This volume contains a contemporary, integrated description of the processes of language. These range from fast scales (fractions of a second) to slow ones (over a million years). The contributors, all experts in their fields, address language in the brain, production of sentences and dialogues, language learning, transmission and evolutionary processes that happen over centuries or millenia, the relation between language and genes, the origins of language, self-organization, and language competition and death. The book as a whole will help to show how processes at different scales affect each other, thus presenting language as a dynamic, complex and profoundly human phenomenon.
Table of Content
Introduction.-Neurobiology: Language by, in, through and across the brain.- Dialogue.- Learning: Statistical mechanisms in language acquisition.- Evolution: Language use and the evolution of languages.- Transitions: The evolution of linguistic replicators.- Genes: Interactions with language on three levels.- Language in Nature: On the evolutionary roots of a cultural phenomenon.- Self-Organization: Complex dynamical systems in the evolution of speech.- Environment: Language ecology and language death.- Conclusions.
About the author
Philippe Binder is a Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and a Faculty Fellow at the New England Complex Systems Institute. His areas of interest are chaos and complex systems, including multiscale analysis. He received his advanced training at Yale and Oxford. Like millions of people worldwide, he is trilingual.Kenny Smith is a Lecturer in the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, with interests in the evolution of communication, human language and the human capacity for language. He uses a mix of modeling and experimental techniques to address these questions.
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