Download or read book Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution written by Michael Pleyer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-28 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evolution of language has developed into a large research field. Two questions are particularly relevant for this strand of research: firstly, how did the human capacity for language emerge? And secondly, which processes of cultural evolution are involved both in the evolution of human language from non-linguistic communication and in the continued evolution of human languages? Much research on language evolution that addresses these two questions is highly compatible with the usage-based approach to language pursued in cognitive linguistics. Focusing on key topics such as comparing human language and animal communication, experimental approaches to language evolution, and evolutionary dynamics in language, this Element gives an overview of the current state-of-the-art of language evolution research and discusses how cognitive linguistics and research on the evolution of language can cross-fertilise each other. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics written by Wen Xu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-04 with total page 792 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics provides a comprehensive introduction and essential reference work to cognitive linguistics. It encompasses a wide range of perspectives and approaches, covering all the key areas of cognitive linguistics and drawing on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in pragmatics, discourse analysis, biolinguistics, ecolinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, neuroscience, language pedagogy, and translation studies. The forty-three chapters, written by international specialists in the field, cover four major areas: • Basic theories and hypotheses, including cognitive semantics, cognitive grammar, construction grammar, frame semantics, natural semantic metalanguage, and word grammar; • Central topics, including embodiment, image schemas, categorization, metaphor and metonymy, construal, iconicity, motivation, constructionalization, intersubjectivity, grounding, multimodality, cognitive pragmatics, cognitive poetics, humor, and linguistic synaesthesia, among others; • Interfaces between cognitive linguistics and other areas of linguistic study, including cultural linguistics, linguistic typology, figurative language, signed languages, gesture, language acquisition and pedagogy, translation studies, and digital lexicography; • New directions in cognitive linguistics, demonstrating the relevance of the approach to social, diachronic, neuroscientific, biological, ecological, multimodal, and quantitative studies. The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is an indispensable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and for all researchers working in this area.

Download or read book Ten Lectures on Cognitive Evolutionary Linguistics written by Arie Verhagen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceiving of language and cognition as biological phenomena, these lectures provide and illustrate a coherent, integrated theoretical framework for studying essentially any aspect of language systems, language use, language change, and language evolution.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics written by Dirk Geeraerts and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2010-06-09 with total page 1366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With 49 chapters written by experts in the field, this reference volume authoritatively covers cognitive linguistics, from basic concepts and models to practical applications.

Download or read book The Evolution of Language written by Erica A Cartmill and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2014-03-21 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume comprises refereed papers and abstracts of the 10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANGX), held in Vienna on 14–17th April 2014. As the leading international conference in the field, the biennial EVOLANG meeting is characterised by an invigorating, multidisciplinary approach to the origins and evolution of human language, and brings together researchers from many subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, biology, cognitive science, computer science, genetics, linguistics, neuroscience, palaeontology, primatology and psychology. For this 10th conference, the proceedings will include a special perspectives section featuring prominent researchers reflecting on the history of the conference and its impact on the field of language evolution since the inaugural EVOLANG conference in 1996. Contents:Diachronic Processes in Language as Signaling Under Conflicting Interests (Christopher Ahern and Robin Clark)Syntactic Development in Phenotypic Space (Lluís Barceló-Coblijn and Antoni Gomila Benejam)Linguistic Animals: Understanding Language Through a Comparative Approach (Piera Filippi)Social Interaction Influences the Evolution of Cognitive Biases for Language (Seán G Roberts, Bill Thompson and Kenny Smith)Symbol Extension and Meaning Generation in Cultural Evolution for Displaced Communication (Kaori Tamura and Takashi Hashimoto)The Origins of Combinatorial Communication (Richard A Blythe and Thomas C Scott-Phillips)Social Origins of Rhythm? Synchrony and Temporal Regularity in Human Vocalization (Daniel L Bowling, Christian T Herbst and W Tecumseh Fitch)The Effect of Pitch Enhancement on Spoken Language Acquisition (Piera Filippi, Bruno Gingras and W Tecumseh Fitch)Bow-and-Arrow Technology: Mapping Human Cognition and Perhaps Language Evolution (Alexandra Regina Kratschmer, Miriam Noël Haidle and Marlize Lombard)The Cognitive Underspinnings of Metaphor as the Driving Force of Language Evolution (Andrew D M Smith and Stefan H Höfler)Model Fitting and Prediction for Language Evolution (Bill Thompson and Vanessa Ferdinand)and other papers Readership: Graduate students, academics and researchers working on the evolution of language, artificial intelligence, genetics and psychology. Key Features:Keywords:Evolution;Language;Evolang;Origin;Protolanguage

