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This study treats human language as the manifestation of a faculty of the mind, which is seen as a mental organ whose nature is determined by human biology and whose functional properties should be explored as physiology explores the functional properties of physical organs. The book surveys the nature of the language faculty in its various aspects: the systems of sounds, words, and syntax, the development of language in the child and historically, what is known about its relation to the brain.
This volume, one of the few devoted to Celtic syntax, makes an
important contribution to the description of Celtic, focusing on
the ordering of major constituents, pronouns, inflection,
compounding, and iode-switching. The articles also address current
issues in linguistic theory so that Celticists and theoretical
linguists alike find this book valuable.
Dr. Dolittle-and many students of animal communication-are wrong:
animals cannot use language. This fascinating book explains why.
Can animals be taught a human language and use it to communicate?
Or is human language unique to human beings, just as many complex
behaviors of other species are uniquely theirs? This engrossing
book explores communication and cognition in animals and humans
from a linguistic point of view and asserts that animals are not
capable of acquiring or using human language. Stephen R. Anderson
explains what is meant by communication, the difference between
communication and language, and the essential characteristics of
language. Next he examines a variety of animal communication
systems, including bee dances, frog vocalizations, bird songs, and
alarm calls and other vocal, gestural, and olfactory communication
among primates. Anderson then compares these to human language,
including signed languages used by the deaf. Arguing that attempts
to teach human languages or their equivalents to the great apes
have not succeeded in demonstrating linguistic abilities in
nonhuman species, he concludes that animal communication
systems-intriguing and varied though they may be-do not include all
the essential properties of human language. Animals can
communicate, but they can't talk.
This study treats human language as the manifestation of a faculty of the mind, which is seen as a mental organ whose nature is determined by human biology and whose functional properties should be explored as physiology explores the functional properties of physical organs. The book surveys the nature of the language faculty in its various aspects: the systems of sounds, words, and syntax, the development of language in the child and historically, what is known about its relation to the brain.
In A-Morphous Morphology, Stephen Anderson presents a theory of
word structure which relates to a full generative grammar of
language. He holds word structure to be the result of interacting
principles from a number of grammatical areas, and thus not
localized in a single morphological component. Dispensing with
classical morphemes, the theory instead treats morphology as a
matter of rule-governed relations, minimizing the non-phonological
internal structure assigned to words and eliminating
morphologically motivated boundary elements. Professor Anderson
makes the further claim that the properties of individual lexical
items are not visible to, or manipulated by, the rules of the
syntax, and assimilates to morphology special clitic phenomena.
A-Morphous Morphology maintains significant distinctions between
inflection, derivation, and compounding, in terms of their place
ina grammar. It also contains discussion of the implications of
this new A-Morphous position analysis of word structure.
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