More than nature needs : language, mind, and evolution / Derek Bickerton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bickerton, Derek.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Language and languages.

Human evolution--Psychological aspects.

Human evolution.

Language acquisition--Psychological aspects.

Language acquisition.

Cognitive grammar.

Psycholinguistics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (280 p.)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

How did humans acquire cognitive capacities far more powerful than any hunting-and-gathering primate needed to survive? Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder with Darwin of evolutionary theory, set humans outside normal evolution. Darwin thought use of language might have shaped our sophisticated brains, but this remained an intriguing guess--until now. Combining state-of-the-art research with forty years of writing and thinking about language origins, Derek Bickerton convincingly resolves a crucial problem that biology and the cognitive sciences have systematically avoided. Before language or advanced cognition could be born, humans had to escape the prison of the here and now in which animal thinking and communication were both trapped. Then the brain's self-organization, triggered by words, assembled mechanisms that could link not only words but the concepts those words symbolized--a process that had to be under conscious control. Those mechanisms could be used equally for thinking and for talking, but the skeletal structures they produced were suboptimal for the hearer and had to be elaborated. Starting from humankind's remotest past, More than Nature Needs transcends nativist thesis and empiricist antithesis by presenting a revolutionary synthesis that shows specifically and in a principled way how and why the synthesis came about.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

CHAPTER 1. Wallace’s Problem

CHAPTER 2. Generative Theory

CHAPTER 3. The “Specialness” of Humans

CHAPTER 4. From Animal Communication to Protolanguage

CHAPTER 5. Universal Grammar

CHAPTER 6. Variation and Change

CHAPTER 7. Language “Acquisition”

CHAPTER 8. Creolization

CHAPTER 9. Homo Sapiens Loquens

References

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Pilot project,eBook available to selected US libraries only

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780674728530

067472853X

9780674728523

0674728521

OCLC:

867049995