Download or read book Reflections on language evolution written by Cedric Boeckx and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay reflects on the fact that as we learn more about the biological underpinnings of our language faculty, the dominant evolutionary narrative coming out of the linguistic tradition most explicitly oriented towards biology ("biolinguistics") appears increasingly implausible. This text offers ways of opening up linguistic inquiry and fostering interdisciplinarity, taking advantage of new opportunities to provide quantitative, testable hypotheses concerning the complex evolutionary path that led to the modern human language faculty. The essay is structured around three main themes: (i) renewed appreciation for the comparative method applied to cognitive questions, leading to the identification of elementary but fundamental abstractions in non-linguistic species relevant to language; (ii) awareness of the conceptual gaps between disciplines, and the need to carefully link genotype and phenotype without bypassing any "intermediate" levels of description (certainly not the brain); and (iii) adoption of a "philosophical" outlook that puts the complexity of biological entities front and center.

Download or read book Approaches to the Evolution of Language written by James R. Hurford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-17 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Cognitive Linguistics written by Vyvyan Evans and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-24 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A general introduction to the area of theoretical linguistics known as cognitive linguistics, this textbook provides up-to-date coverage of all areas of the field, including recent developments within cognitive semantics (such as Primary Metaphor Theory, Conceptual Blending Theory, and Principled Polysemy), and cognitive approaches to grammar (such as Radical Construction Grammar and Embodied Construction Grammar). The authors offer clear, critical evaluations of competing formal approaches within theoretical linguistics. For example, cognitive linguistics is compared to Generative Grammar and Relevance Theory. In the selection of material and in the presentations, the authors have aimed for a balanced perspective. Part II, Cognitive Semantics, and Part III, Cognitive Approaches to Grammar, have been created to be read independently. The authors have kept in mind that different instructors and readers will need to use the book in different ways tailored to their own goals. The coverage is suitable for a number of courses. While all topics are presented in terms accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, and modern languages, this work is sufficiently comprehensive and detailed to serve as a reference work for scholars who wish to gain a better understanding of cognitive linguistics.

Download or read book Language Evolution written by Morten H. Christiansen and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2003-07-24 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it that makes us human? This is one of the most challenging and important questions we face. Our species' defining characteristic is language - we appear to be unique in the natural world in having such an incredibly open-ended system for putting thoughts into words. If we are to truly understand ourselves as a species we must understand the origins of this strange and unique ability. To do so, we need to answer some of the most intriguing questions in contemporary scientific research: Where did language come from? How did it evolve? Why are we unique in possessing it? This book, for the first time, brings together the leading thinkers who are trying to unlock the puzzle of language evolution. Here we see the latest ideas and theories from fields as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, artificial life, biology, cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology. In a series of seventeen well-written and accessible chapters we get an unrivalled view of the state of the art in this exciting area. Current controversies are revealed and new perspectives uncovered, in a clear and readable guide to the latest theories. This collection marks a major step forward in our quest to understand the origins and evolution of human language. In doing so it sheds new light on the process of evolution, the workings of the brain, the structure of language, and - most importantly - what it means to be human. Language Evolution is essential reading for researchers and students working in the areas covered, and has been used as a textbook for courses in the field. It will also attract the general reader who wants to know more about this fascinating subject.

Download or read book Ten Lectures on Language Culture and Mind written by Chris Sinha and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this interdisciplinary collection of lectures, Chris Sinha presents a uniquely cultural, developmental and evolutionary approach to cognitive linguistics. Topics range from language in children’s play, through cultural conceptualizations of time, to philosophical and linguistic relativism.

