[PDF] Approaches To The Evolution Of Language eBook

Author : James R. Hurford
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 460 pages
File Size : 40,27 MB
Release : 1998-09-17
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780521639644

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This is one of the first systematic attempts to bring language within the neo-Darwinian framework of modern evolutionary theory, without abandoning the vast gains in phonology and syntax achieved by formal linguistics over the past forty years. The contributors, linguists, psychologists, and paleoanthropologists, address such questions as: what is language as a category of behavior; is it an instrument of thought or of communication; what do individuals know when they know a language; what cognitive, perceptual, and motor capacities must they have to speak, hear, and understand a language? For the past two centuries, scientists have tended to see language function as largely concerned with the exchange of practical information. By contrast, this volume takes as its starting point the view of human intelligence as social, and of language as a device for forming alliances, in exploring the origins of the sound patterns and formal structures that characterize language.

Author : W. Tecumseh Fitch
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 625 pages
File Size : 37,68 MB
Release : 2010-04-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 113948706X

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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 : David McNeill
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 24,3 MB
Release : 2012-08-30
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1139560913

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Human language is not the same as human speech. We use gestures and signs to communicate alongside, or instead of, speaking. Yet gestures and speech are processed in the same areas of the human brain, and the study of how both have evolved is central to research on the origins of human communication. Written by one of the pioneers of the field, this is the first book to explain how speech and gesture evolved together into a system that all humans possess. Nearly all theorizing about the origins of language either ignores gesture, views it as an add-on or supposes that language began in gesture and was later replaced by speech. David McNeill challenges the popular 'gesture-first' theory that language first emerged in a gesture-only form and proposes a groundbreaking theory of the evolution of language which explains how speech and gesture became unified.

Author : Maggie Tallerman
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 790 pages
File Size : 49,32 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0199541116

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Leading scholars present critical accounts of every aspect of the field, including work in animal behaviour; anatomy, genetics and neurology; the prehistory of language; the development of our uniquely linguistic species; and language creation, transmission, and change.

Author : Salikoko S. Mufwene
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 44,14 MB
Release : 2001-08-30
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780521791380

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This major new work explores the development of creoles and other new languages, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues they raise for genetic linguistics. Written by an internationally renowned linguist, the book surveys a wide range of examples of changes in the structure, function and vitality of languages, and suggests that similar ecologies have played the same kinds of roles in all cases of language evolution. The Ecology of Language Evolution will be welcomed by students and researchers in sociolinguistics, creolistics, theoretical linguistics and theories of evolution.

Author : Angelo Cangelosi
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 26,91 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Computers
ISBN : 1447106636

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This book is the first to provide a comprehensive survey of the computational models and methodologies used for studying the evolution and origin of language and communication. Comprising contributions from the most influential figures in the field, it presents and summarises the state-of-the-art in computational approaches to language evolution, and highlights new lines of development. Essential reading for researchers and students in the fields of evolutionary and adaptive systems, language evolution modelling and linguistics, it will also be of interest to researchers working on applications of neural networks to language problems. Furthermore, due to the fact that language evolution models use multi-agent methodologies, it will also be of great interest to computer scientists working on multi-agent systems, robotics and internet agents.

Author : Anna R. Kinsella
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 17,21 MB
Release : 2009-07-23
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0521895308

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Discusses the relationship between Chomskyan syntactic theory and the evolution of language.

Author : Wolfgang Wildgen
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 12,11 MB
Release : 2004-01-01
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9789027251930

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Wolfgang Wildgen presents three perspectives on the evolution of language as a key element in the evolution of mankind in terms of the development of human symbol use. (1) He approaches this question by constructing possible scenarios in which mechanisms necessary for symbolic behavior could have developed, on the basis of the state of the art in evolutionary anthropology and genetics. (2) Non-linguistic symbolic behavior such as cave art is investigated as an important clue to the developmental background to the origin of language. Creativity and innovation and a population's ability to integrate individual experiments are considered with regard to historical examples of symbolic creativity in the visual arts and natural sciences. (3) Probable linguistic 'fossils' of such linguistic innovations are examined. The results of this study allow for new proposals for a 'protolanguage' and for a theory of language within a broader philosophical and semiotic framework, and raises interesting questions as to human consciousness, universal grammar, and linguistic methodology. (Series B)

Author : Nikolaus Ritt
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 42,13 MB
Release : 2004-05-27
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780521826716

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