Download Full eBooks in PDF
The Evolutionary Emergence Of Language Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of The Evolutionary Emergence Of Language book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
Author : Chris Knight,Michael Studdert-Kennedy,James Hurford
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2000-11-20
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0521786967
This book covers the origins of language, combining social and natural science perspectives.
Author : Rudolf Botha,Martin Everaert
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2013-07-25
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780191626470
The book presents new and stimulating approaches to the study of language evolution and considers their implications for future research. Leading scholars from linguistics, primatology, anthroplogy, and cognitive science consider how language evolution can be understood by means of inference from the study of linked or analogous phenomena in language, animal behaviour, genetics, neurology, culture, and biology. In their introduction the editors show how these approaches can be interrelated and deployed together through their use of comparable forms of inference and the similar conditions they place on the use of evidence. The Evolutionary Emergence of Language will interest everyone concerned with this intriguing and important subject, including those in linguistics, biology, anthropology, archaeology, neurology, and cognitive science.
Author : Morten H. Christiansen,Simon Kirby
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2003-07-24
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780191581663
What is it that makes us human? This is one of the most challenging and important questions we face. Our species' defining characteristic is language - we appear to be unique in the natural world in having such an incredibly open-ended system for putting thoughts into words. If we are to truly understand ourselves as a species we must understand the origins of this strange and unique ability. To do so, we need to answer some of the most intriguing questions in contemporary scientific research: Where did language come from? How did it evolve? Why are we unique in possessing it? This book, for the first time, brings together the leading thinkers who are trying to unlock the puzzle of language evolution. Here we see the latest ideas and theories from fields as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, artificial life, biology, cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology. In a series of seventeen well-written and accessible chapters we get an unrivalled view of the state of the art in this exciting area. Current controversies are revealed and new perspectives uncovered, in a clear and readable guide to the latest theories. This collection marks a major step forward in our quest to understand the origins and evolution of human language. In doing so it sheds new light on the process of evolution, the workings of the brain, the structure of language, and - most importantly - what it means to be human. Language Evolution is essential reading for researchers and students working in the areas covered, and has been used as a textbook for courses in the field. It will also attract the general reader who wants to know more about this fascinating subject.
Author : Oxford University Press
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Historical linguistics
ISBN : 0191759007
Leading primatologists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists and linguists consider how language evolution can be understood by means of inference from the study of linked or analogous phenomena in language, animal behaviour, genetics, neurology culture, and biology.
Author : Robert C. Berwick,Noam Chomsky
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2017-05-12
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780262533492
Berwick and Chomsky draw on recent developments in linguistic theory to offer an evolutionary account of language and humans' remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire it. “A loosely connected collection of four essays that will fascinate anyone interested in the extraordinary phenomenon of language.” —New York Review of Books We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—“the language faculty”—raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book by two distinguished scholars—a computer scientist and a linguist—addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language. Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently the evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define “language” and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals. Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world; the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding; the tension between Darwin's idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language; and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds.
Author : Rudolf Botha,Martin Everaert
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 355 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2013-07-25
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780199654840
Leading primatologists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, and linguists consider how language evolution can be understood by means of inference from the study of linked or analogous phenomena in language, animal behaviour, genetics, neurology, culture, and biology.
Author : W. Tecumseh Fitch
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2010-04-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781139487061
Language, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not? How, and why, did language evolve in our species and not in others? Since Darwin's theory of evolution, questions about the origin of language have generated a rapidly-growing scientific literature, stretched across a number of disciplines, much of it directed at specialist audiences. The diversity of perspectives - from linguistics, anthropology, speech science, genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology - can be bewildering. Tecumseh Fitch cuts through this vast literature, bringing together its most important insights to explore one of the biggest unsolved puzzles of human history.
Author : James R. Hurford
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 808 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2012
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780199207879
The second in James Hurford's acclaimed two-volume exploration of the biological evolution of language explores the evolutionary and cultural preconditions and consequences of humanity's great leap into language.
Author : Jean-Louis Dessalles
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 398 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2007-01-04
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780199276233
Constant exchange of information is integral to our societies. The author explores how this came into being. Presenting language evolution as a natural history of conversation, he sheds light on the emergence of communication in the hominine congregations, as well as on the human nature.
