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

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910464477903321
• Autore: Bickerton Derek
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Cambridge, Massachusetts : , : Harvard University Press, , 2014; ©2014
• ISBN: 0-674-72853-X; 0-674-72852-1
• Edizione: [Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (280 p.)
• Disciplina: 401/.9
• Soggetti: Language and languages; Human evolution - Psychological aspects; Language acquisition - Psychological aspects; Cognitive grammar; Psycholinguistics; Electronic books.
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: 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
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.