NEW BOOK: Givon: Bio-Linguistics

[Paul Peranteau]

John Benjamins Publishing Co. is pleased to announce the impending 
publication of
T. Givón's BIO-LINGUISTICS: THE SANTA BARBARA LECTURES 
(Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2002, 377pp . including bibliography and index) .

The book presents an adaptive--evolutionary, variationist, diachronic-- 
account of human language, an account fully consonant with modern 
evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology and evolutionary 
anthropology. In the process, the book challenges rigid 
traditional--Platonic/Cartesian--dichotomies such as mind vs. body, nature 
vs. nurture, biology vs. culture/history, innate vs. emergent, or language 
vs. cognition.

In placing the core human phenomena of mind, language and culture within 
their rightful adaptive context, one neither detracts from their staggering 
complexity and apparent uniqueness, nor does one do violence to the 'hard' 
constraints of evolutionary biology. Rather, biology and culture turn out 
to inter-penetrate and illuminate each other along a graded continuum.

The main chapters of the book are:

1. Language as a biological adaptation (overview)

2. The bounds of generativity and the adaptive basis of variation (the 
functional basis of categories and prototypes)

3. The demise of competence  (an empirical study of so-called 
'configurationality' in oral texts from English and Ute)

4. Human language as an evolutionary product  (on the co-evolution of 
language, mind and brain)

5. An evolutionary account of language processing rates  (an experimental 
study of visual processing of objects and events)

6. The diachronic foundations of language universal (the Greenbergial 
program of functionality, diachrony, typology and universals)

7. Anticipating othere minds: The neuro-cognitive interpretation of 
'context' (re-casting the pragmatics of 'context in terms of mental models)

8. The grammar of narrator's perspective in narrative fiction (text-based 
study of speaker's 'voice' and grammaticalized modality)

9. The society of intimates (the cultural context for inter-personal 
cooperation and
communication)

10. On the ontology of academic negativity  (the pitfalls of doing science 
in an institutional context)

11. Epilogue: Joseph Greenberg as a theorist

The book is dedicated to the memory of the late Joseph Greenberg, a 
self-certified lumper of functionalism, diachrony, universals, variation 
and evolution.

US & Canada:    Hardcover ISBN 1 58811 225 X USD 110.00
                         Paperback ISBN 1 58811 226 8 USD 43.95

Everywhere Else:        Hardcover  ISBN 90 272 2590 7 EUR 110.00
                         Paperback ISBN 90 272 2591 5 EUR 44.00




Paul Peranteau (paul at benjamins.com)
P O Box 27519                   Ph: 215 836-1200
Philadelphia PA 19118-0519      Fax: 215 836-1204
John Benjamins Publishing Co. website: http://www.benjamins.com
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