Download or read book Darwinian Biolinguistics written by Antonino Pennisi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Biolinguistics written by Lyle Jenkins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-13 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the nature of human language and its importance for the study of the mind. In particular, it examines current work on the biology of language. Lyle Jenkins reviews the evidence that language is best characterized by a generative grammar of the kind introduced by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s and developed in various directions since that time. He then discusses research into the development of language which tries to capture both the underlying universality of human language, as well as the diversity found in individual languages (Universal Grammar). Finally, he discusses a variety of approaches to language design and the evolution of language. An important theme is the integration of biolinguistics into the natural sciences - the 'unification problem'. Jenkins also answers criticisms of the biolinguistic approach from a number of other perspectives, including evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, connectionism and ape language research, among others.
Download or read book Advances in Biolinguistics written by Koji Fujita and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biolinguistics is a highly interdisciplinary field that seeks the rapprochement between linguistics and biology. Linking theoretical linguistics, theoretical biology, genetics, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, this book offers a collection of chapters situating the enterprise conceptually, highlighting both the promises and challenges of the field, and chapters focusing on the challenges and prospects of taking interdisciplinarity seriously. It provides concrete illustrations of some of the cutting-edge research in biolinguistics and piques the interest of undergraduate students looking for a field to major in and inspires graduate students on possible research directions. It is also meant to show to specialists in adjacent fields how a particular strand of theoretical linguistics relates to their concerns, and in so doing, the book intends to foster collaboration across disciplines. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Download or read book Biolinguistic Investigations and the Formal Language Hierarchy written by Juan Uriagereka and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects some of Juan Uriagereka’s previously published pieces and presentations on biolinguistics in recent years in one comprehensive volume. The book’s introduction lays the foundation for the field of biolinguistics, which looks to integrate concepts from the natural sciences in the analysis of natural language, situating the discussion within the minimalist framework. The volume then highlights eight of the author’s key papers from the literature, some co-authored, representative of both the architectural and evolutionary considerations to be taken into account within biolinguistic research. The book culminates in a final chapter showcasing the body of work being done on biolinguistics within the research program at the University of Maryland and their implications for interdisciplinary research and future directions for the field. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars interested in the interface between language and the natural sciences, including linguistics, syntax, biology, archaeology, and anthropology.
Download or read book The Biolinguistic Enterprise written by Anna Maria Di Sciullo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, by leading scholars, represents some of the main work in progress in biolinguistics. It offers fresh perspectives on language evolution and variation, new developments in theoretical linguistics, and insights on the relations between variation in language and variation in biology. The authors address the Darwinian questions on the origin and evolution of language from a minimalist perspective, and provide elegant solutions to the evolutionary gap between human language and communication in all other organisms. They consider language variation in the context of current biological approaches to species diversity - the 'evo-devo revolution' - which bring to light deep homologies between organisms. In dispensing with the classical notion of syntactic parameters, the authors argue that language variation, like biodiversity, is the result of experience and thus not a part of the language faculty in the narrow sense. They also examine the nature of this core language faculty, the primary categories with which it is concerned, the operations it performs, the syntactic constraints it poses on semantic interpretation and the role of phases in bridging the gap between brain and syntax. Written in language accessible to a wide audience, The Biolinguistic Enterprise will appeal to scholars and students of linguistics, cognitive science, biology, and natural language processing.
Download or read book Language from a Biological Point of View written by Cedric Boeckx and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume offers a collection of essays covering a broad range of areas where currently a rapprochement between linguistics and biology is actively being sought. Following a certain tradition, we call this attempt at a synthesis “biolinguistics.” The nine chapters (grouped into three parts: Language and Cognition, Language and the Brain, and Language and the Species) offer a comprehensive overview of issues at the forefront of biolinguistic research, such as language structure; language development; linguistic change and variation; language disorders and language processing; the cognitive, neural and genetic basis of linguistic knowledge; or the evolution of the Faculty of Language. Each contribution highlights exciting prospects for the field, but they also point to significant obstacles along the way. The main conclusion is that the age of theoretical exclusivity in Linguistics, much like the age of theoretical specificity, will have to end if interdisciplinarity is to reign and if biolinguistics is to flourish.
