Title: The Natural Origin of Language: The Structural Inter-Relation of Language, Visual Perception and Action (Paperback or Softback)
Publisher: 1/12/2012
Publication Date: 2012
Language: English
ISBN 10: 1469144700
ISBN 13: 9781469144702
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: New
Weight: 1.29 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

The starting-point for the book is the straightforward question: Where do these words come from? What is the source of the unbroken stream or river of language, which we all experience, both in talking to others and in formulating our own thoughts? The answer proposed is that words, the fabric of language, are not arbitrary, a conventional cultural product of human ingenuity. Evolutionarily and physiologically they derive directly from and are integrated with perception and action, the other main components of total human behaviour. A few years ago, it would have been necessary to apologise for even venturing to discuss the origin of language, never mind for suggesting that words are not arbitrary, but such an apology is no longer necessary. The origin of language, so extensively discussed in the 18th century and earlier, is once again a living and respectable subject for scientists with many different types of expertise. The hypothesis of the natural and evolutionary basis of language presented in this book has as an immediate consequence the integration of linguistics with the rest of science, and particularly with biology, neurology and physiology. Perhaps even more important than the direct impact on linguistics as a real science in embryo, is the significance of the new view of language for research into brain function. At present, the neurologies of voluntary action, of language and of perception, of thought and consciousness, present difficulties of 'astronomical proportions', and research into each of these has inevitably been treated as a distinct field of study. If one now assumes, on the theory presented here, an underlying functional integration of language, vision and action, then the 'window' into the brain that language affords (Karl Lashley's phrase) becomes of vastly greater potential importance. How readily the new view presented will be given a hearing is subject not only to the usual and often scientifically justified suspicion of the unorthodox - Locke remarks that new opinions are always suspected and usually opposed without any other reason but because they are not already common - but also to the cast-iron certainty in mainline linguistics of the arbitrariness of the sign. Hume, the great sceptic, at one point remarked that "a true sceptic will be diffident of his philosophical doubt". The hope is that those reading the book will be prepared, provisionally, to be diffident of the certainty so widely prevailing that words and language must be wholly conventional and cannot be natural.

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