BEBC will be closing for Christmas on Friday 15th December 2023 & will not reopen until Tuesday 2nd January 2024.
**Last orders will be accepted before 2pm on Friday 15th December and shipped the same day if in stock**
All orders placed between Christmas & New Year will be processed on Tuesday 2nd January 2024.

eBOOK ORDERS - Any eBook orders placed during this period will be invoiced on our return.
If we have stock, the code & instructions will be sent to you in your order confirmation.
If the eBook is not in stock, we cannot send you the eBook code until January 2024, after ordering these resources in from the publisher.
  • ISBN: 9789027225900
  • Category: Linguistics
  • Learning Level:
  • Status: Temporarily out of stock. Despatched within 12 working days.

£109.00

Bio-Linguistics the Santa Barbara Lectures Hardbound

by Givon, T Published by John Benjamins

Published 2002.

Is human language an evolutionary adaptation? Is linguistics a natural science? These questions have bedevilled philosophers, philologists and linguists from Plato through Chomsky. Prof. Givon suggests that the answers fall naturally within an integrated study of living organisms.

In this new work, Givon points out that language operates between aspects of both complex biological design and adaptive behaviour. As in biology, the whole is an adaptive compromise to competing demands. Variation is the indispensable tool of learning, change and adaptation. The contrast between innateness and input-driven emergence is an interaction between genetically-coded and behaviourally-coded experience.

In enlarging the cross-disciplinary domain, the book examines the parallels between language evolution and language diachronic. Sociality, cooperation and communication are shown to be rooted in a common evolutionary source, the kin-based hunting-and-gathering society of intimates.

The book pays homage to the late Joseph Greenberg and his visionary integration of functional motivation, typological diversity and diachronic change.

Other books that matched your search

Related books that matched your search