Morten H. Christiansen Knihy

A collection of writings by leading scholars in the field of language evolution, giving readable accounts of their theories on the origins of language and reflecting on the most current issues and debates.

"Think about the game charades. Its rules are simple: no talking, of course, and little else. Each time we play with a new group, we have to figure each other out, with our different styles, backgrounds, and senses of the world, as we struggle to connect how we would act out something (say, Christopher Columbus crossing the Atlantic) with how other people might understand it. But as we play, a lingo can develop-with time, an upheld hand, bobbing along, might not just come to represent the ship on the Santa Maria, but a vast range of possibilities, including both conceptual ones such as exploration or trade, actions like sailing, or even a place like India or Santo Domingo. Almost from nothing, the players can create something like a language. Such nearly rule-less games are a hallmark of the human species: testament not just to our intelligence, but our flexibility of mind as well as our desires to cooperate, to understand, and to be understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Nick Chater and Morten Christiansen show games like charades reveal something more: where language comes from and how it works. Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing traits, and one of its most studied, but as Chater and Christiansen, it has been our most poorly understood. Several generations of scientists sought to understand how the rules of language could be hardwired in the brain. It was a colossal mistake. Chater and Christiansen show that language is hardly about rules at all, let alone those welded into our brain by evolution, but rather about near-total freedom, where the only real constraints are our imaginations and our desire to be understood. And with that as the point of departure, they are able to find compelling solutions to old riddles and new puzzles, including why chimpanzees don't understand pointing fingers; whether having two words for "blue" changes what we see; why Danish is so much harder to learn than Norwegian; how words change meanings; and whether computers will ever truly understand a human. The Language Game will bewitch readers of classic books on mind and language, such as Douglas Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach and John McWhorter's The Power of Babel, and find a welcome spot on the shelf of readers of Joseph Henrich's Weirdest People in the World and Frans de Waal's Mama's Last Hug. And like the game of charades, it will engage, amuse, and dazzle readers for years to come"--Publisher's description

Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities are unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through the processes of cultural evolution. Christiansen and Chater propose a revolutionary new framework for understanding the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, offering an integrated theory of how language creation is intertwined across these multiple timescales. Christiansen and Chater argue that mainstream generative approaches to language do not provide compelling accounts of language evolution, acquisition, and processing. Their own account draws on important developments from across the language sciences, including statistical natural language processing, learnability theory, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults. Christiansen and Chater also consider some of the major implications of their theoretical approach for our understanding of how language works, offering alternative accounts of specific aspects of language, including the structure of the vocabulary, the importance of experience in language processing, and the nature of recursive linguistic structure. --Dust jacket