Approaches to the Evolution of Language

Approaches to the Evolution of Language
Author: James R. Hurford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 460
Release: 1998-09-17
Genre: 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.

The Evolution of Language

The Evolution of Language
Author: W. Tecumseh Fitch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 625
Release: 2010-04-01
Genre: 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.

How Language Began

How Language Began
Author: David McNeill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2012-08-30
Genre: 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.

The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution

The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution
Author: Maggie Tallerman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 790
Release: 2012
Genre: 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.

Simulating the Evolution of Language

Simulating the Evolution of Language
Author: Angelo Cangelosi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: 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.

The Ecology of Language Evolution

The Ecology of Language Evolution
Author: Salikoko S. Mufwene
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2001-08-30
Genre: 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.

The Evolution of Language Out of Pre-language

The Evolution of Language Out of Pre-language
Author: Talmy Givón
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027229595
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The contributors to this volume are linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, primatologists, and anthropologists who share the assumption that language, just as mind and brain, are products of biological evolution. The rise of human language is not viewed as a serendipitous mutation that gave birth to a unique linguistic organ, but as a gradual, adaptive extension of pre-existing mental capacities and brain structures. The contributors carefully study brain mechanisms, diachronic change, language acquisition, and the parallels between cognitive and linguistic structures to weave a web of hypotheses and suggestive empirical findings on the origins of language and the connections of language to other human capacities. The chapters discuss brain pathways that support linguistic processing; origins of specific linguistic features in temporal and hierarchical structures of the mind; the possible co-evolution of language and the reasoning about mental states; and the aspects of language learning that may serve as models of evolutionary change.

Language Evolution and Syntactic Theory

Language Evolution and Syntactic Theory
Author: Anna R. Kinsella
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2009-07-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0521895308
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Discusses the relationship between Chomskyan syntactic theory and the evolution of language.

The Evolution of Human Language

The Evolution of Human Language
Author: Wolfgang Wildgen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: 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)