Martin P . J . Edwardes
I have had a long career with many different projects completed successfully. I have worked with small, large and multinational companies in a range of roles, gaining a wide range of skills in the process.
I have also maintained a very active life outside of work, taking opportunities to study a range of subjects, some at academic level. I have been involved in a range of voluntary work, which has augmented my team-working and team-leading experience.
I taught at BA and MA level at King's College London, 2008-2020, in topics related to anthropological linguistics, psycholinguistics, statistics and lexis. I have now been officially retired from KCL because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but I I see myself as semi-retired; I hope to return to a teaching role sometime soon.
My website is at http://martinedwardes.me.uk/, and my email address is [email protected]
I have also maintained a very active life outside of work, taking opportunities to study a range of subjects, some at academic level. I have been involved in a range of voluntary work, which has augmented my team-working and team-leading experience.
I taught at BA and MA level at King's College London, 2008-2020, in topics related to anthropological linguistics, psycholinguistics, statistics and lexis. I have now been officially retired from KCL because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but I I see myself as semi-retired; I hope to return to a teaching role sometime soon.
My website is at http://martinedwardes.me.uk/, and my email address is [email protected]
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Papers by Martin P . J . Edwardes
Chomsky’s Generative Linguistics programme directed linguistic study away from individual languages, and toward a universal system of language which generates all languages. Instead of descriptive accounts of grammar, phonology, lexis and semantics, linguistics became an essentialist study of grammar and syntax; and instead of studying language users, Generative linguists concentrated on inward analysis of their own systems of language. Linguistics descended into a fog of grammatical forms, investigated largely by self-regard: smoke and mirrors.
This paper looks at three conventionalised metaphors in academic linguistics, representing unproven assumptions which we seldom question: LANGUAGING IS BEING HUMAN; LANGUAGING IS BEING CLEVER; and LANGUAGING IS A GOOD THING. These metaphors have emerged directly from the Generativist enterprise, and they are often assumed in the work of linguists who otherwise abhor the Generativist tradition. They are key metaphors because they have allowed us to pretend that all languages are representations of a still-unspecified acme we call language, that this unspecified substance is what sets us apart from other animals, and that the substance is a significant feature in all our species specialisms. The paper discusses why we now need to abandon these metaphors, and the assumptions behind them, and reconfigure our subject area in terms of the wider topics of communication, socialisation, and human evolution.
Chomsky’s Generative Linguistics programme directed linguistic study away from individual languages, and toward a universal system of language which generates all languages. Instead of descriptive accounts of grammar, phonology, lexis and semantics, linguistics became an essentialist study of grammar and syntax; and instead of studying language users, Generative linguists concentrated on inward analysis of their own systems of language. Linguistics descended into a fog of grammatical forms, investigated largely by self-regard: smoke and mirrors.
This paper looks at three conventionalised metaphors in academic linguistics, representing unproven assumptions which we seldom question: LANGUAGING IS BEING HUMAN; LANGUAGING IS BEING CLEVER; and LANGUAGING IS A GOOD THING. These metaphors have emerged directly from the Generativist enterprise, and they are often assumed in the work of linguists who otherwise abhor the Generativist tradition. They are key metaphors because they have allowed us to pretend that all languages are representations of a still-unspecified acme we call language, that this unspecified substance is what sets us apart from other animals, and that the substance is a significant feature in all our species specialisms. The paper discusses why we now need to abandon these metaphors, and the assumptions behind them, and reconfigure our subject area in terms of the wider topics of communication, socialisation, and human evolution.
Edwardes argues that other awareness is a relatively early evolutionary development, present throughout the primate clade and perhaps beyond, but self-awareness is a product of the sharing of social models, something only humans appear to do. The self of which we are aware is not something innate within us, it is a model of our self produced as a response to the models of us offered to us by other people. Edwardes proposes that human construction of selfhood involves seven different types of self. All but one of them are internally generated models, and the only non-model, the actual self, is completely hidden from conscious awareness. We rely on others to tell us about our self, and even to let us know we are a self.
Developed in relation to a range of subject areas – linguistics, anthropology, genomics and cognition, as well as socio-cultural theory – The Origins of Self is of particular interest to students and researchers studying the origins of language, human origins in general, and the cognitive differences between human and other animal psychologies.