Download or read book The Ecology of Language Evolution written by Salikoko S. Mufwene and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-08-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major new work explores the development of creoles and other new languages, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues they raise for genetic linguistics. Written by an internationally renowned linguist, the book surveys a wide range of examples of changes in the structure, function and vitality of languages, and suggests that similar ecologies have played the same kinds of roles in all cases of language evolution. The Ecology of Language Evolution will be welcomed by students and researchers in sociolinguistics, creolistics, theoretical linguistics and theories of evolution.
Download or read book The Ecology of Language Evolution written by Salikoko S. Mufwene and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-08-30 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major new work explores the development of creoles and other new languages, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues they raise for genetic linguistics. Written by an internationally renowned linguist, the book surveys a wide range of examples of changes in the structure, function and vitality of languages, and suggests that similar ecologies have played the same kinds of roles in all cases of language evolution. The Ecology of Language Evolution will be welcomed by students and researchers in sociolinguistics, creolistics, theoretical linguistics and theories of evolution.
Download or read book Linguistic Ecology and Language Contact written by Ralph Ludwig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book revisits and updates the concept of linguistic ecology, outlining applications to a variety of contact situations worldwide.
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.
Download or read book Language Evolution written by Salikoko S. Mufwene and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-03-31 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Languages are constantly changing. New words are added to the English language every year, either borrowed or coined, and there is often railing against the 'decline' of the language by public figures. Some languages, such as French and Finnish, have academies to protect them against foreign imports. Yet languages are species-like constructs, which evolve naturally over time. Migration, imperialism, and globalization have blurred boundaries between many of them, producing new ones (such as creoles) and driving some to extinction. This book examines the processes by which languages change, from the macroecological perspective of competition and natural selection. In a series of chapters, Salikoko Mufwene examines such themes as: - natural selection in language - the actuation question and the invisible hand that drives evolution - multilingualism and language contact - language birth and language death - the emergence of Creoles and Pidgins - the varying impacts of colonization and globalization on language vitality This comprehensive examination of the organic evolution of language will be essential reading for graduate and senior undergraduate students, and for researchers on the social dynamics of language variation and change, language vitality and death, and even the origins of linguistic diversity.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages written by Peter K. Austin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is generally agreed that about 7,000 languages are spoken across the world today and at least half may no longer be spoken by the end of this century. This state-of-the-art Handbook examines the reasons behind this dramatic loss of linguistic diversity, why it matters, and what can be done to document and support endangered languages. The volume is relevant not only to researchers in language endangerment, language shift and language death, but to anyone interested in the languages and cultures of the world. It is accessible both to specialists and non-specialists: researchers will find cutting-edge contributions from acknowledged experts in their fields, while students, activists and other interested readers will find a wealth of readable yet thorough and up-to-date information.
Download or read book The Ecology of Language written by Einar Ingvald Haugen and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Evolutionary Emergence of Language written by Chris Knight and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-11-20 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language has no counterpart in the animal world. Unique to Homo sapiens, it appears inseparable from human nature. But how, when and why did it emerge? The contributors to this volume - linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others - adopt a modern Darwinian perspective which offers a bold synthesis of the human and natural sciences. As a feature of human social intelligence, language evolution is driven by biologically anomalous levels of social cooperation. Phonetic competence correspondingly reflects social pressures for vocal imitation, learning, and other forms of social transmission. Distinctively human social and cultural strategies gave rise to the complex syntactical structure of speech. This book, presenting language as a remarkable social adaptation, testifies to the growing influence of evolutionary thinking in contemporary linguistics. It will be welcomed by all those interested in human evolution, evolutionary psychology, linguistic anthropology, and general linguistics.
Download or read book Evolutionary Ecology written by and published by Eric R. Pianka. This book was released on 2011 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally, an eBook version of this now classic textbook has become available. Largely based on the 6th edition, published in 2000, this version is competitively priced. Written by well-known ecologist Eric R. Pianka, a student of the late Robert H. MacArthur, this timeless treatment of evolutionary ecology, first published in 1974, will endure for many decades to come. Basic principles of ecology are framed in an evolutionary perspective.
Download or read book The Symbolic Species The Co evolution of Language and the Brain written by Terrence W. Deacon and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1998-04-17 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A work of enormous breadth, likely to pleasantly surprise both general readers and experts."—New York Times Book Review This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions. Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.
Download or read book The Ecology of Language Evolution written by Salikoko S. Mufwene and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-08-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major new work explores the development of creoles and other new languages, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues they raise for genetic linguistics. Written by an internationally renowned linguist, the book surveys a wide range of examples of changes in the structure, function and vitality of languages, and suggests that similar ecologies have played the same kinds of roles in all cases of language evolution. The Ecology of Language Evolution will be welcomed by students and researchers in sociolinguistics, creolistics, theoretical linguistics and theories of evolution.
Download or read book Ecology and Evolution of Flowers written by Lawrence D. Harder and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006-11-30 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Floral biology, floral function, sexual systems, diversification.
Download or read book Why Only Us written by Robert C. Berwick and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-05-12 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation written by Dolph Schluter and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-08-31 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adaptive radiation is the evolution of diversity within a rapidly multiplying lineage. It can cause a single ancestral species to differentiate into an impressively vast array of species inhabiting a variety of environments. Much of life's diversity has arisen during adaptive radiations. Some of the most famous recent examples include the East African cichlid fishes, the Hawaiian silverswords, and of course, Darwin's Gal--aacute--;pagos finches,. This book evaluates the causes of adaptive radiation. It focuses on the 'ecological' theory of adaptive radiation, a body of ideas that began with Darwin and was developed through the early part of the 20th Century. This theory proposes that phenotypic divergence and speciation in adaptive radiation are caused ultimately by divergent natural selection arising from differences in environment and competition between species. In The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation the author re-evaluates the ecological theory, along with its most significant extensions and challenges, in the light of all the recent evidence. This important book is the first full exploration of the causes of adaptive radiation to be published for decades, written by one of the world's best young evolutionary biologists.
Download or read book Ecological Speciation written by Patrik Nosil and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origin of biological diversity, via the formation of new species, can be inextricably linked to adaptation to the ecological environment. Specifically, ecological processes are central to the formation of new species when barriers to gene flow (reproductive isolation) evolve between populations as a result of ecologically-based divergent natural selection. This process of 'ecological speciation' has seen a large body of particularly focused research in the last 10-15 years, and a review and synthesis of the theoretical and empirical literature is now timely. The book begins by clarifying what ecological speciation is, its alternatives, and the predictions that can be used to test for it. It then reviews the three components of ecological speciation and discusses the geography and genomic basis of the process. A final chapter highlights future research directions, describing the approaches and experiments which might be used to conduct that future work. The ecological and genetic literature is integrated throughout the text with the goal of shedding new insight into the speciation process, particularly when the empirical data is then further integrated with theory.
Download or read book Ecology and Evolution of Communities written by Martin L. Cody and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1975 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evolution of species abundance and diversity; Competitive strategies of resource allocation; Community structure; Outlook.
Download or read book Big Questions in Ecology and Evolution written by Thomas N. Sherratt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an introduction to a range of fundamental questions that have taxed evolutionary biologists and ecologists for decades. All of the questions posed have at least a partial solution, all have seen exciting breakthroughs in recent years, yet many of the explanations have been hotly debated.
