27.1428, Books: Creating Language: Christiansen, Chater

Thu Mar 24 18:57:49 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1428. Thu Mar 24 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.1428, Books: Creating Language: Christiansen, Chater

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Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 14:57:32
From: Susan Mai [susanmai at mit.edu]
Subject: Creating Language: Christiansen, Chater

Title: Creating Language 
Subtitle: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing 
Publication Year: 2016 
Publisher: MIT Press
	   http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Book URL: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/creating-language 

Author: Morten H Christiansen
Author: Nick Chater

Electronic: ISBN:  9780262334761 Pages: 344 Price: U.S. $ 28.00
Hardback: ISBN:  9780262034319 Pages: 344 Price: U.S. $ 40.00

Abstract:

Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded
expressivity of our linguistic abilities is 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.

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Language Acquisition
                     Linguistic Theories
                     Philosophy of Language
                     Psycholinguistics

Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=99713

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