Language Play

by Crystal, David

• ISBN13: 9780226122052
• ISBN10: 0226122050
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-06-11
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

In this exhilarating and often hilarious book, David Crystal examines why we devote so much time and energy to language games, how professionals make a career of them, and how young children instinctively take to them. Crystal makes a simple argument-that since playing with language is so natural, a natural way to learn language is to play with it-while he discusses puns, crosswords, lipograms, comic alphabets, rhymes, funny voices taken from dialect and popular culture, limericks, anagrams, scat singing, and much more.

Author Biography

David Crystal is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor.

Table of Contents

List of Games People Play	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. ix
The Ludic View	p. 1
The Amateurs	p. 9
Introduction	p. 9
Enjoying the Joke	p. 12
Dialect Humour	p. 18
Funny Sounds and Voices	p. 24
Nonce Words and Meanings	p. 30
Sounds and Spellings	p. 36
Limerick Land	p. 45
Even Total Nonsense	p. 49
The Enthusiasts	p. 54
Introduction	p. 54
The Language Enthusiast	p. 54
Missions Impossible	p. 56
The Ludic Tower of Babel	p. 61
Building Higher Towers	p. 72
Gematria, and its Legacy	p. 80
Grid Games	p. 83
And Finally...	p. 89
The Professionals	p. 93
Introduction	p. 93
The Advertisers	p. 94
The Headline Writers	p. 101
The Comedians	p. 105
The Collectors	p. 116
The Comic Writers	p. 127
The Authors	p. 137
The Artists	p. 148
The Theologians	p. 155
The Children	p. 159
Introduction	p. 159
The First Year	p. 159
Growing Up	p. 164
The Language of the Playground	p. 173
Towards Education	p. 178
The Logical Conclusion	p. 182
The Readers	p. 183
Introduction	p. 183
The Ludic Gap	p. 184
The Missing Play	p. 188
From Creativity to Intervention	p. 195
Other Domains?	p. 204
A New Climate?	p. 211
The Future	p. 218
Introduction	p. 218
Why Play?	p. 219
The Final Step	p. 222
Notes	p. 227
Index	p. 238
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.