Overview

How can an infinite number of sentences be generated from one human mind? How did language evolve in apes? In this book Donald Loritz addresses these and other fundamental and vexing questions about language, cognition, and the human brain. He starts by tracing how evolution and natural adaptation selected certain features of the brain to perform communication functions, then shows how those features developed into designs for human language. The result -- what Loritz calls an adaptive grammar -- gives a unified explanation of language in the brain and contradicts directly (and controversially) the theory of innateness proposed by, among others, Chomsky and Pinker.

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9780195118742

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This volume convinces me that its subject matter is an important area for cooperative interdisciplinary research efforts, which have enormous possibilities for future breakthroughs in fields such as speech and language pathology and communicative disorders. --Notes on Linguistics<br> How the brain evolved language is written in an engagingly chatty style that aids comprehension of the highly technical matter that it covers. Anyone interested in how connectionism might be applied to diverse aspects of language, ranging from phonemic distinctiveness to the particle movement construction, will find the book very useful. --Book Notices<br>

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