Morten Christiansen / Simon Kirby (eds.)

Language Evolution

Ed.: Morten H. Christiansen and Simon Kirby

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The leading scholars in the rapidly growing field of language evolution give readable accounts of their theories on the origins of language and reflect on the most important current issues and debates. As well as providing a guide to their own published research in this area they highlight what they see as the most relevant research of others. The authors come from a wide range of disciplines involved in language evolution including linguistics, cognitive science, computational science, primatology, and archaeology.

Produktdetails

• Studies in the Evolution of Language
• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 414
• Erscheinungstermin: 24. Juli 2003
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 234mm x 156mm x 22mm
• Gewicht: 635g
• ISBN-13: 9780199244843
• ISBN-10: 0199244847
• Artikelnr.: 14997095

Autorenporträt

Morten H. Christiansen is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He is co-editor of Connectionist Psycholinguistics published by Ablex in 2001. Simon Kirby is a British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh: his book, Function, Selection, and Innateness was published by OUP in 1999.

Inhaltsangabe

* 1: Morten H. Christiansen and Simon Kirby: Language Evolution: The
Hardest Problem in Science?
* 2: Steven Pinker: Language as an Adaptation to the Cognitive Niche
* 3: James Hurford: The Language Mosaic and its Evolution
* 4: Frederick J. Newmeyer: What can the Field of Linguistics Tell Us
About the Origins of Language?
* 5: Derek Bickerton: Symbol and Structure: A Comprehensive Framework
for Language Evolution
* 6: Michael Tomasello: On the Different Origins of Symbols and Grammar
* 7: Terrence W. Deacon: Universal Grammar and Semiotic Constraints
* 8: Iain Davidson: The Archaeological Evidence of Language Origins:
States of the Art
* 9: Marc D. Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch: What are the Uniquely Human
Components of the Language Faculty?
* 10: Michael A. Arbib: The Evolving Mirror System: A Neural Basis for
Language Readiness
* 11: Michael C. Corballis: From Hand to Mouth: the Gestural Origins of
Language
* 12: Robin I. M. Dunbar: The Origin and Subsequent Evolution of
Language
* 13: Michael Studdert-Kennedy and Louis Goldstein: Launching Language:
the Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
* 14: Philip Lieberman: Motor Control, Speech, and the Evolution of
Human Language
* 15: Simon Kirby and Morten H. Christiansen: From Language Learning to
Language Evolution
* 16: Ted Briscoe: Grammatical Assimilation
* 17: Natalia L. Komarova and Martin A. Nowak: Language, Learning, and
Evolution

Rezensionen

Some time since we and the chimpanzees went our separate evolutionary ways, probably towards the very end of that 6 million year period, an innovation occurred whose only precedent was arguably the DNA code itself. Language arose in our ancestors, and there had been nothing like it. Of course other species communicate, many of them vocally, but none of this comes close to the open-ended, generative capacity, the huge vocabulary, the nuanced subtlety, the permanent recordability of language. As an outsider, it is with real fascination that I have read this compendium. One of the merits of any book is its capacity to stimulate the reader to think beyond its confines. This, and other merits are possessed by Language Evolution in abundance. Richard Dawkins