Thursday, October 06, 2005

Sustained Silent Reading

The book is: Sounds like Life: Sound-symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua. It's by Janis B. Nuckolls, 1996. Sounds pretty good, right?

To be honest, it's kind of heavy going. I was hoping to be a bit more engaged. Here's a representative sample (p. 5):

Its pervasiveness in Quechua speakers' discursive practice suggests that sound symbolism ramifies with their larger cultural concerns by pointing their attention to what is perceptually salient, affectively suggestive, and imaginatively engaging.

Actually that pretty much sums what I've read so far.