Download Free Unravelling The Evolution Of Language Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Unravelling The Evolution Of Language and write the review.

What blocks the way to a better understanding of language evolution, it is widely held, is above all a paucity of factual evidence. Not so, argues Unravelling the Evolution of Language. This book finds the main obstacle, instead, in a poverty of a specific kind of theory—restrictive theory. It shows, too, that this poverty of restrictive theory is one of the root causes of the paucity of factual evidence. "Unravelling"...takes it that a theory of a thing T—for example, language—is restrictive if it gives us a basis for distinguishing T in a non-arbitrary way from all things that are in fact distinct from it, including those that happen to be related to it. The book then argues in detail that much of the recent work on language evolution proceeds from loose assumptions, rather than restrictive theories, about a number of crucial "things": The entities, prelinguistic or linguistic, that are believed to have undergone evolution; the processes by which these entities are believed to have evolved; the ways in which these (pre)linguistic entities link up with entities that are believed to be correlates of them; the sources of data that are believed to yield indirect evidence about the evolution of language; and the factors that add to or subtract from the scientific substance of accounts of language evolution. In support of its main argument, Unravelling the Evolution of Language puts forward detailed analyses of various recent accounts of language evolution, including co-optationist accounts by Noam Chomsky, Stephen Jay Gould, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Lyle Jenkins preadaptationist accounts by Philip Lieberman, Wendy Wilkins, Jenny Wakefield, Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, William Calvin and Derek Bickerton adaptationist accounts by Steven Pinker, Paul Bloom and others. This means that Unravelling...as it builds its main argument, also offers an appraisal of some significant contributions to recent work on language evolution.
Developments in cognitive science indicate that human and nonhuman primates share a range of behavioral and physiological characteristics that speak to the issue of language origins. This volume has three major themes, woven throughout the chapters. First, it is argued that scientists in animal behavior and anthropology need to move beyond theoretical debate to a more empirically focused and comparative approach to language. Second, those empirical and comparative methods are described, revealing underpinnings of language, some of which are shared by humans and other primates and others of which are unique to humans. New insights are discussed, and several hypotheses emerge concerning the evolutionary forces that led to the "design" of language. Third, evolutionary challenges that led to adaptive changes in communication over time are considered with an eye toward understanding various constraints that channeled the process.
This book summarizes the latest research on the origins of language, with a focus on the process of evolution and differentiation of language. It provides an update on the earlier successful book, “The Origins of Language” edited by Nobuo Masataka and published in 2008, with new content on emerging topics. Drawing on the empirical evidence in each respective chapter, the editor presents a coherent account of how language evolved, how music differentiated from language, and how humans finally became neurodivergent as a species. Chapters on nonhuman primate communication reveal that the evolution of language required the neural rewiring of circuits that controlled vocalization. Language contributed not only to the differentiation of our conceptual ability but also to the differentiation of psychic functions of concepts, emotion, and behavior. It is noteworthy that a rudimentary form of syntax (regularity of call sequences) has emerged in nonhuman primates. The following chapters explain how music differentiated from language, whereas the pre-linguistic system, or the “prosodic protolanguage,” in nonhuman primates provided a precursor for both language and music. Readers will gain a new understanding of music as a rudimentary form of language that has been discarded in the course of evolution and its role in restoring the primordial synthesis in the human psyche. The discussion leads to an inspiring insight into autism and neurodiversity in humans. This thought-provoking and carefully presented book will appeal to a wide range of readers in linguistics, psychology, phonology, biology, anthropology and music.
Developments in cognitive science indicate that human and nonhuman primates share a range of behavioral and physiological characteristics that speak to the issue of language origins. This volume has three major themes, woven throughout the chapters. First, it is argued that scientists in animal behavior and anthropology need to move beyond theoretical debate to a more empirically focused and comparative approach to language. Second, those empirical and comparative methods are described, revealing underpinnings of language, some of which are shared by humans and other primates and others of which are unique to humans. New insights are discussed, and several hypotheses emerge concerning the evolutionary forces that led to the "design" of language. Third, evolutionary challenges that led to adaptive changes in communication over time are considered with an eye toward understanding various constraints that channeled the process.
How can we unravel the evolution of language, given that there is no direct evidence about it? Rudolf Botha addresses this intriguing question in his fascinating new book. Inferences can be drawn about language evolution from a range of other phenomena, serving as windows into this prehistoric process. These include shell-beads, fossil skulls and ancestral brains, modern pidgin and creole languages, homesign systems and emergent sign languages, modern motherese, language use of modern hunter-gatherers, first language acquisition, similarities between language and music, and comparative animal behaviour. The first systematic analysis of the Windows Approach, it will be of interest to students and researchers in many disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, palaeontology and primatology, as well as anyone interested in how language evolved.
This volume comprises refereed papers and abstracts from the 7th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG7), held in Barcelona in March 2008. As the leading international conference in the field, the biennial EVOLANG meeting is characterized by an invigorating, multidisciplinary approach to the origins and evolution of human language, and brings together researchers from many fields including anthropology, archeology, artificial life, biology, cognitive science, computer science, ethology, genetics, linguistics, neuroscience, paleontology, primatology, psychology and statistical physics.The latest theoretical, experimental and modeling research on language evolution is presented in this collection. It includes contributions from leading scientists such as Derek Bickerton, Rudolf Botha, Camilo Cela Conde, Francesco d'Erico, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Simon Kirby, Gary Marcus, Friedemann Pulvermüller and Juan Uriagereka./a
This book is the first to focus on the African origins of human language. It explores the origins of language and culture 250,000-150,000 years ago when modern humans evolved in Africa. Scholars from around the world address the fossil, genetic, and archaeological evidence and critically examine the ways it has been interpreted. The book also considers parallel developments among Europe's Neanderthals and the contrasting outcomes for the two species. Following an extensive introduction contextualizing and linking the book's topics and approaches, fifteen chapters bring together many of the most significant recent findings and developments in modern human origins research. The fields represented by the authors include genetics, biology, behavioural ecology, linguistics, archaeology, cognitive science, and anthropology.
Letters are tangible language. Joining together in endless combinations to actually show speech, letters convey our messages and tell our stories. While we encounter these tiny shapes hundreds of times a day, we take for granted the long, fascinating history behind one of the most fundamental of human inventions -- the alphabet. The heart of the book is the 26 fact-filled “biographies” of letters A through Z, each one identifying the letter’s particular significance for modern readers, tracing its development from ancient forms, and discussing its noteworthy role in literature and other media. We learn, for example, why the letter X has a sinister and sexual aura, how B came to signify second best, why the word “mother” in many languages starts with M, and what is the story of O. Packed with information and lavishly illustrated, Letter Perfect is not only accessible and entertaining, but essential to the appreciation of our own language.
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.
This book was written by Frederic William Farrar, an Anglican cleric, classics scholar, and a comparative philologist, who applied Charles Darwin's ideas of branching descent to the relationships between languages, despite disagreeing with Darwin's idea as applied to evolutionary biology. Readers can find Darwinian influence in this book as Farrar lays down the idea of how language evolved throughout the ages.