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The Origins of Meaning (Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language (8)) by James R. Hurford, James Raymond Hurford is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

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In this, the first of two ground-breaking volumes on the nature of language in the light of the way it evolved, James Hurford looks at how the world first came to have a meaning in the minds of animals and how in humans this meaning eventually came to be expressed as language. He reviews a mass of evidence to show how close some animals, especially primates and more especially apes, are to the brink of human language. Apes may not talk to us but they construct rich cognitive representations of the world around them, and here, he shows, are the evolutionary seeds of abstract thought - the means of referring to objects, the memory of events, even elements of the propositional thinking philosophers have hitherto reserved for humans. What then, he asks, is the evolutionary path between the non-speaking minds of apes and our own speaking minds? Why don't apes communicate the richness of their thoughts to each other? Why do humans alone have a unique disposition to reveal their thoughts in complex detail? Professor Hurford searches a wide range of evidence for the answers to these central questions, including degrees of trust, the role of hormones, the ability to read minds, and the will

Who reads The Origins of Meaning (Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language (8))?

Author

James R. Hurford, James Raymond Hurford

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA; Oxford University Press

Published

2007

Language

EN

ISBN

9780191607233

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Linguistics, Language Learning, Literary Fiction