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Niche-construction, co-evolution, and domain-specificity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

James R. Hurford
James R. Hurford
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, and Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9LL, United Kingdom. [email protected]://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~jim
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Abstract

That language is shaped to fit the human brain is close to the Chomskyan position. The target article by Christiansen & Chater (C&C) assumes an entity, “(the) language,” outside individual heads. What is the nature of this entity? Linguistic niche-construction and co-evolution of language and genes are possible, with some of what evolved being language-specific. Recent generative theory postulates much less than the old Universal Grammar (UG).

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 31 , Issue 5 , October 2008 , pp. 526
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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