Cognition And Communication In The Evolution Of Language

Author : Anne Reboul
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198747314
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cognition and Communication in the Evolution of Language written by Anne Reboul and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes a new two-step approach to the evolution of language, whereby syntax first evolved as an auto-organizational process for the human conceptual apparatus (as a Language of Thought), and this Language of Thought was then externalized for communication, due to social selection pressures. Anne Reboul first argues that despite the routine use of language in communication, current use is not a failsafe guide to adaptive history. She points out that human cognition is as unique in nature as is language as a communication system, suggesting deep links between human thought and language. If language is seen as a communication system, then the specificities of language, its hierarchical syntax, its creativity, and the ability to use it to talk about absent objects, are a mystery. This book shows that approaching language as a system for thought overcomes these problems, and provides a detailed account of both steps in the evolution of language: its evolution for thought and its externalization for communication.

Author : James R. Hurford
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521639644
Total Pages : 460 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Approaches to the Evolution of Language written by James R. Hurford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-17 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
ISBN 13 : 113948706X
Total Pages : 625 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Evolution of Language written by W. Tecumseh Fitch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Kathleen Rita Gibson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521485418
Total Pages : 506 pages
Book Rating : 4.1X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution written by Kathleen Rita Gibson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at how humans have evolved complex behaviours such as language and culture.

Author : Richard D. Janda
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 111873226X
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II written by Richard D. Janda and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entirely new follow-up volume providing a detailed account of numerous additional issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics. This brand-new, second volume of The Handbook of Historical Linguistics is a complement to the well-established first volume first published in 2003. It includes extended content allowing uniquely comprehensive coverage of the study of language(s) over time. Though it adds fresh perspectives on several topics previously treated in the first volume, this Handbook focuses on extensions of diachronic linguistics beyond those key issues. This Handbook provides readers with studies of language change whose perspectives range from comparisons of large open vs. small closed corpora, via creolistics and linguistic contact in general, to obsolescence and endangerment of languages. Written by leading scholars in their respective fields, new chapters are offered on matters such as the origin of language, evidence from language for reconstructing human prehistory, invocations of language present in studies of language past, benefits of linguistic fieldwork for historical investigation, ways in which not only biological evolution but also field biology can serve as heuristics for research into the rise and spread of linguistic innovations, and more. Moreover, it: offers novel and broadened content complementing the earlier volume so as to provide the fullest available overview of a wholly engrossing field includes 23 all-new contributed chapters, treating some familiar themes from fresh perspectives but mostly covering entirely new topics features expanded discussion of material from language families other than Indo-European provides a multiplicity of views from numerous specialists in linguistic diachrony. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, researchers and professional linguists, as well as all those interested in the history of particular languages and the history of language more generally.

Author : Boris M. Velichkovsky
Publisher : Psychology Press
ISBN 13 : 1134798776
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Communicating Meaning written by Boris M. Velichkovsky and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dealing specifically with the origins and development of human language, this book is based on a selection of materials from a recent international conference held at the Center of Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. The significance of the volume is that it testifies to paradigmatic changes currently in progress. The changes are from the typical emphasis on the syntactic properties of language and cognition to an analysis of biological and cultural factors which make these formal properties possible. The chapters provide in-depth coverage of such topics as new theoretical foundations for cognitive research, phylogenetic prerequisites and ontogenesis of language, and environmental and cultural forces of development. Some of the arguments and lines of research are relatively well-known; others deal with completely new interdisciplinary approaches. As a result, some of the authors' conclusions are in part, rather counterintuitive, such as the hypothesis that language as a system of formal symbolic transformations may be in fact a very late phenomenon located in the sphere of socio-cultural and not biological development. While highly debatable, this and other hypotheses of the book may well define research questions for the future.

Author : Robert M. Seyfarth
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 140088814X
Total Pages : 179 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Social Origins of Language written by Robert M. Seyfarth and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How human language evolved from the need for social communication The origins of human language remain hotly debated. Despite growing appreciation of cognitive and neural continuity between humans and other animals, an evolutionary account of human language—in its modern form—remains as elusive as ever. The Social Origins of Language provides a novel perspective on this question and charts a new path toward its resolution. In the lead essay, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney draw on their decades-long pioneering research on monkeys and baboons in the wild to show how primates use vocalizations to modulate social dynamics. They argue that key elements of human language emerged from the need to decipher and encode complex social interactions. In other words, social communication is the biological foundation upon which evolution built more complex language. Seyfarth and Cheney’s argument serves as a jumping-off point for responses by John McWhorter, Ljiljana Progovac, Jennifer E. Arnold, Benjamin Wilson, Christopher I. Petkov and Peter Godfrey-Smith, each of whom draw on their respective expertise in linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Michael Platt provides an introduction, Seyfarth and Cheney a concluding essay. Ultimately, The Social Origins of Language offers thought-provoking viewpoints on how human language evolved.

Author : W. Tecumseh Fitch
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 052185993X
Total Pages : 625 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Evolution of Language written by W. Tecumseh Fitch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together the most important insights from the vast amount of literature on the origin of language.

Author : Maggie Tallerman
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199541116
Total Pages : 790 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution written by Maggie Tallerman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Ulrich E. Stegmann
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9781108464727
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Animal Communication Theory written by Ulrich E. Stegmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The explanation of animal communication by means of concepts like information, meaning and reference is one of the central foundational issues in animal behaviour studies. This book explores these issues, revolving around questions such as: • What is the nature of information? • What theoretical roles does information play in animal communication studies? • Is it justified to employ these concepts in order to explain animal communication? • What is the relation between animal signals and human language? The book approaches the topic from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including ethology, animal cognition, theoretical biology and evolutionary biology, as well as philosophy of biology and mind. A comprehensive introduction familiarises non-specialists with the field and leads on to chapters ranging from philosophical and theoretical analyses to case studies involving primates, birds and insects. The resulting survey of new and established concepts and methodologies will guide future empirical and theoretical research.