New Essays on the Origin of LanguageJürgen Trabant, Sean Ward The contributions to this volume reflect the state of the art in the renewed discussion on the origin of language. Some of the most important specialists in the field - life scientists and linguists - primarily examine two aspects of the question: the origin of the language faculty and the evolution of the first language. At stake is the relation between nature and culture and between universality and historical particularity as well as cognition, communication, and the very essence of language. |
Contents
New perspectives on an old academic question | 1 |
On the subcortical bases of the evolution of language | 21 |
the language amoeba hypothesis | 41 |
can Universal Grammar | 55 |
Elementary forms of linguistic organisation | 81 |
an episode in the origin of language | 103 |
Protothought had no logical names | 119 |
The birth of rules | 133 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
ability adaptive Amerind animacy animals aphasia aspects basal ganglia Basic Variety behaviour biological brain Broca's Broca's aphasia Broca's area characterisation chimpanzees cognitive complex conceptual constraints create creole crucial cultural evolution deficits Dene-Caucasian English Eurasiatic event evolutionary example functional genes genetic assimilation grammar Greenberg Grimm guage Herder Hittite hominids human language faculty hypothesis individual constants Indo-European Indo-Hittite inflectional innate innovations input interaction involved language acquisition language capacity language evolution language origin language's learners learning lexeme lexical items lexicon Lieberman linguistic system meaning mental Merritt Ruhlen morphological murder narration natural language neural normal Nostratic noun object origin of language particular pattern predicates prelinguistic primates properties protolanguage question relevant representations ritualisation Ruhlen rules selection sentences sequence sign language social speakers specific speech stage structure studies subcortical syntactic syntax theory tion Trombetti types utterances verb verbal vocal tract Wernicke's area Wiyot words