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This book studies the origins of language. It presents language as the product of a unique non-linguistic cognitive feature (i.e., metacognition) that emerged late in human evolution.
List of contents
Preface
1 Human behaviour and human language
2 Two opposing views on the origins of language
3 The flimsy foundations of linguistic nativism
4 Is there any evidence of spontaneously emergent languages?
5 Making the case for a conscious invention of language
6 Secondary consciousness and language
7 Seeing the invisible: the advent of conceptual thinking
8 The cooperative roots of language and the new social mind
9 When did language appear?
10 Constructing a language from scratch: a few issues
11 Some implications of the proposed picture
12 Will AI ever develop a human-like intelligence and language?
Index
About the author
Filippo-Enrico Cardini has a degree in English and German (Università di Genova, Italy), an MA in "Language, Society, and Culture" (University of East Anglia, UK), and a PhD in Linguistics (Lancaster University, UK). His doctoral work investigated the subject of Linguistic Relativity, and he is especially attracted to issues concerning language and cognition. This is reflected in some articles he wrote in the past on motion conceptualisation and on metaphors. Over recent years, he has developed a growing interest for the subject of language evolution, which has resulted in the publishing of an article on this subject in the
Journal Lingua.
Summary
This book studies the origins of language. It presents language as the product of a unique non-linguistic cognitive feature (i.e., metacognition) that emerged late in human evolution.
