EAN: 9780262533492

WHY ONLY US - ROBERT C BERWICK NOAM CHOMSKY KAR...

Berwick and Chomsky draw on recent developments in linguistic theory to offer an evolutionary
account of language and humans' remarkable  species-specific ability to acquire it. A loosely
connected collection of four essays that will fascinate anyone interested in the extraordinary
phenomenon of language.” —New York Review of Books We are born crying  but those cries signal
the first stirring of language. Within a year or so  infants master the sound system of their
language  a few years after that  they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable 
species-specific ability to acquire any human language—the language faculty”—raises important
biological questions about language  including how it has evolved. This book by two
distinguished scholars—a computer scientist and a linguist—addresses the enduring question of
the evolution of language. Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently the
evolutionary question could not be properly posed  because we did not have a clear idea of how
to define language” and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist
Program  developed by Chomsky and others  we know the key ingredients of language and can put
together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other
animals. Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language  which views
language as a particular object of the biological world  the computational efficiency of
language as a system of thought and understanding  the tension between Darwin's idea of gradual
change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language  and evidence
from nonhuman animals  in particular vocal learning in songbirds.

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