A young slave stitches a quilt with a map pattern which guides her to freedom in the North.

How language evolved has been called "the hardest problem in science." Linguist Derek Bickerton shows how and why previous attempts to solve that problem have fallen short. This book is the first that thoroughly integrates the story of how language evolved with the story of how humans evolved. Taking cues from topics as diverse as the foraging strategies of ants, the distribution of large prehistoric herbivores, and the construction of ecological...

"According to Paul Bloom, children learn words through sophisticated cognitive abilities that exist for other purposes. These include the ability to infer others' intentions, the ability to acquire concepts, and appreciation of syntactic structure, and certain general learning and memory abilities. The acquisition of even simple nouns requires rich conceptual, social, and linguistic capacities interacting in complex ways." "This book requires no background...

Mankind has a distinct advantage over other terrestrial species: we talk to one another. But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a "bombshell" linguist and "instant folk hero" (Tom Wolfe, Harper's), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than seven thousand languages that exist...

"Smart as hell and funny as fuck, this book explains why we can't stop swearing and what it tells us about our language and brains. Everyone swears. Only the rare individual can avoid ever letting slip an expletive. And yet, we ban the words from television and insist that polite people excise them from their vocabularies. That's a fucking shame. Not only is swearing colorful, fun, and often powerfully apt, as linguist and cognitive scientist Benjamin...

"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science. . . . Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories...

"As immigrants and others are engulfed by dominant societies, the connection to their ancestral tongues is routinely severed. Julie Sedivy takes on the science and politics of language loss, offering lessons for the renewal and preservation of heritage languages, alongside her own moving story of language loss and accompanying personal crisis"--