Language Complexity As An Evolving Variable
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Language Complexity As An Evolving Variable
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Author : Geoffrey Sampson
language : en
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Release Date : 2009-02-26
Language Complexity As An Evolving Variable written by Geoffrey Sampson and has been published by OUP Oxford this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2009-02-26 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
This book presents a challenge to the widely-held assumption that human languages are both similar and constant in their degree of complexity. For a hundred years or more the universal equality of languages has been a tenet of faith among most anthropologists and linguists. It has been frequently advanced as a corrective to the idea that some languages are at a later stage of evolution than others. It also appears to be an inevitable outcome of one of the central axioms of generative linguistic theory: that the mental architecture of language is fixed and is thus identical in all languages and that whereas genes evolve languages do not. Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable reopens the debate. Geoffrey Sampson's introductory chapter re-examines and clarifies the notion and theoretical importance of complexity in language, linguistics, cognitive science, and evolution. Eighteen distinguished scholars from all over the world then look at evidence gleaned from their own research in order to reconsider whether languages do or do not exhibit the same degrees and kinds of complexity. They examine data from a wide range of times and places. They consider the links between linguistic structure and social complexity and relate their findings to the causes and processes of language change. Their arguments are frequently controversial and provocative; their conclusions add up to an important challenge to conventional ideas about the nature of language. The authors write readably and accessibly with no recourse to unnecessary jargon. This fascinating book will appeal to all those interested in the interrelations between human nature, culture, and language.
Complexity Isolation And Variation
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Author : Raffaela Baechler
language : en
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Release Date : 2016-07-11
Complexity Isolation And Variation written by Raffaela Baechler and has been published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016-07-11 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
Complexity of grammatical structure has become a center of interest in recent typological and dialectological research. The contributions of the present volume discuss structural complexity from the perspective of language variation and change. Particular attention is paid to the hypothesis that languages and varieties spoken by small, isolated communities tend to display greater complexity than others.
Complexity In Language
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Author : Salikoko S. Mufwene
language : en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 2017-03-30
Complexity In Language written by Salikoko S. Mufwene and has been published by Cambridge University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017-03-30 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
This book is about dynamical, social-interactional aspects of the emergence of complexity in language, explained by linguists, cognitivists, and modelers.
Language Complexity
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Author : Matti Miestamo
language : en
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Release Date : 2008
Language Complexity written by Matti Miestamo and has been published by John Benjamins Publishing this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2008 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
Language complexity has recently attracted considerable attention from linguists of many different persuasions. This volume a thematic selection of papers from the conference Approaches to Complexity in Language, held in Helsinki, August 2005 is the first collection of articles devoted to the topic. The sixteen chapters of the volume approach the notion of language complexity from a variety of perspectives. The papers are divided into three thematic sections that reflect the central themes of the book: Typology and theory, Contact and change, Creoles and pidgins. The book is mainly intended for typologists, historical linguists, contact linguists and creolists, as well as all linguists interested in language complexity in general. As the first collective volume on a very topical theme, the book is expected to be of lasting interest to the linguistic community.
Why Only Us
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Author : Robert C. Berwick
language : en
Publisher: MIT Press
Release Date : 2017-05-12
Why Only Us written by Robert C. Berwick and has been published by MIT Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017-05-12 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
Berwick and Chomsky draw on recent developments in linguistic theory to offer an evolutionary account of language and humans' remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire it. “A loosely connected collection of four essays that will fascinate anyone interested in the extraordinary phenomenon of language.” —New York Review of Books We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—“the language faculty”—raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book by two distinguished scholars—a computer scientist and a linguist—addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language. Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently the evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define “language” and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals. Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world; the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding; the tension between Darwin's idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language; and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds.
Linguistic Complexity
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Author : Bernd Kortmann
language : en
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Release Date : 2012-05-29
Linguistic Complexity written by Bernd Kortmann and has been published by Walter de Gruyter this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012-05-29 with Foreign Language Study categories.
