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Article: The geolinguistics of verbal taboo.
- Article from:
- ETC.: A Review of General Semantics
- Article date:
- December 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Institute of General Semantics. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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THE WORD geolinguistics may not be very familiar to a number of you in this audience and perhaps I should preface my remarks with a few words about this field. The initial exposition is to be found in Professor Mario Pei's book, Invitation to Linguistics, published in 1965. He introduced a tri-partite division into descriptive linguistics dealing with the synchronic analysis, and geolinguistics dealing with the relation of language to its speakers as they are spread over the world.
It has occurred to me, perhaps somewhat whimsically, that we might even have a pun here, that geolinguistics is down-to-earth linguistics. At least this is a fostering of certain ...