- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
- [UNTITLED]
- Preface and acknowledgements
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Introduction: The evolution of language
- Introduction to Part I: Insights from comparative animal behaviour
- Language or protolanguage? A review of the ape language literature
- Primate social cognition as a precursor to language
- Cooperative breeding and the evolution of vocal flexibility
- Gesture as the most flexible modality of primate communication
- Have we underestimated great ape vocal capacities?
- Bird song and language
- Vocal communication and cognition in cetaceans
- Evolution of communication and language: insights from parrots and songbirds
- Are other animals as smart as great apes? Do others provide better models for the evolution of speech or language?
- Introduction to Part II: The biology of language evolution: anatomy, genetics and neurology
- Innateness and human language: a biological perspective
- Evolutionary biological foundations of the origin of language: the co‐evolution of language and brain
- Genetic influences on language evolution: an evaluation of the evidence
- Not the neocortex alone: other brain structures also contribute to speech and language
- The mimetic origins of language
- Evolution of behavioural and brain asymmetries in primates
- Towards an evolutionary biology of language through comparative neuroanatomy
- Mirror systems: evolving imitation and the bridge from praxis to language
- Cognitive prerequisites for the evolution of indirect speech
- The anatomical and physiological basis of human speech production: adaptations and exaptations
- Introduction to Part III: The prehistory of language: when and why did language evolve?
- Molecular perspectives on human evolution
- The fossil record: evidence for speech in early hominins
- The genus <i>Homo</i> and the origins of ‘humanness’
- The Palaeolithic record
- Musicality and language
- Linguistic implications of the earliest personal ornaments
- Inferring modern language from ancient objects
- Natural selection‐itis
- The role of hominin mothers and infants in prelinguistic evolution
- Infant‐directed speech and language evolution
- Displays of vocal and verbal complexity: a fitness account of language, situated in development
- Tool‐dependent foraging strategies and the origin of language
- Gossip and the social origins of language
- Social conditions for the evolutionary emergence of language
- Introduction to Part IV: Launching language: the development of a linguistic species
- The role of evolution in shaping the human language faculty
- The origins of meaning
- The origins of language in manual gestures
- From sensorimotor categories and pantomime to grounded symbols and propositions
- The symbol concept
- Words came first: adaptations for word‐learning
- The emergence of phonetic form
- The evolution of phonology
- The evolution of morphology
- What is syntax?
- The origins of syntactic language
- The evolutionary relevance of more and less complex forms of language
- Protolanguage
- The emergence of language, from a biolinguistic point of view
- Introduction to Part V: Language change, creation, and transmission in modern humans
- Grammaticalization theory as a tool for reconstructing language evolution
- Domain‐general processes as the basis for grammar
- Pidgins, creoles, and the creation of language
- What modern‐day gesture can tell us about language evolution
- Monogenesis or polygenesis: a single ancestral language for all humanity?
- Prehistoric population contact and language change
- Why formal models are useful for evolutionary linguists
- Language is an adaptive system: the role of cultural evolution in the origins of structure
- Robotics and embodied agent modelling of the evolution of language
- Self‐organization and language evolution
- Statistical learning and language acquisition
- A solution to the logical problem of language evolution: language as an adaptation to the human brain
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Abstract and Keywords
The basic processes of syntax are categorized into four main categories. These categories include a process for assembling words into hierarchical structures, processes for determining the boundaries of segments within such structures, and processes for moving segments within such structures and lastly, processes for determining the reference of elements that are not phonetically expressed. The syntax characterizes all languages, whether signed or spoken, in a highly developed form but it is entirely absent both from the productions of “language-trained” animals and the natural communication systems of other species. Children first acquire nouns, then a few verbs, and only later begin to add other word classes. The acquisition of grammatical items follows some time after the emergence of recognizable syntactic structures, even if those structures do not normally begin to appear until age two or thereabouts, and the earliest stages of development constitute an example of protolanguage, rather than full human language. The emergence of these structures is typically quite rapid with several types of both simple and complex sentence appearing within a few weeks. Creole languages are really a special case of child language development, representing what the language faculty produces when structured input is severely reduced.
