On Biology, History and Culture in Human Language / Moreno and Mend ívil-Giró

[Valerie Hall]

Just published:

 

On Biology, History and Culture in Human Language

A Critical Overview

Juan-Carlos Moreno and José-Luis Mendívil-Giró

HB 9781781790526

£40 and $60, 128pp

 

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https://www.equinoxpub.com/equinox/books/showbook.asp?bkid=591

 

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Description
Human language is viewed and studied by some authors as a natural object and
by other scholars as a social and cultural object. Actually, human language,
as usually observed, manifests itself as a tightly entangled bundle of
natural and cultural features. In the present essay we propose several ways
to disentangle this complex feature bundle in order to show that often what
seems contradictory is really complementary. 

The main goal of this book consists in showing that both views are correct
and compatible if applied in a proper way. In order to do that it is
necessary to differentiate two distinct entities: natural languages and
cultivated languages. A natural language develops in childhood in a
spontaneous way on the basis of the innate capabilities determined by the
human faculty of language. In contrast, a cultivated language is culturally
determined and must be acquired by the individuals through guided learning,
since it is based on certain cultural elaborations of a natural language. We
show that some of the most controversial topics in current linguistic
research are vitiated by the failure to make this distinction or by a poor
understanding of it.


Contents
Prologue

1. Language in nature and culture
2. Exploring the naturalness of natural languages
3. The paradox of languages without a Faculty of Language
4. Characterizing cultivated languages
5. The mismeasure of language diversity
6. Natural and cultivated languages: a necessary distinction