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  1. (8 other versions)The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex.Charles Darwin - 1871 - New York: Plume. Edited by Carl Zimmer.
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  • The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language.Steven Pinker - 1994/2007 - Harper Perennial.
    In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from (...)
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  • The Minimalist Program.Noam Chomsky - 1995 - MIT Press.
    In these essays the minimalist approach to linguistic theory is formulated and progressively developed.
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  • Natural language and natural selection.Steven Pinker & Paul Bloom - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):707-27.
    Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers (...)
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  • Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution.Ray Jackendoff - 2002 - Oxford University Press UK.
    Presenting a landmark in linguistics and cognitive science, Ray Jackendoff proposes a new holistic theory of the relation between the sounds, structure, and meaning of language and their relation to mind and brain. Foundations of Language exhibits the most fundamental new thinking in linguistics since Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965—yet is readable, stylish, and accessible to a wide readership. Along the way it provides new insights on the evolution of language, thought, and communication.
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  • Language and Human Behavior.Derek Bickerton - 1995 - Seattle: University Washington Press.
    According to Bickerton, the behavioral sciences have failed to give an adequate account of human nature at least partly because of the conjunction and mutual reinforcement of two widespread beliefs: that language is simply a means of communication and that human intelligence is the result of the rapid growth and unusual size of human brains. Bickerton argues that each of the properties distinguishing human intelligence and consciousness from that of other animals can be shown to derive straightforwardly from properties of (...)
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  • Language, Its Nature, Development, and Origin.Leonard Bloomfield & Otto Jespersen - 1922 - American Journal of Philology 43 (4):370.
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  • Monkey semantics: two ‘dialects’ of Campbell’s monkey alarm calls.Philippe Schlenker, Emmanuel Chemla, Kate Arnold, Alban Lemasson, Karim Ouattara, Sumir Keenan, Claudia Stephan, Robin Ryder & Klaus Zuberbühler - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (6):439-501.
    We develop a formal semantic analysis of the alarm calls used by Campbell’s monkeys in the Tai forest and on Tiwai island —two sites that differ in the main predators that the monkeys are exposed to. Building on data discussed in Ouattara et al. :e7808, 2009a; PNAS 106: 22026–22031, 2009b and Arnold et al., we argue that on both sites alarm calls include the roots krak and hok, which can optionally be affixed with -oo, a kind of attenuating suffix; in (...)
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  • The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?Hauser Marc, D. Chomsky, Noam Fitch & W. Tecumseh - 2002 - Science 298 (22):1569-1579.
    We argue that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation. We suggest how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience. We submit that a distinction should be made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB)and in the narrow sense (FLN). FLB includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptual-intentional system, and the computational mechanisms for recursion, providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions (...)
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  • The Origins of Grammar: Language in the Light of Evolution Ii.James R. Hurford - 2011 - Oxford University Press.
    The second in James Hurford's acclaimed two-volume exploration of the biological evolution of language explores the evolutionary and cultural preconditions and consequences of humanity's great leap into language.
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  • The Emergence of Hierarchical Structure in Human Language.Shigeru Miyagawa, Robert C. Berwick & Kazuo Okanoya - 2013 - Frontiers in Psychology 4.
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  • Darwin's last word: How words changed cognition.Derek Bickerton - 2008 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (2):132-132.
    Although Penn et al. make a good case for the existence of deep cognitive discontinuity between humans and animals, they fail to explain how such a discontinuity could have evolved. It is proposed that until the advent of words, no species had mental representations over which higher-order relations could be computed.
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  • Compounds and commands in the evolution of human language.Ljiljana Progovac - forthcoming - Theoria Et Historia Scientiarum 9:49-70.
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  • Local Economy.Chris Collins - 1996 - MIT Press.
    "This monograph will provoke a great deal of constructive discussion and debate among syntacticians of all kinds. Collins has done an especially good job of making the work accessible to those of us who didn't "grow up" in Building 20." -- Molly Diesing, Cornell University Any theory of grammar must contain a lexicon, an interface with the mechanisms of production and perception (PF), and an interface with the interpretational system of semantics (LF). A traditional way to relate these three components (...)
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