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New Perspectives on the Origins of Language
The question of how language emerged is one of the most fascinating and difficult problems in science. In recent years, a strong resurgence of interest in the emergence of language from an evolutionary perspective has been helped by the convergence of approaches, methods, and ideas from several disciplines. The selection of contributions in this volume highlight scenarios of language origin and the prerequisites for a faculty of language based on biological, historical, social, cultural, and paleontological forays into the conditions that brought forth and favored language emergence, augmented by insights from sister disciplines. The chapters all reflect new speculation, discoveries and more refined research methods leading to a more focused understanding of the range of possibilities and how we might choose among them. There is much that we do not yet know, but the outlines of the path ahead are ever clearer.
[Studies in Language Companion Series, 144] 2013. xvi, 582 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 1 November 2013
Published online on 1 November 2013
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- Preface | pp. vii–viii
- Introduction | pp. ix–xvi
- Part 1. General perspectives and issues on language origins
- Historical, Darwinian, and current perspectives on the origin(s) of languageHenri Cohen | pp. 3–30
- The origin of language as seen by eighteenth-century philosophySylvian Auroux | pp. 31–52
- Cognitive and social aspects of language originsAlan Barnard | pp. 53–72
- Part 2. At the roots of language
- Reconstructed fossil vocal tracts and the production of speech: Phylogenetic and ontogenetic considerationsJean-Louis Boë, Jean Granat, Jean-Louis Heim, Pierre Badin, Guillaume Barbier, Guillaume Captier, Antoine Serrurier, Pascal Perrier, Nicolas Kielwasser and Jean-Luc Schwartz | pp. 75–128
- Paleoanthropology and languageIan Tattersall | pp. 129–146
- Material culture and languageBenoît Dubreuil and Christopher S. Henshilwood | pp. 147–170
- Gestural theory of the origins of languageMichael C. Corballis | pp. 171–184
- Part 3. Communication and language origins
- Primate communicationKlaus Zuberbühler | pp. 187–210
- FoxP2 and vocalizationStephanie White | pp. 211–236
- Brain lateralization and the emergence of languageNathalie Tzourio-Mazoyer and Cyril Courtin | pp. 237–256
- Sensorimotor constraints and the organization of sound patternsLucie Ménard | pp. 257–278
- Symbol grounding and the origin of language: From show to tellAlexandre Blondin Massé, Stevan Harnad, Olivier Picard and Bernard St-Louis | pp. 279–298
- Part 4. Linguistic views on language origins
- Sound patterns and conceptual content of the first wordsPeter F. MacNeilage | pp. 301–332
- Brave new wordsPierre J. Bancel and Alain Matthey de l'Etang | pp. 333–378
- On the origin of GrammarBernd Heine, Gunther Kaltenböck and Tania Kuteva | pp. 379–406
- Arbitrary signs and the emergence of languageDenis Bouchard | pp. 407–440
- On the relevance of pidgins and creoles in the debate on the origins of languageClaire Lefebvre | pp. 441–484
- Part 5. Computational modeling of language origins
- Modeling cultural evolution: Language acquisition as multiple-cue integrationMorten H. Christiansen | pp. 487–504
- How language emerges in situated embodied interactionsLuc Steels | pp. 505–532
- Emergence of communication and language in evolving robotsStefano Nolfi | pp. 533–554
- Evolving a bridge from praxis to languageMichael A. Arbib | pp. 555–578
- Index | pp. 579–582
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Roberge, Paul T.
Yoshinaga, Tsukasa, Kazunori Nozaki, Osamu Kondo & Akiyoshi Iida
Peters, Martin
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