Function, Selection, and Innateness: The Emergence of Language Universals

ISBN-13: 9780198238119 / Angielski / Twarda / 1999 / 176 str.

Simon Kirby

Opis

This book is a powerful demonstration of the value of looking at language as an adaptive system, which reaches the heart of debates in linguistics and cognitive science on the evolution and nature of language. Simon Kirby combines functional and formal theories in order to develop a way of treating language as an adaptive system in which its communicative and formal roles have crucial and complimentary roles.

Recenzje

In this important and highly original work Simon Kirby proposes a new method for addressing a major issue in the explanation of language universals. If many universals are to be explained by processing efficiency, then how do the preferences of performance actually become the fixed, and variant, conventions of grammars that we observe in current language samples? Kirby's computer simulations model the 'adaptive mechanism', and his discussion of the relationship between function, selection and innateness is both clarifying and timely.