Studies in Language Origins PDF Download

Author: Walburga von Raffler-Engel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781556190780
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The question of language origin has fascinated people for years. The contributions in the present book stem primarely from the papers presented at the Third International Meeting of the Language Origins Society (LOS) held at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, June 1988. The contributors approach the problem not only from the viewpoint of linguistics, but also from that of anatomy, physiology, social sciences, physical anthropology, paleoanthropology, paleontology, comparative zoology, general biology, ethology, evolutionary biology and psychology.

Author: Claire Lefebvre
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027271135
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 600

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Book Description
The question of how language emerged is one of the most fascinating and difficult problems in science. In recent years, a strong resurgence of interest in the emergence of language from an evolutionary perspective has been helped by the convergence of approaches, methods, and ideas from several disciplines. The selection of contributions in this volume highlight scenarios of language origin and the prerequisites for a faculty of language based on biological, historical, social, cultural, and paleontological forays into the conditions that brought forth and favored language emergence, augmented by insights from sister disciplines. The chapters all reflect new speculation, discoveries and more refined research methods leading to a more focused understanding of the range of possibilities and how we might choose among them. There is much that we do not yet know, but the outlines of the path ahead are ever clearer.

Author: Sverker Johansson
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027294607
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Sverker Johansson has written an unusual book on language origins, with its emphasis on empirical evidence rather than theory-building. This is a book for the student or researcher who prefers solid data and well-supported conclusions, over speculative scenarios. Much that has been written on the origins of language is characterized by hypothesizing largely unconstrained by evidence. But empirical data do exist, and the purpose of this book is to integrate and review the available evidence from all relevant disciplines, not only linguistics but also, e.g., neurology, primatology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary biology. The evidence is then used to constrain the multitude of scenarios for language origins, demonstrating that many popular hypotheses are untenable. Among the issues covered: (1) Human evolutionary history, (2) Anatomical prerequisites for language, (3) Animal communication and ape "language", (4) Mind and language, (5) The role of gesture, (6) Innateness, (7) Selective advantage of language, (8) Proto-language.

Author: Jean-Louis Dessalles
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199276234
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Constant exchange of information is integral to our societies. The author explores how this came into being. Presenting language evolution as a natural history of conversation, he sheds light on the emergence of communication in the hominine congregations, as well as on the human nature.

Author: Talmy Givón
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027229595
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
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.

Author: Peter F. MacNeilage
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199581584
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
This book explores the origin and evolution of speech. The human speech system is in a league of its own in the animal kingdom and its possession dwarfs most other evolutionary achievements. During every second of speech we unconsciously use about 225 distinct muscle actions. To investigate the evolutionary origins of this prodigious ability, Peter MacNeilage draws on work in linguistics, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and animal behavior. He puts forward a neo-Darwinian account of speech as a process of descent in which ancestral vocal capabilities became modified in response to natural selection pressures for more efficient communication. His proposals include the crucial observation that present-day infants learning to produce speech reveal constraints that were acting on our ancestors as they invented new words long ago. This important and original investigation integrates the latest research on modern speech capabilities, their acquisition, and their neurobiology, including the issues surrounding the cerebral hemispheric specialization for speech. Written in a clear style with minimal recourse to jargon the book will interest a wide range of readers in cognitive, neuro-, and evolutionary science, as well as all those seeking to understand the nature and evolution of speech and human communication.

Author: Jan Wind
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401720398
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
Language Origin: A Multidisciplinary Approach presents a synthesis of viewpoints and data on linguistic, psychological, anatomical and behavioral studies on living species of Primates and provides a comparative framework for the evaluation of paleoanthropological studies. This double endeavor makes it possible to direct new research on the nature and evolution of human language and cognition. The book is directed to students of linguistics, biology, anthropoloy, anatomy, physiology, neurology, psychology, archeology, paleontology, and other related fields. A better understanding of speech pathology may stem from a better understanding of the relationship of human communication to the evolution of our species. The book is conceived as a timely contribution to such knowledge since it allows, for the first time, a systematic assessment of the origins of human language from a comprehensive array of scientific viewpoints.

Author: Derek Bickerton
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3946234089
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Roots of language was originally published in 1981 by Karoma Press (Ann Arbor). It was the first work to systematically develop a theory first suggested by Coelho in the late nineteenth century: that the creation of creole languages somehow reflected universal properties of language. The book also proposed that the same set of properties would be found to emerge in normal first-language acquisition and must have emerged in the original evolution of language. These proposals, some of which were elaborated in an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1984), were immediately controversial and gave rise to a great deal of subsequent research in creoles, much of it aimed at rebutting the theory. The book also served to legitimize and stimulate research in language evolution, a topic regarded as off-limits by linguists for over a century. The present edition contains a foreword by the author bringing the theory up to date; a fuller exposition of many of its aspects can be found in the author's most recent work, More than nature needs (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Author: Catherine Delesse
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527512231
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This collection of eleven essays traces the complex paths of change taken by the English language in its long history, from its Indo-European origins to the present day. Just like any other language, English is a complex system made up of several interconnected sub-systems – lexical, syntactical, phonological, morphological – and all of those sub-systems are subject to change, resulting in constant shifts and readjustments. Additionally, more than some other languages, English has a history marked by strong upheavals, particularly with the influence of Scandinavian and Romance languages in the Middle Ages. The contributions here consider all aspects of that complex history, with four of them taking a particular interest in the issues brought about by language contact with French and Latin.

Author: Peter Schrijver
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134254490
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
History, archaeology, and human evolutionary genetics provide us with an increasingly detailed view of the origins and development of the peoples that live in Northwestern Europe. This book aims to restore the key position of historical linguistics in this debate by treating the history of the Germanic languages as a history of its speakers. It focuses on the role that language contact has played in creating the Germanic languages, between the first millennium BC and the crucially important early medieval period. Chapters on the origins of English, German, Dutch, and the Germanic language family as a whole illustrate how the history of the sounds of these languages provide a key that unlocks the secret of their genesis: speakers of Latin, Celtic and Balto-Finnic switched to speaking Germanic and in the process introduced a 'foreign accent' that caught on and spread at the expense of types of Germanic that were not affected by foreign influence. The book is aimed at linguists, historians, archaeologists and anyone who is interested in what languages can tell us about the origins of their speakers.