BOOKS BY CATEGORY
Your Account
The Social Origins of Language
This book is currently unavailable – please contact us for further information.
Price
Quantity
€34.10
(To see other currencies, click on price)
Hardback
Add to basket  

MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

Main description:

How human language evolved from the need for social communicationThe origins of human language remain hotly debated. Despite growing appreciation of cognitive and neural continuity between humans and other animals, an evolutionary account of human language-in its modern form-remains as elusive as ever. The Social Origins of Language provides a novel perspective on this question and charts a new path toward its resolution.In the lead essay, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney draw on their decades-long pioneering research on monkeys and baboons in the wild to show how primates use vocalizations to modulate social dynamics. They argue that key elements of human language emerged from the need to decipher and encode complex social interactions. In other words, social communication is the biological foundation upon which evolution built more complex language.Seyfarth and Cheney's argument serves as a jumping-off point for responses by John McWhorter, Ljiljana Progovac, Jennifer E. Arnold, Christopher I. Petkov and Benjamin Wilson, and Peter Godfrey-Smith, each of whom draw on their respective expertise in linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Michael Platt provides an introduction, Seyfarth and Cheney a concluding essay. Ultimately, The Social Origins of Language offers thought-provoking viewpoints on how human language evolved.


PRODUCT DETAILS

ISBN-13: 9780691177236
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: November, 2017
Pages: 200
Weight: 652g
Availability: Not available (reason unspecified)
Subcategories: Neuroscience

CUSTOMER REVIEWS

Average Rating