I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

How to Do Things With Words

Statistical physics has proven to be a fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. Recent years have witnessed an attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the interactions of individuals as elementary units in social structures. A wide list of topics are reviewed ranging from opinion and cultural and language dynamics to crowd behavior, hierarchy formation, human dynamics, and social spreading. The connections between these problems and other, more traditional, topics of statistical physics are highlighted. Comparison of model results with empirical data from social systems are also emphasized.

Statistical physics of social dynamics

We argue that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation. We suggest how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience. We submit that a distinction should be made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB)and in the narrow sense (FLN) . FLB includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptual-intentional system, and the computational mechanisms for recursion, providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements. We hypothesize that FLN only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language. We further argue that FLN may have evolved for reasons other than language, hence comparative studies might look for evidence of such computations outside of the domain of communication (for example, number, navigation, and social relations).

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The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

Part I. The Evolution of Cooperative Communication: 1. Introduction: the evolution of cooperative communication Chris Knight 2. Comprehension, production and conventionalization in the origins of language Robbins Burling 3. Co-operation, competition and the evolution of pre-linguistic communication Jason Noble 4. Language and hominid politics Jean-Louis Dessalles 5. Secret language use at female initiation: bounding gossiping communities Camilla Power 6. Play as precursor of phonology and syntax Chris Knight Part II. The Emergence of Phonetic Structure: 7. Introduction: the emergence of phonetic structure Michael Studdert-Kennedy 8. The role of mimesis in infant language development: evidence for phylogeny? Marilyn M. Vihman and Rory A. DePaolis 9. Evolution of speech: the relation between ontogeny and phylogeny Peter J. MacNeilage and Barbara L. Davis 10. Evolutionary implications of the particulate principle: imitation and the dissociation of phonetic form from semantic function Michael Studdert-Kennedy 11. Emergence of sound systems through self-organisation Bart de Boer 12. Modelling language-physiology coevolution Daniel Livingstone and Colin Fyfe Part III. The Evolution of Syntax: 13. The emergence of syntax James R. Hurford 14. The spandrels of the linguistic genotype David Lightfoot 15. The distinction between sentences and noun phrases: an impediment to language evolution? Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy 16. How protolanguage became language Derek Bickerton 17. Holistic utterances in protolanguage: the link from primates to humans Alison Wray 18. Syntax without natural selection: how compositionality emerges from vocabulary in a population of learners Simon Kirby 19. Social transmission favours linguistic generalization James R. Hurford 20. Words, memes and language evolution Robert P. Worden 21. On the reconstruction of 'proto-world' word order Frederick J. Newmeyer Epilogue 22. The history, rate and pattern of world linguistic evolution Mark Pagel.

The evolutionary emergence of language : social function and the origins of linguistic form

As language users humans possess a culturally transmitted system of unparalleled complexity in the natural world. Linguistics has revealed over the past 40 years the degree to which the syntactic structure of language in particular is strikingly complex. Furthermore, as Pinker and Bloom point out in their agenda-setting paper Natural Language and Natural Selection “grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface” (Pinker and Bloom, 1990: 707). These sorts of observations, along with influential arguments from linguistics and psychology about the innateness of language (see Chomsky, 1986; Pinker, 1994), have led many authors to the conclusion that an explanation for the origin of syntax must invoke neo-Darwinian natural selection.

The emergence of linguistic structure: an overview of the iterated learning model

Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device

Approaches to the Evolution of Language

Introduction Michael Studdert-Kennedy, Chris Knight, and James R. Hurford Part I. Grounding Language Function in Social Cognition: 1. Introduction: Grounding language function in social cognition Chris Knight 2. On discontinuing the continuity-discontinuity debate Jean Aitchison 3. The origin of language and cognition Ib Ulbaek 4. Mimesis and the executive suite: missing links in language evolution Merlin Donald 5. Ritual/speech co-evolution: a 'selfish gene' solution to the problem of deception Chris Knight 6. Theory of mind and the evolution of language Robin Dunbar 7. Old wives' tales: the gossip hypothesis and the reliability of cheap signals Camilla Power 8. Altruism, status, and the origin of relevance Jean-Louis Dessalles 9. The evolution of language from social intelligence Robert Worden Part II. The Emergence of Phonology: 10. Introduction: the emergence of phonology Michael Studdert-Kennedy 11. Long call structure in apes as a possible precursor for language Maria Ujhelyi 12. Social sound-making as a precursor to spoken language John F. Locke 13. The particulate origins of language generativity: from syllable to gesture Michael Studdert-Kennedy 14. Evolution of the mechanisms of language output: comparative neurobiology of vocal and manual communication Peter MacNeilage 15. Systemic constraints and adaptive change in the formation of sound structure Bjoern Lindblom 16. The development of sound systems in human language Klaus J. Kohler 17. Synonymy avoidance, phonology and the origin of syntax Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy Part III. The Emergence of Syntax: 18. Introduction: the emergence of syntax James R. Hurford 19. On the supposed 'counterfunctionality' of universal grammar: some evolutionary implications Frederick J. Newmeyer 20. Language evolution and the minimalist program: the origins of syntax Robert C. Berwick 21. Catastrophic evolution: the case for a single step from protolanguage to full human language Derek Bickerton 22. Fitness and the selective adaptation of language Simon Kirby 23. Synthesizing the origins of language and meaning using co-evolution, self-organization and level formation Luc Steels 24. Computational simulations of the emergence of grammar John Batali.

James R. Hurford

Papers

The evolutionary emergence of language : social function and the origins of linguistic form

The emergence of linguistic structure: an overview of the iterated learning model

Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device

Approaches to the Evolution of Language

Approaches to the evolution of language : social and cognitive bases