Download or read book Language Evolution and the Brain written by James W. MINETTinett and published by City University of HK Press. This book was released on 2009-07-07 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A number of research groups around the world have begun to study how the brain acquires and processes language, but we still know comparatively little about it. Many such groups work on very specific, often narrow, problems. This approach is certainly necessary, but a broad perspective can be helpful, if not essential, too. This volume consists of an important collection of papers presented at the Seminar on Language, Evolution, and the Brain (SLEB), hosted by the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Kyoto, Japan, bringing together distinguished researchers with background in cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics, robotics, physics, etc. Major topics discussed here include: Creoles and pidgins, and their implications regarding language evolution. Quantitative analysis and modeling of various aspects of language evolution, including the evolution of lexical items and color terms, the emergence of linguistics categories, and the dynamics of language competition. The evolution of the human brain, and how that relates to language evolution. The evolution and the role of mirror neurons in both humans and non-humans. Evidence that the influence of language on color perception (an example of the Whorf Effect) is stronger for the right visual field than the left. This volume provides a multi-faceted discussion of how language evolves and shapes the brain that may entice university students and researchers to delve into this field with more background and curiosity.

Download or read book Cognitive Linguistics for Linguists written by Margaret E. Winters and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers an introduction to cognitive linguistics, written by authors who were engaged in the field from its beginnings. It starts by reviewing these early studies and provides an overview of the sources and conceptual underpinnings of the theory. This is followed by a description of how cognitive linguistics has been (and continues to be) applied in all subcomponents of language study. From the point of view of the history of Linguistics, it presents the evolution of the theory over time in a range of directions, including its view of the nature of Language itself, as well as how it is acquired. The final chapter provides an overview of relatively new approaches, in particular those which are provoking a significant challenge to the generative account.

Download or read book The Evolution of Language Out of Pre language written by Talmy Givón and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Historical Cognitive Linguistics written by Margaret E. Winters and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses aspects of language change using the semantics-based theory of Cognitive Linguistics, and primarily focuses on the lexicon and metaphor, the semantics of syntax, and language evolution. The papers that make up the collection consider current approaches to questions of the mental organization of meaning and its expression, and point toward future research.

Download or read book Reflections on language evolution written by Cedric Boeckx and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-10-18 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay reflects on the fact that as we learn more about the biological underpinnings of our language faculty, the dominant evolutionary narrative coming out of the linguistic tradition most explicitly oriented towards biology ("biolinguistics") appears increasingly implausible. This text offers ways of opening up linguistic inquiry and fostering interdisciplinarity, taking advantage of new opportunities to provide quantitative, testable hypotheses concerning the complex evolutionary path that led to the modern human language faculty. The essay is structured around three main themes: (i) renewed appreciation for the comparative method applied to cognitive questions, leading to the identification of elementary but fundamental abstractions in non-linguistic species relevant to language; (ii) awareness of the conceptual gaps between disciplines, and the need to carefully link genotype and phenotype without bypassing any "intermediate" levels of description (certainly not the brain); and(iii) adoption of a "philosophical" outlook that puts the complexity of biological entities front and center.

Download or read book The Handbook of Historical Linguistics Volume II written by Richard D. Janda and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entirely new follow-up volume providing a detailed account of numerous additional issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics. This brand-new, second volume of The Handbook of Historical Linguistics is a complement to the well-established first volume first published in 2003. It includes extended content allowing uniquely comprehensive coverage of the study of language(s) over time. Though it adds fresh perspectives on several topics previously treated in the first volume, this Handbook focuses on extensions of diachronic linguistics beyond those key issues. This Handbook provides readers with studies of language change whose perspectives range from comparisons of large open vs. small closed corpora, via creolistics and linguistic contact in general, to obsolescence and endangerment of languages. Written by leading scholars in their respective fields, new chapters are offered on matters such as the origin of language, evidence from language for reconstructing human prehistory, invocations of language present in studies of language past, benefits of linguistic fieldwork for historical investigation, ways in which not only biological evolution but also field biology can serve as heuristics for research into the rise and spread of linguistic innovations, and more. Moreover, it: offers novel and broadened content complementing the earlier volume so as to provide the fullest available overview of a wholly engrossing field includes 23 all-new contributed chapters, treating some familiar themes from fresh perspectives but mostly covering entirely new topics features expanded discussion of material from language families other than Indo-European provides a multiplicity of views from numerous specialists in linguistic diachrony. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, researchers and professional linguists, as well as all those interested in the history of particular languages and the history of language more generally.

Download or read book The Evolution of Language written by W. Tecumseh Fitch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.