Robert C. Berwick, Noam Chomsky

Why Only Us

Language and Evolution

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

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" - aises 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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: MIT Press
• Seitenzahl: 224
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. März 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 210mm x 144mm x 21mm
• Gewicht: 361g
• ISBN-13: 9780262034241
• ISBN-10: 0262034247
• Artikelnr.: 44026786

Autorenporträt

Robert C. Berwick is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Computer Science and Engineering, in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT and the author of Computational Complexity and Natural Language and The Acquisition of Syntactic Knowledge, both published by the MIT Press. Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at MIT and the author of many influential books on linguistics, including Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and The Minimalist Program, both published by the MIT Press.

Rezensionen

Why Only Us: Language and Evolution is a loosely connected collection of four essays that will fascinate anyone interested in the extraordinary phenomenon of language. New York Review of Books