Approaches to 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 Approaches to the Evolution of Language write by James R. Hurford. This book was released on 1998-09-17. Approaches to the Evolution of Language available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
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.
How Language Began
How Language Began - 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 How Language Began write by David McNeill. This book was released on 2012-08-30. How Language Began available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
Approaches to the evolution of language
Approaches to 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 Approaches to the evolution of language write by . This book was released on 19??. Approaches to the evolution of language available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
The Evolution of Human Language
The Evolution of Human 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 Human Language write by Wolfgang Wildgen. This book was released on 2004-01-01. The Evolution of Human Language available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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)
