Bio-Linguistics

The Santa Barbara lectures

T. Givón | University of Oregon

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027225900 (Eur) | EUR 130.00

ISBN 9781588112255 (USA) | USD 195.00

Paperback – Available

ISBN 9789027225917 (Eur) | EUR 44.00

ISBN 9781588112262 (USA) | USD 66.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027296061 | EUR 130.00/44.00*
| USD 195.00/66.00*

Is human language an evolutionary adaptation? Is linguistics a natural science? These questions have bedeviled philosophers, philologists and linguists from Plato through Chomsky. Prof. Givón suggests that the answers fall naturally within an integrated study of living organisms.

In this new work, Givón points out that language operates between aspects of both complex biological design and adaptive behavior. As in biology, the whole is an adaptive compromise to competing demands. Variation is the indispensable tool of learning, change and adaptation. The contrast between innateness and input-driven emergence is an interaction between genetically-coded and behaviorally-coded experience.

In enlarging the cross-disciplinary domain, the book examines the parallels between language evolution and language diachrony. Sociality, cooperation and communication are shown to be rooted in a common evolutionary source, the kin-based hunting-and-gathering society of intimates.

The book pays homage to the late Joseph Greenberg and his visionary integration of functional motivation, typological diversity and diachronic change.

[Not in series, 113] 2002. xviii, 383 pp.

Publishing status: Available
Published online on 21 October 2008

https://doi.org/10.1075/z.113

Table of Contents

Preface | p. xv

1. Language as a biological adaptation | pp. 1–29

2. The bounds of generativity and the adaptive basis of variation | pp. 31–69

3. The demise of competence | pp. 71–122

4. Human language as an evolutionary product | pp. 123–161

5. An evolutionary account of language processing rates | pp. 163–202

6. The diachronic foundations of language universals | pp. 203–222

7. The neuro-cognitive interpretation of ‘context’: Anticipating other minds | pp. 223–259

8. The grammar of the narrator’s perspective in fiction | pp. 261–299

9. The society of intimates | pp. 301–331

10. On the ontology of academic negativity | pp. 333–343

Epilogue: Joseph Greenberg as a theorist | pp. 345–353

Index | pp. 377–383

“I believe that this book opens new horizons in linguistics... 'Bio-Linguistics' provides the reader with the material to admire, reflect upon, agree with or disagree with. Besides being a manifest of linguistics of a new type. 'Bio-Linguistics' is a brilliant handbook that can help bring up a linguist who thinks within common sense frame and who would not de frightened to penetrate into both subtle details of particular investigations and into the soars of general theory. The book is vivid and full of humor.”

Marina Rusakova, Saint Petersburg State University on Linguist List 14-3125 (2003)

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