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Philip Lieberman, Human language and our reptilian brain: The subcortical bases of speech, syntax, and thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. 221. Hb $39.95; Chris Knight, Michael Studdert-Kennedy, and James R. Hurford, The evolutionary emergence of language: Social function and the origins of linguistic form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xi, 426. Hb $74.95.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2002

Greg Urban
Greg Urban
Affiliation:
Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, [email protected]
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Abstract

The two volumes reviewed here thumb their noses at the 1866 ban by the Linguistic Society of Paris on publications concerning language origins – a ban imposed by those august guardians of public faith in linguistic science because of the disreputable, speculative, nonempirical character of language origins scholarship. Yet nose-thumbing has been on the rise in the past two decades, even alarmingly so. Why? Have we witnessed epochal new empirical or conceptual breakthroughs that would warrant the overturning of that sober 19th-century decision?

Type
REVIEWS
Information
Language in Society , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , October 2002 , pp. 609 - 612
Copyright
2002 Cambridge University Press

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