Keywords: syntax, protolanguage, human language, creole languages, child language
Derek Bickerton (PhD Cambridge) is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii. He is best known for his work on creole languages, including the controversial Bioprogram Hypothesis, and on the evolution of language. His publications in the latter field include Language and species (University of Chicago Press, 1990), Adam's tongue (Hill & Wang, 2009), and Biological foundations and origins of syntax (MIT Press, 2009, edited with Eörs Szathmáry).
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- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
- [UNTITLED]
- Preface and acknowledgements
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Introduction: The evolution of language
- Introduction to Part I: Insights from comparative animal behaviour
- Language or protolanguage? A review of the ape language literature
- Primate social cognition as a precursor to language
- Cooperative breeding and the evolution of vocal flexibility
- Gesture as the most flexible modality of primate communication
- Have we underestimated great ape vocal capacities?
- Bird song and language
- Vocal communication and cognition in cetaceans
- Evolution of communication and language: insights from parrots and songbirds
- Are other animals as smart as great apes? Do others provide better models for the evolution of speech or language?
- Introduction to Part II: The biology of language evolution: anatomy, genetics and neurology
- Innateness and human language: a biological perspective
- Evolutionary biological foundations of the origin of language: the co‐evolution of language and brain
- Genetic influences on language evolution: an evaluation of the evidence
- Not the neocortex alone: other brain structures also contribute to speech and language
- The mimetic origins of language
- Evolution of behavioural and brain asymmetries in primates
- Towards an evolutionary biology of language through comparative neuroanatomy
- Mirror systems: evolving imitation and the bridge from praxis to language
- Cognitive prerequisites for the evolution of indirect speech
- The anatomical and physiological basis of human speech production: adaptations and exaptations
- Introduction to Part III: The prehistory of language: when and why did language evolve?
- Molecular perspectives on human evolution
- The fossil record: evidence for speech in early hominins
- The genus <i>Homo</i> and the origins of ‘humanness’
- The Palaeolithic record
- Musicality and language
- Linguistic implications of the earliest personal ornaments
- Inferring modern language from ancient objects
- Natural selection‐itis
- The role of hominin mothers and infants in prelinguistic evolution
- Infant‐directed speech and language evolution
- Displays of vocal and verbal complexity: a fitness account of language, situated in development
- Tool‐dependent foraging strategies and the origin of language
- Gossip and the social origins of language
- Social conditions for the evolutionary emergence of language
- Introduction to Part IV: Launching language: the development of a linguistic species
- The role of evolution in shaping the human language faculty
- The origins of meaning
- The origins of language in manual gestures
- From sensorimotor categories and pantomime to grounded symbols and propositions
- The symbol concept
- Words came first: adaptations for word‐learning
- The emergence of phonetic form
- The evolution of phonology
- The evolution of morphology
- What is syntax?
- The origins of syntactic language
- The evolutionary relevance of more and less complex forms of language
- Protolanguage
- The emergence of language, from a biolinguistic point of view
- Introduction to Part V: Language change, creation, and transmission in modern humans
- Grammaticalization theory as a tool for reconstructing language evolution
- Domain‐general processes as the basis for grammar
- Pidgins, creoles, and the creation of language
- What modern‐day gesture can tell us about language evolution
- Monogenesis or polygenesis: a single ancestral language for all humanity?
- Prehistoric population contact and language change
- Why formal models are useful for evolutionary linguists
- Language is an adaptive system: the role of cultural evolution in the origins of structure
- Robotics and embodied agent modelling of the evolution of language
- Self‐organization and language evolution
- Statistical learning and language acquisition
- A solution to the logical problem of language evolution: language as an adaptation to the human brain
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index