Selected Web Resources

• Saussure and Semiotics (k.i.s.s. of the panopticon)
• “What Comes First: Speech or Thought?” (NPR's All Things Considered, 21 July 2004). The latest thinking on whether a) "even babies have abstract thoughts and may be trying to express them" or b) "children need language in order to frame concepts" in the first place.
• Semiotics for Beginners (Daniel Chandler, U of Wales, Aberystwyth)
• Barthes (k.i.s.s. of the panopticon)
• John Colapinto, "The Interpreter" (The New Yorker April 16, 2007): an introduction to the work of linguist Dan Everett, a detractor of Noam Chomsky's theory of "universal grammar," whose fieldwork suggests that humans' ability to conceptualize is constrained by the contours of any given culture's language