Dealing specifically with the origins and development of human
language, this book is based on a selection of materials from a
recent international conference held at the Center of
Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld in
Germany. The significance of the volume is that it testifies to
paradigmatic changes currently in progress. The changes are from
the typical emphasis on the syntactic properties of language and
cognition to an analysis of biological and cultural factors which
make these formal properties possible. The chapters provide
in-depth coverage of such topics as new theoretical foundations for
cognitive research, phylogenetic prerequisites and ontogenesis of
language, and environmental and cultural forces of development.
Some of the arguments and lines of research are relatively
well-known; others deal with completely new interdisciplinary
approaches. As a result, some of the authors' conclusions are in
part, rather counterintuitive, such as the hypothesis that language
as a system of formal symbolic transformations may be in fact a
very late phenomenon located in the sphere of socio-cultural and
not biological development. While highly debatable, this and other
hypotheses of the book may well define research questions for the
future.
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