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Contains: The Darwinian Theory and the Science of language (1863) by August Schleicher, translated from the German by Alexander V. W. Bikkers. On the Significance of Language for the Natural History of Man (1865) by August Schleicher, translated from the German by J. Peter Maher. On the Origin of Language (1867) by Wilhelm H. I. Bleek, edited with a preface by Ernst Haeckel, translated from the German by Thomas Davidson.
Berwick and Chomsky draw on recent developments in linguistic theory to offer an evolutionary account of language and humans' remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire it. “A loosely connected collection of four essays that will fascinate anyone interested in the extraordinary phenomenon of language.” —New York Review of Books 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”—raises 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. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals. Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world; the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding; the tension between Darwin's idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language; and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds.
English Words Abroad summarizes the methods developed for the innovative multilingual Dictionary of European Anglicisms (Görlach 2001, OUP) which combines data on English loanwords in sixteen European languages (four each for Germanic, Slavic, Romance and others). This summary allows us to quantify for the first time the extent of the lexical impact of loanwords on individual languages and cultures. The author discusses the elicitation of data from informants with a high linguistic awareness; criteria for inclusion; problems of integration on graphemic, phonological, morphological and semantic/stylistic levels; and speakers' reactions (purism, language, legislation). He then explores the possibilities of applying these methods to dictionaries of gallicisms and germanisms. The book includes a survey of the most recent dictionaries of anglicisms in European languages.
In this forcefully argued book, the leading evolutionary theorist of language draws on evidence from evolutionary biology, genetics, physical anthropology, anatomy, and neuroscience, to provide a framework for studying the evolution of human language and cognition. Philip Lieberman argues forcibly that the widely influential theories of language's development, advanced by Chomskian linguists and cognitive scientists, especially those that postulate a single dedicated language "module," "organ," or "instinct," are inconsistent with principles and findings of evolutionary biology and neuroscience. He argues that the human neural system in its totality is the basis for the human language ability, for it requires the coordination of neural circuits that regulate motor control with memory and higher cognitive functions. Pointing out that articulate speech is a remarkably efficient means of conveying information, Lieberman also highlights the adaptive significance of the human tongue. Fully human language involves the species-specific anatomy of speech, together with the neural capacity for thought and movement. In Lieberman's iconoclastic Darwinian view, the human language ability is the confluence of a succession of separate evolutionary developments, jury-rigged by natural selection to work together for an evolutionarily unique ability.
Publisher Description
This book synthesizes much of the exciting recent research in the biology of language. Drawing on data from anatomy, neurophysiology, physiology, and behavioral biology, Philip Lieberman develops a new approach to the puzzle of language, arguing that it is the result of many evolutionary compromises. Within his discussion, Lieberman skillfully addresses matters as various as the theory of neoteny (which he refutes), the mating calls of bullfrogs, ape language, dyslexia, and computer-implemented models of the brain.
This book brings together the most important insights from the vast amount of literature on the origin of language.
This is one of the first systematic attempts to bring language within the neo-Darwinian framework of modern evolutionary theory, without abandoning the vast gains in phonology and syntax achieved by formal linguistics over the past forty years. The contributors, linguists, psychologists, and paleoanthropologists, address such questions as: what is language as a category of behavior; is it an instrument of thought or of communication; what do individuals know when they know a language; what cognitive, perceptual, and motor capacities must they have to speak, hear, and understand a language? For the past two centuries, scientists have tended to see language function as largely concerned with the exchange of practical information. By contrast, this volume takes as its starting point the view of human intelligence as social, and of language as a device for forming alliances, in exploring the origins of the sound patterns and formal structures that characterize language.
This book proposes a radically evolutionary approach to biolinguistics that consists in considering human language as a form of species-specific intelligence entirely embodied in the corporeal structures of Homo sapiens. The book starts with a historical reconstruction of two opposing biolinguistic models: the Chomskian Biolinguistic Model (CBM) and the Darwinian Biolinguistic Model (DBM). The second part compares the two models and develops into a complete reconsideration of the traditional biolinguistic issues in an evolutionary perspective, highlighting their potential influence on the paradigm of biologically oriented cognitive science. The third part formulates the philosophical, evolutionary and experimental basis of an extended theory of linguistic performativity within a naturalistic perspective of pragmatics of verbal language. The book proposes a model in which the continuity between human and non-human primates is linked to the gradual development of the articulatory and neurocerebral structures, and to a kind of prelinguistic pragmatics which characterizes the common nature of social learning. In contrast, grammatical, semantic and pragmatic skills that mark the learning of historical-natural languages are seen as a rapid acceleration of cultural evolution. The book makes clear that this acceleration will not necessarily favour the long-term adaptations for Homo sapiens.
William Croft's text weaves together recent research findings from sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, grammatical change, pragmatics, social variation, language contact and genetic linguistics.