."

— Howard Hibbett, Harvard University

The Speaking Self at Amazon.com.
326 pages.
ISBN-10: 1478357045
ISBN-13: 978-1478357049

From the Amazon page:

Michael Shapiro, Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Semiotic Studies at Brown University, was born in 1939 in Yokohama (Japan) and grew up speaking Russian, Japanese, and English. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1952 and was educated in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Michael Shapiro’s career as a teacher and scholar spans almost half a century. He has taught at several universities, including the University of California (Los Angeles and Berkeley) and Princeton, and served as president of the Charles S. Peirce Society in 1991. His articles on English usage have appeared in American Speech and Language.

Michael Shapiro letter in the NY Times Book Review

Sunday Book Review, July 12, 2012: Letter from Michael Shapiro

Letter

An American Philosophy

Published: July 12, 2012

To the Editor:

Anthony Gottlieb’s review of “America the Philosophical,” by Carlin Romano (July 1), seriously mischaracterizes what he calls “America’s principal homegrown school of philosophy,” namely the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Far from being, as Gottlieb caricatures it, the doctrine that our theories “should be judged by their practical value rather than by their accuracy in representing the world,” pragmatism is a theory of inquiry — always emphatically seeking the truth in the long run — that follows what Peirce called the pragmatic maxim: “Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings we conceive the objects of our conception to have. Then our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

Gottlieb’s assertion (citing Sidney Morgenbesser’s purported witticism) that “the ultimate fate of this idea . . . was all very well in theory but didn’t work in practice” is belied by its undeniable success in underwriting the worldwide scientific advance in the 21st century of disciplines as diverse as linguistics, biology and applied mathematics, not to speak of philosophy and logic. Traducing pragmatism as “either trivial or incoherent when you try to flesh it out” is not worthy of an otherwise sensible reviewer.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO
Manchester Center, Vt.
The writer is an emeritus professor of Slavic and semiotic studies at Brown University.

A version of this letter appeared in print on July 15, 2012, on page BR8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: An American Philosophy.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

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B.U.: The battle seems unending against the vulgarest interpretations of Peirce's pragmatism. Kudos to Michael Shapiro for keeping it up.