Bücher der Reihe Studies in Linguistic Anthropology

This volume is the first in a planned series presenting the previously unpublished Itelmen material in Waldemar Bogoras's Itelmen notebooks from January and February 1901. The original notebooks are held in the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg. This first volume presents the Itelmen language folktales and narratives from the notebooks. This volume includes reproductions of the notebook pages with faithful transcriptions on facing pages, as well as standardized renderings in contemporary Itelmen with interlinear gloss and free translation in English and Russian, and also Bogoras' own notes and additional notes by the editor.

Focusing on the scientific study of communication, this book is a systematic examination. To that end, the natural, social, cultural, and rational scientific perspectives on communication are presented and then brought together in one unifying framework of the semiotic square, showing how all four views are interconnected. The question of whether the study of communication can be considered a unique science is addressed. It is argued that communication is never separate from any object of study and thus we always deal with its manifestations, captured in the four scientific perspectives discussed in the book.

As a meditation on the nature of human thought and action, this book starts with the proposition that human thinking is inherently and irreducibly social, and that the long rhetorical tradition in the West has been a neglected source for thinking about cognition.