Edit Book :: Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 280
1976
Historical linguistics and the origin of language
Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 280, 1976
The membership of the Linguistic Society of Paris, which decreed the infamous ban on the topic of our present conference, consisted mainly of historical linguists, including some of my teachers and their teachers. 1 rather sympathize with their skepticism about the relevance ...
On the nature of language
Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 280, pages 46-57, 1976
Imagine a creature so magnificently endowed as to be in a position to regard humans rather in the way that we regard fruit flies. Faced with the problem of determining the nature of language, this creature might exploit a variety of means. It might undertake the study of ...
Induction, evolution and accountability
Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 280, pages 58--60, 1976
HARNAD: Let me just ask a question which everyone else who has been faithfully attending these sessions is surely burning to ask: If some rules you have described constitute universal constraints on all languages, yet they are not learned, nor are they somehow ...
Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 280, pages 61--72, 1976
For most of us, the insight that things can have names comes too early in life for it to leave a clear trace in our memory. In the case of Helen Keller, however, it came when she was nearly seven years old, at a much more developed stage of understanding and memory ...
From hand to mouth: Some critical stages in the evolution of language
Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 280, pages 445--455, 1976
In the evolution of linguistic behavior, as in the evolution of other traits, the actual sequence of events often proceeds by accretion and overlay upon prior developments such that a purely synchronic consideration of the end product can be considerably misleading as to ...