The First Word The Search for the Origins of Language

by Kenneally, Christine

• ISBN13: 9780143113744
• ISBN10: 0143113747
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-05-27
• Publisher: Penguin Books

Summary

Language, viewed from any perspective, remains almost an ineffable miracle: the tool that liberated our early ancestors from the realm of the apes, the tool that gave rise to history, the tool that enables us even to imagine such things. But where did language come from? In this, the first book to trace the exciting breakthroughs of this new field, Christine Kenneally shows how a few brilliant scholars took evolutionary linguistics from wild speculation into hard science and brought us face-to-face with the origins of that most human of characteristics. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Christine Kenneally was born in Australia and received her Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She has written about language, science, and culture for publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Scientific American, and Slate.

Table of Contents

Prelude	p. 1
Introduction	p. 4
Language is not a Thing	p. 15
Prologue	p. 17
Noam Chomsky	p. 24
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh	p. 40
Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom	p. 52
Philip Lieberman	p. 68
If you have Human Language ...	p. 83
You have something to talk about	p. 91
You have words	p. 112
You have gestures	p. 123
You have speech	p. 139
You have structure	p. 154
You have a human brain	p. 175
Your genes have human mutations	p. 192
What Evolves?	p. 203
Species evolve	p. 207
Culture evolves	p. 226
Why things evolve	p. 243
Where Next?	p. 255
The future of the debate	p. 257
The future of language and evolution	p. 279
Epilogue: The babies of Galapagos	p. 291
Acknowledgments	p. 301
Notes	p. 305
Bibliography	p. 323
Index	p. 341
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