The Language Organ: Linguistics as Cognitive Physiology

by Stephen R. Anderson , David W. Lightfoot

• ISBN13: 9780521809948
• ISBN10: 0521809940
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-23
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Challenging and original, The Language Organ treats human language as the manifestation of a faculty of the mind, a mental organ whose nature is determined by human biology and whose functional properties should be explored just as physiology explores the functional properties of physical organs. It 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, and what is known about its relation to the brain. It discusses the kinds of work that can be carried out in these areas that will contribute to an understanding of the human language organ. This book will appeal to students and researchers in linguistics, and is written to be accessible to colleagues in other disciplines dealing with language as well as to readers with an interest in general science and the nature of the human mind.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Studying the human language faculty	1	(17)
Linguistics and the mind/brain	3	(2)
Linguistics as history	5	(7)
Linguistics as the study of E-language	12	(2)
Linguistics as the study of I-language	14	(4)
Language as a mental organ	18	(23)
We know more than we learn	18	(5)
The nature of grammars	23	(2)
Back to the puzzles	25	(9)
The acquisition problem	34	(6)
Conclusion	40	(1)
Syntax	41	(26)
The emergence of syntax within linguistics	41	(2)
Successive merger and deletion	43	(18)
Case	61	(5)
Conclusion	66	(1)
Sound patterns in language	67	(25)
Phonetics as theory	68	(5)
Phonology: language-particular structure	73	(10)
Morphophonemics and I-language	83	(9)
Describing linguistic knowledge	92	(19)
Phonological knowledge as it appears in borrowing	93	(3)
Can rules express phonological knowledge?	96	(3)
Constraint-based theories of phonological knowledge	99	(10)
The extension of constraint-based description	109	(2)
Phonetics and the I-linguistics of speech	111	(20)
Representations and the study of sound structure	111	(3)
A linguistic basis for phonetic representation	114	(13)
Speech microprosody: a research program	127	(2)
Conclusion	129	(2)
Morphology	131	(26)
The lexicon	132	(2)
Words and ``morphemes''	134	(18)
Productivity	152	(3)
Conclusions about lexical organization	155	(2)
Language change	157	(29)
Long-term directionality in the twentieth century	157	(4)
Grammars and time	161	(1)
English auxiliary verbs	162	(13)
Syntactic effects of the loss of case	175	(8)
Chaos	183	(3)
``Growing'' a language	186	(30)
Principles of Universal Grammar: active early	186	(5)
New phenomena	191	(3)
Experimental technique	194	(4)
Nature of the trigger	198	(8)
Acquiring sound patterns	206	(8)
Conclusion	214	(2)
The organic basis of language	216	(28)
Only humans have language organs	219	(2)
Language is a function of the brain	221	(15)
Language is a particular faculty	236	(2)
Conclusions	238	(6)
References	244	(13)
Index	257