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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics
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The Social Origins of Language (Hardcover)
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The Social Origins of Language (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language, 19
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This book offers an exciting new perspective on the origins of
language. Language is conceptualized as a collective invention, on
the model of writing or the wheel, and the book places social and
cultural dynamics at the centre of its evolution: language emerged
and further developed in human communities already suffused with
meaning and communication, mimesis, ritual, song and dance,
alloparenting, new divisions of labour and revolutionary changes in
social relations. The book thus challenges assumptions about the
causal relations between genes, capacities, social communication
and innovation: the biological capacities are taken to evolve
incrementally on the basis of cognitive plasticity, in a process
that recruits previous adaptations and fine-tunes them to serve
novel communicative ends. Topics include the ability brought about
by language to tell lies, that must have confronted our ancestors
with new problems of public trust; the dynamics of social-cognitive
co-evolution; the role of gesture and mimesis in linguistic
communication; studies of how monkeys and apes express their
feelings or thoughts; play, laughter, dance, song, ritual and other
social displays among extant hunter-gatherers; the social nature of
language acquisition and innovation; normativity and the emergence
of linguistic norms; the interaction of language and emotions; and
novel perspectives on the time-frame for language evolution. The
contributors are leading international scholars from linguistics,
anthropology, palaeontology, primatology, psychology, evolutionary
biology, artificial intelligence, archaeology, and cognitive
science.
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