Linguaphile: A Life of Love Language - Julie Sedivy and Maryanne Wolf
Linguaphile: A Life of Love Language - Julie Sedivy and Maryanne Wolf
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About Julie Sedivy
Julie Sedivy is a Calgary-based writer and language scientist whose work ranges from the scientific to the literary, and includes everything in between. She received her PhD in linguistics at the University of Rochester, and has conducted pioneering scientific work related to how people produce, understand, and learn language. She has taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University and the University of Calgary, and has published a textbook (Language in Mind) on the rapidly growing field of psycholinguistics. She also writes for nonacademic audiences about language, how it sets up camp in the human mind, and how it plays out in human interactions and in society at large. Her latest book is Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love (publication date: Oct. 2024), a blend of scientific exploration and lyrical memoir. You can read her bio here, check out her books, read some of her essays, hear some of her talks, or follow her on X (Twitter). She is a citizen of three countries.
Linguaphile: A Life of Love Language
Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love follows the path that language takes through a human life―from an infant’s first attempts at sense-making to the vulnerabilities and losses that accompany aging. As Sedivy shows, however, language and life are inextricable, and here she offers them together: a childish misunderstanding of her mother’s meaning reveals the difficulty of relating to other minds; frustration with “professional” communication styles exposes the labyrinth of standards that define success; the first signs of hearing loss lead to a meditation on society’s discomfort with physical and mental limitations.
Part memoir, part scientific exploration, and part cultural commentary, this book epitomizes the thrills of a life steeped in the aesthetic delights of language and the joys of its scientific scrutiny.