Author : Philip Lieberman
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 458 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2006-06-30
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0674021843
In this forcefully argued book, the leading evolutionary theorist of language draws on evidence from evolutionary biology, genetics, physical anthropology, anatomy, and neuroscience, to provide a framework for studying the evolution of human language and cognition. Philip Lieberman argues forcibly that the widely influential theories of language's development, advanced by Chomskian linguists and cognitive scientists, especially those that postulate a single dedicated language "module," "organ," or "instinct," are inconsistent with principles and findings of evolutionary biology and neuroscience. He argues that the human neural system in its totality is the basis for the human language ability, for it requires the coordination of neural circuits that regulate motor control with memory and higher cognitive functions. Pointing out that articulate speech is a remarkably efficient means of conveying information, Lieberman also highlights the adaptive significance of the human tongue. Fully human language involves the species-specific anatomy of speech, together with the neural capacity for thought and movement. In Lieberman's iconoclastic Darwinian view, the human language ability is the confluence of a succession of separate evolutionary developments, jury-rigged by natural selection to work together for an evolutionarily unique ability.
Author : Sverker Johansson
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 359 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2005-02-17
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027294609
Sverker Johansson has written an unusual book on language origins, with its emphasis on empirical evidence rather than theory-building. This is a book for the student or researcher who prefers solid data and well-supported conclusions, over speculative scenarios. Much that has been written on the origins of language is characterized by hypothesizing largely unconstrained by evidence. But empirical data do exist, and the purpose of this book is to integrate and review the available evidence from all relevant disciplines, not only linguistics but also, e.g., neurology, primatology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary biology. The evidence is then used to constrain the multitude of scenarios for language origins, demonstrating that many popular hypotheses are untenable. Among the issues covered: (1) Human evolutionary history, (2) Anatomical prerequisites for language, (3) Animal communication and ape "language", (4) Mind and language, (5) The role of gesture, (6) Innateness, (7) Selective advantage of language, (8) Proto-language.
Author : Christine Kenneally
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2007-07-19
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781101202395
An accessible exploration of a burgeoning new field: the incredible evolution of language The first popular book to recount the exciting, very recent developments in tracing the origins of language, The First Word is at the forefront of a controversial, compelling new field. Acclaimed science writer Christine Kenneally explains how a relatively small group of scientists that include Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker assembled the astounding narrative of how the fundamental process of evolution produced a linguistic ape-in other words, us. Infused with the wonder of discovery, this vital and engrossing book offers us all a better understanding of the story of humankind.
Author : Rudolf P. Botha
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2021-11-22
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789004487208
What blocks the way to a better understanding of language evolution, it is widely held, is above all a paucity of factual evidence. Not so, argues Unravelling the Evolution of Language. This book finds the main obstacle, instead, in a poverty of a specific kind of theory—restrictive theory. It shows, too, that this poverty of restrictive theory is one of the root causes of the paucity of factual evidence. "Unravelling"...takes it that a theory of a thing T—for example, language—is restrictive if it gives us a basis for distinguishing T in a non-arbitrary way from all things that are in fact distinct from it, including those that happen to be related to it. The book then argues in detail that much of the recent work on language evolution proceeds from loose assumptions, rather than restrictive theories, about a number of crucial "things": The entities, prelinguistic or linguistic, that are believed to have undergone evolution; the processes by which these entities are believed to have evolved; the ways in which these (pre)linguistic entities link up with entities that are believed to be correlates of them; the sources of data that are believed to yield indirect evidence about the evolution of language; and the factors that add to or subtract from the scientific substance of accounts of language evolution. In support of its main argument, Unravelling the Evolution of Language puts forward detailed analyses of various recent accounts of language evolution, including co-optationist accounts by Noam Chomsky, Stephen Jay Gould, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Lyle Jenkins preadaptationist accounts by Philip Lieberman, Wendy Wilkins, Jenny Wakefield, Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, William Calvin and Derek Bickerton adaptationist accounts by Steven Pinker, Paul Bloom and others. This means that Unravelling...as it builds its main argument, also offers an appraisal of some significant contributions to recent work on language evolution.
Author : W. Tecumseh Fitch
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 625 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2010-04
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780521859936
This book brings together the most important insights from the vast amount of literature on the origin of language.
Author : Merritt Ruhlen
Publisher : Wiley
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 1996-08-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0471159638
"Ruhlen is a leader in the new attempt to unify the theory of language development and diffusion."––Library Journal "A powerful statement...also a wonderfully clear exposition of linguistic thinking about prehistory."––Anthropological Science One of the world's foremost language researchers takes readers step-by-step through the hotly contested evidence that all modern languages derive from one "mother tongue" once spoken by primitive humans in Africa. With The Origin of Language, Merritt Ruhlen makes this fascinating science accessible to readers with no linguistic background. MERRITT RUHLEN, PhD (Palo Alto, California) is the author of A Guide to the World's Languages