Bøker i Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language-serien

Ljiljana Progovac proposes a gradualist, adaptationist approach to the evolution of syntax, subject to natural selection. The book provides a specific framework for studying the evolution of syntax, combining the fields of evolutionary biology, theoretical syntax, typology, neuroscience, and genetics.

Leading primatologists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, and linguists consider how language evolution can be understood by means of inference from the study of linked or analogous phenomena in language, animal behaviour, genetics, neurology, culture, and biology.

Leading primatologists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, and linguists consider how language evolution can be understood by means of inference from the study of linked or analogous phenomena in language, animal behaviour, genetics, neurology, culture, and biology.

This book presents a new perspective on the origins of language, and highlights the key role of social and cultural dynamics in driving language evolution. It considers, among other questions, the role of gesture in communication, mimesis, play, dance, and song in extant hunter-gatherer communities, and the time-frame for language evolution.

This book presents a new perspective on the origins of language, and highlights the key role of social and cultural dynamics in driving language evolution. It considers, among other questions, the role of gesture in communication, mimesis, play, dance, and song in extant hunter-gatherer communities, and the time-frame for language evolution.

This important and original account of the origin and evolution of speech integrates the latest research in speech, acquisition, and neurobiology, and includes the key observation that infants learning language reveal similar constraints to those acting on our distant ancestors. It is written in a clear style with minimal recourse to jargon.

Denis Bouchard looks at how the human brain got the capacity for language and how language evolved. He argues that language is a system of signs and considers how these elements first came together in the brain. His account of language origins offers insights into language and to constructions that have defied decades of linguistic analysis.

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.