Linguistic complexity is one of the currently most hotly debated notions in linguistics. The essays in this volume reflect the intricacies of thinking about the complexity of languages and language varieties (here: of English) in three major contact-related fields of (and schools in) linguistics: creolistics, indigenization and nativization studies (i.e. in the realm of English linguistics, the “World Englishes” community), and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research: How can we adequately assess linguistic complexity? Should we be interested in absolute complexity or rather relative complexity? What is the extent to which language contact and/or (adult) language learning might lead to morphosyntactic simplification? The authors in this volume are all leading linguists in different areas of specialization, and they were asked to elaborate on those facets of linguistic complexity which are most relevant in their area of specialization, and/or which strike them as being most intriguing. The result is a collection of papers that is unique in bringing together leading representatives of three often disjunct fields of linguistic scholarship in which linguistic complexity is seen as a dynamic and inherently variable parameter.
Variable Properties In Language
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Author : David W. Lightfoot
language : en
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Release Date : 2019-07-01
Variable Properties In Language written by David W. Lightfoot and has been published by Georgetown University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019-07-01 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
This edited volume, based on papers presented at the 2017 Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics (GURT), approaches the study of language variation from a variety of angles. Language variation research asks broad questions such as, "Why are languages' grammatical structures different from one another?" as well as more specific word-level questions such as, "Why are words that are pronounced differently still recognized to be the same words?" Too often, research on variation has been siloed based on the particular question—sociolinguists do not talk to historical linguists, who do not talk to phoneticians, and so on. This edited volume seeks to bring discussions from different subfields of linguistics together to explore language variation in a broader sense and acknowledge the complexity and interwoven nature of variation itself.
Linguistic Complexity
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Author : Bernd Kortmann
language : en
Publisher: De Gruyter
Release Date : 2012
Linguistic Complexity written by Bernd Kortmann and has been published by De Gruyter this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012 with Foreign Language Study categories.
Linguistic complexity is one of the currently most hotly debated notions in linguistics. The essays in this volume address the intricacies of assessing the complexity of languages and language varieties (here: of English) in three major linguistic disciplines: creolistics, indigenization and nativization studies, and Second Language Acquisition research. The volume is thus unique in bringing together leading representatives of three often disjunct fields of linguistic scholarship in which linguistic complexity is seen as a dynamic and inherently variable parameter.
Complexity Applications In Language And Communication Sciences
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Author : Àngels Massip-Bonet
language : en
Publisher: Springer
Release Date : 2019-01-11
Complexity Applications In Language And Communication Sciences written by Àngels Massip-Bonet and has been published by Springer this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019-01-11 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
This book offers insights on the study of natural language as a complex adaptive system. It discusses a new way to tackle the problem of language modeling, and provides clues on how the close relation between natural language and some biological structures can be very fruitful for science. The book examines the theoretical framework and then applies its main principles to various areas of linguistics. It discusses applications in language contact, language change, diachronic linguistics, and the potential enhancement of classical approaches to historical linguistics by means of new methodologies used in physics, biology, and agent systems theory. It shows how studying language evolution and change using computational simulations enables to integrate social structures in the evolution of language, and how this can give rise to a new way to approach sociolinguistics. Finally, it explores applications for discourse analysis, semantics and cognition.
Complexity In Language
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Author : Salikoko S. Mufwene
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2017
Complexity In Language written by Salikoko S. Mufwene and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017 with LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES categories.
The question of complexity, as in what makes one language more complex than another, is a long-established topic of debate among linguists. Recently, this issue has been complemented with the view that languages are complex adaptive systems, in which emergence and self-organization play major roles. However, few students of the phenomenon have gone beyond the basic assessment of the number of units and rules in a language (what has been characterized as bit complexity) or shown some familiarity with the science of complexity. This book reveals how much can be learned by overcoming these limitations, especially by adopting developmental and evolutionary perspectives. The contributors include specialists of language acquisition, evolution and ecology, grammaticization, phonology, and modelling, all of whom approach languages as dynamical, emergent, and adaptive complex systems.