A Critical Introduction to Language Evolution - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook A Critical Introduction to Language Evolution write by Ljiljana Progovac. This book was released on 2018-12-18. A Critical Introduction to Language Evolution available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book provides a critical introduction to the current views and controversies regarding language evolution. It sheds new light on hot topics such as: How ancient is language? Did Neanderthals have some form of language? Did language evolve gradually and incrementally, through stages, or suddenly, in one leap, in all its complexity? Does language evolution involve natural selection or not? This book is essential reading for scholars and students interested in language evolution, especially those in the fields of linguistics, psychology, biology, anthropology, and neuroscience.
The Evolution of Language
The Evolution of Language - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Evolution of Language write by W. Tecumseh Fitch. This book was released on 2010-04-01. The Evolution of Language available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution
The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution write by Maggie Tallerman. This book was released on 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
Language Evolution
Language Evolution - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Language Evolution write by Salikoko S. Mufwene. This book was released on 2008-03-31. Language Evolution available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Languages are constantly changing. New words are added to the English language every year, either borrowed or coined, and there is often railing against the 'decline' of the language by public figures. Some languages, such as French and Finnish, have academies to protect them against foreign imports. Yet languages are species-like constructs, which evolve naturally over time. Migration, imperialism, and globalization have blurred boundaries between many of them, producing new ones (such as creoles) and driving some to extinction. This book examines the processes by which languages change, from the macroecological perspective of competition and natural selection. In a series of chapters, Salikoko Mufwene examines such themes as: - natural selection in language - the actuation question and the invisible hand that drives evolution - multilingualism and language contact - language birth and language death - the emergence of Creoles and Pidgins - the varying impacts of colonization and globalization on language vitality This comprehensive examination of the organic evolution of language will be essential reading for graduate and senior undergraduate students, and for researchers on the social dynamics of language variation and change, language vitality and death, and even the origins of linguistic diversity.
Why Only Us
Why Only Us - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Why Only Us write by Robert C. Berwick. This book was released on 2017-05-12. Why Only Us available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
