Description
Evolutionary linguistics - an approach to language study that takes into account our origins and development as a species - has rapidly developed in recent years. Informed by the latest findings in evolutionary theory, this book sets language within the context of human biology and development, taking ideas from fields such as psychology, neurology, biology, anthropology, genetics and cognitive science. By factoring an evolutionary and developmental perspective into the theoretical framework, the author replaces old questions - such as 'what is language?' - with new questions, such as 'how do living beings become 'languaging' living beings?' Linguistics and Evolution offers readers the first rethinking of an introductory approach to linguistics since Leonard Bloomfield's 1933 Language. It will be of significant interest to advanced students and researchers in all subfields of linguistics, and the related fields of biology, anthropology, cognitive science and psychology.
Chapter
Languaging as an orienting behavior
2 Developmental systems theory
Maturana’s “Scientific and Philosophical Theories”
A parade of linguistic phenomena to be explained
Eliminating the nature/nurture dichotomy once and for all
Applied Oyama: Paul Griffiths’ What Emotions Really Are
Emotion as an affect program
Socially constructed emotions
Higher cognitive motivational complexes
Beginning the search for linguistic interactants
3 A twist in the cognitive turn
Opening on to the interior
Where is language/ing located in the individual?
A second historiographic review: the brain in twentieth-century linguistics
Part II A developmental systems linguistics
4 Evolutionary scenarios I: the standard story and the self-reproductionist script
Continuity versus discontinuity: a multilayered dichotomy
Continuing continuity versus discontinuity
Continuous or discontinuous with respect to what?
The self-reproductionist script
A third historiographic review: done with Descartes
5 Evolutionary scenarios II: the emerging story and the self-realizationist script
The second neo-Darwinian synthesis
The self-realizationist script
A continuist script for languaging
Living our cognitive domains
A range of evolutionary scenarios
The nineteenth-century linguistic heritage
Evolutionary neurobiology
6 The ontogenic script begins
Getting off the ground and into the languaging loop
Ontogeny: the very beginnings
What is presupposed by the term languaging living being?
What is the length of the developmental linguistic system in the individual’s life?
A final historiographic review: thought and language
Thought precedes language
Language precedes thought
Thought and language are contemporaneous
A case in point: the tight-fit/loose-fit distinction
7 The ontogenic script continues
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
8 Revisit: Skinner, Chomsky and construction grammar
The impoverishment of the stimulus
From Bloomfield to Chomsky
The cognitive turn and (cognitive) construction grammar
9 Revise: introductory linguistics textbooks
The problem: theoretical disintegration
The solution: stepping up to the Austinian challenge
What is the basic unit of analysis?
What is the purpose of issuing utterances?
What phenomena are properly included in a linguistics derived from speech act theory?
What is the most central and/or most primary feature of languaging derived from a speech act framework?
Austin gets the last word
Linguistics and Evolution
：A Developmental Approach
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