Download or read book Bio Linguistics written by T. Givón and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-12-19 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is human language an evolutionary adaptation? Is linguistics a natural science? These questions have bedeviled philosophers, philologists and linguists from Plato through Chomsky. Prof. Givón suggests that the answers fall naturally within an integrated study of living organisms.In this new work, Givón points out that language operates between aspects of both complex biological design and adaptive behavior. As in biology, the whole is an adaptive compromise to competing demands. Variation is the indispensable tool of learning, change and adaptation. The contrast between innateness and input-driven emergence is an interaction between genetically-coded and behaviorally-coded experience. In enlarging the cross-disciplinary domain, the book examines the parallels between language evolution and language diachrony. Sociality, cooperation and communication are shown to be rooted in a common evolutionary source, the kin-based hunting-and-gathering society of intimates. The book pays homage to the late Joseph Greenberg and his visionary integration of functional motivation, typological diversity and diachronic change.
Download or read book The Minimalist Program written by Fahad Rashed Al-Mutairi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of the Minimalist Program (MP), Noam Chomsky's most recent generative model of linguistics, has been highly influential over the last twenty years. It has had significant implications not only for the conduct of linguistic analysis itself, but also for our understanding of the status of linguistics as a science. The reflections and analyses in this book contain insights into the strengths and the weaknesses of the MP. These include: a clarification of the content of the Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT); a synthesis of Chomsky's linguistic and interdisciplinary discourses; and an analysis of the notion of optimal computation from conceptual, empirical and philosophical perspectives. This book will encourage graduate students and researchers in linguistics to reflect on the foundations of their discipline, and the interdisciplinary nature of the topics explored will appeal to those studying biolinguistics, neurolinguistics, the philosophy of language and other related disciplines.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics written by Cedric Boeckx and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biolinguistics involves the study of language from a broad perspective that embraces natural sciences, helping us better to understand the fundamentals of the faculty of language. This Handbook offers the most comprehensive state-of-the-field survey of the subject available. A team of prominent scholars working in a variety of disciplines is brought together to examine language development, language evolution and neuroscience, as well as providing overviews of the conceptual landscape of the field. The Handbook includes work at the forefront of contemporary research devoted to the evidence for a language instinct, the critical period hypothesis, grammatical maturation, bilingualism, the relation between mind and brain, and the role of natural selection in language evolution. It will be welcomed by graduate students and researchers in a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
Download or read book The Biology of Language written by Stanislaw Puppel and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1995-07-27 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together 15 papers on the evolution and origin of language. The authors approach the subject from various angles, exploring biological, cultural, psychological and linguistic factors. A wide variety of topics is discussed, such as animal communication, language acquisition, the essentialist-evolutionist debate, and genetic classification.
Download or read book Computational Phenotypes written by Sergio Balari and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about language as a species-typical trait of humans. It argues that language is not so exceptional after all, as according to the authors it is just the human version of a rather common and conservative organic system that they refer to as the Central Computational Complex.
Download or read book Why Only Us written by Robert C. Berwick and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick draw on recent developments in linguistic theory to offer an evolutionary account of language and our 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.
Download or read book The Biolinguistic Turn written by Joana Rosselló and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Language Down the Garden Path written by Montserrat Sanz and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-08-30 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas G. Bever's now iconic sentence, The horse raced past the barn fell, first appeared in his 1970 paper "The Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures". This 'garden path sentence', so-called because of the way it leads the reader or listener down the wrong parsing path, helped spawn the entire subfield of sentence processing. It has become the most often quoted element of a paper which spanned a wealth of research into the relationship between the grammatical system and language processing. Language Down the garden Path traces the lines of research that grew out of Bever's classic paper. Leading scientists review over 40 years of debates on the factors at play in language comprehension, production, and acquisition (the role of prediction, grammar, working memory, prosody, abstractness, syntax, and semantics mapping); the current status of universals and narrow syntax; and virtually every topic relevant in psycholinguistics since 1970. Written in an accessible and engaging style, the book will appeal to all those interested in understanding the questions that shaped, and are still shaping, this field and the ways in which linguists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists are seeking to answer them.
Download or read book The Biology and Evolution of Language written by Philip Lieberman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Biological Foundations of Linguistic Communication written by Thomas T. Ballmer and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1982-01-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second of two volumes the first volume being Waltraud Brennenstuhl's Control and Ability (P&B III:4) treating biocybernetical questions of language. This book starts out from an investigation of the (neuro-)biological relevancy of natural language from the point of view of grammar and the lexicon. Furthermore, the basic mechanisms of the self-organization of organisms in their environments are discussed, in so far as they lead to linguistic control and abilities.
Download or read book Toward an Evolutionary Biology of Language written by Philip Lieberman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-30 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
