Exploring Language With Logo

By Wallace Feurzeig and E. Paul Goldenberg

Exploring Language with Logoinvites the reader to participate actively in the play and work of the linguist. It is the first comprehensive presentation of Logo's highly developed, well publicized, but vastly underused language-manipulation capability. Throughout the book, experimental projects and compelling examples of language in use are chosen to stimulate interest in and promote exploration of the structure, function, and history of language. The treatment is both serious and playful. Using this book, readers can teach a machine how to produce words, phrases, and sentences and at the same time gain insight into both the elegance and the complexity of language. The book teaches Logo technique as it is needed for specific explorations, with the goal of providing readers with enough programming independence to design their own sophisticated language-manipulation programs. The first part takes up the grammar of sentences, poems, and stories -syntax, semantics, and style, the orderliness of language in units larger than a word. The second explores the structure in the microscopic worlds within words - morphology, orthography, and phonology. The reader is invited to model the structure of words, create procedures that know how to spell, discover the ways words are affected when affixes are added, and to work with projects on word roots, historical changes in words, and conjugations and declensions in English and other languages. This inventive and innovative text is readable both with and without the computer. It will challenge and excite anyone interested in learning or teaching language and linguistics. E. Paul Goldenberg is Researcher and Developer at Education Development Center, Inc., Newton, adjunct faculty in education at Lesley College, and former Director of the Computer Center at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School. Wallace Feurzeig is Division Scientist of the Information Sciences Division at BBN Laboratories, Cambridge. Exploring Language with Logois included in the series Explorations in Logo, edited by E. Paul Goldenberg.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262570653
• ISBN13: 9780262570657
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Length: 354 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.0" x 8.0"
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

what an odd, clever book!

This book is basically about using simple programs in Logo to generate natural language at various levels, mainly syntax and morphology, but also some phonology and, you could say, etymology. There are also interesting and often profound digressions into the history of English, various aspects of synchronic and diachronic linguistics, and even what it means to formulate a linguistic theory. Parts of this book feel like a good intro-linguistics book, parts of it feel like a jr-high or high school intro-to-programming book, and parts of it feel like just a fun book written by people enthusiastic about language.First off, this book is interesting and entertaining just to read on one's own.Second off, this could form the basis of a course (or part of one) in, well, exploring language, at any level from junior high to college. This book could just as easily be useful for a ninth-grade computer science teacher to pull two or three exercises out of, as it could be for someone devising a college course based entirely around this book.Now, I was somewhat surprised by Logo having been the language chosen for this book, but: 1) it's a harmless choice, and the code in the book is easily intelligible to people with a programming background but no knowledge of Logo; 2) I don't consider any of the points in the book to depend on the choice of language; and 3) any instructor who felt the use of Logo to be problematic could easily provide students with translations of the code into some other language, or maybe just teach them just enough Logo to be able to read the examples.