Monday, October 4, 2010

Enfield on Language and Social Context

Nick Enfield, of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and Radboud University in Nijmegen, has a fascinating review of two recent books about language evolution in the 24 September 2010 issue of Science. The article, called "Without Social Context?", reviews The Evolution of Language by W. Tecumseh Fitch, and The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives, by Richard K. Larson, Viviane Déprez, and Hiroko Yamakido (eds.). In summary, Enfield says that "... an urgent prerequisite for this line of research ... is a comparative understanding of language in the dynamic context of social behavior."

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