Skip to content
Home/ Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words
Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words

Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words

by Erard, Michael
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780262049429 The MIT Press

A beautiful and intimate exploration of first and last words--and the many facets of how language begins and ends--from a pioneering language writer.

With our earliest utterances, we announce ourselves--and are recognized--as persons ready for social life. With our final ones, we mark where others must release us to death's embrace. In Bye Bye I Love You, linguist and author Michael Erard explores these phenomena, commonly called "first words" and "last words," uncovering their cultural, historical, and biological entanglements and honoring their deep private significance. Erard draws from personal, historical, and anthropological sources to provide a sense of the breadth of beliefs and practices about these phenomena across eras, religions, and cultures around the world.

What do babies' first words have in common? How do people really communicate at the end of life? In the first half of the book, Erard tells the story of first words in human development and evolution, and how the attention to children's early language--a modern phenomenon--arose. In the second half, he provides a groundbreaking overview of language at the end of life and the cultural conventions that surround it. Throughout he reveals the many parallels and asymmetries between first and last words and asks whether we might be able to use a linguistic understanding of end of life to discover what we truly want.

About the author

Product details

BrandThe MIT Press
Pub dateFeb 11, 2025
ISBN-100262049422
ISBN-139780262049429
Hardcover344.0 pages
LanguageEnglish
Dimensions9.25 × 1.31 × 6.25 in
Weight1 lb
Last updated 2026-09-07 15:20
$23.14 $32.95 29% off
You save $9.81 · list price $32.95
Only 8 left in stock — order soon
Delivery by Monday, September 14, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Linguistics - Psycholinguistics
See all
Language Acquisition: Knowledge Representation and Processing
Language Acquisition has been a much-disputed territory over which the conflicting claims of cognitive scientists, psychologists and linguists have long been fought. While for years each discipline has kept within its own theoretical frameworks, a fruitful recent development has been the increase in cross-disciplinary fertilisation of ideas between researchers of different orientations. It is in this spirit of collaboration that the GALA conferences on Language Acquisition have taken off. The aim of GALA '97 was to further promote cross-fertilisation across the different disciplines. The conference was an overwhelming success and this volume reflects both the eminence of the invited speakers and the richness of current debate. Presenting current cutting-edge research, the book fully illustrates the fruitfulness of the convergence of endeavours between researchers of different orientations. Containing a valuable introductory chapter from the editors that sets out the theoretical differences and standpoints on fundamental questions in language acquisition, the book presents eight papers based on the plenary lectures given at the conference. With contributions from major figures in the field, the book addresses the full range of core issues in Language Acquisition from the different viewpoints (lexical-semantic theory, generative grammar, optimality theory, experimental speech perception, computational modelling).
$163.80
Figurative Language: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Linguistic Perspectives
Dobrovol'skij, Dmitrij
$190.13
Handbook of the Neuroscience of Language
Available
$196.65
Mental Lexicon: Core Perspectives
Jarema, Gonia
$147.34
Handbook of Psycholinguistics
Available
$245.74
Linguistic Cerebellum
<p><i>The Linguistic Cerebellum </i>provides a comprehensive analysis of this unique part of the brain that has the most number of neurons, each operating in distinct networks to perform diverse functions. </p> <p>This book outlines how those distinct networks operate in relation to non-motor language skills. Coverage includes cerebellar anatomy and function in relation to speech perception, speech planning, verbal fluency, grammar processing, and reading and writing, along with a discussion of language disorders.</p>
$98.43