Why Only Us: Language and Evolution
Why Only Us: Language and Evolution is backordered and will ship as soon as it is back in stock.
Couldn't load pickup availability
Genuine Products Guarantee
Genuine Products Guarantee
We guarantee 100% genuine products, and if proven otherwise, we will compensate you with 10 times the product's cost.
Delivery and Shipping
Delivery and Shipping
Products are generally ready for dispatch within 1 day and typically reach you in 3 to 5 days.
Sign up to be the first to know when it's here
Author: Chomsky, Noam
Brand: MIT Press
Color: Black
Edition: Reprint
Features:
- MIT
Binding: paperback
Format: illustrated
Number Of Pages: 224
Release Date: 12-05-2017
Part Number: 45786073
Details: 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.
EAN: 9780262533492
Package Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
Languages: English
