Who forgot Paul Broca? The origin of language as test case for speciation theory Jürgen Trabant & Sean Ward (eds.), New essays on the origin of language (Trends in Linguistics). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001. Pp. vi+258. Morten H. Christiansen & Simon Kirby (eds.), Language evolution (Studies in the Evolution of Language 3). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xvii+395.

2005 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY J. CROW
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Origin Of Language ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

In December 1999, as part of its tricentenary celebrations, the Berlin Academy of Sciences invited eleven speakers to discuss the Origin of Language (cf. the Trabant & Ward volume, henceforth T&W). In March 2000 a workshop (Crow 2002a) under the auspices of the British Academy and the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, ‘The speciation of modern Homo sapiens’, addressed the same problem. The speciation of Homo sapiens and the origins of language are surely two sides of the same coin. At about the same time, the Christiansen & Kirby volume on Language Evolution (henceforth C&K) was conceived at the Fifth Australasian Cognitive Science Conference. Together the contributions of these volumes constitute a substantial contemporary archive on the origin of language. Their publication provides an opportunity to review the status of attempts to account for the evolution of language. Do the contributions converge on a solution?

Linguists play catchup with evolution

2001 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEREK BICKERTON
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Computational Linguistics ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Language And Communication ◽  
Georgetown University ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Oxford University Press

Donald Loritz, How the brain evolved language. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. 227.Lyle Jenkins, Biolinguistics : exploring the biology of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii+264.In the course of reviewing recent books on the evolution of language and communication (Dunbar 1996, Hauser 1996, Deacon 1997) I have had occasion to note that relatively few writers on these topics know much about linguistics, and to wish that more of them did. I should have remembered the old adage that one shouldn't wish for things - one might get them.For more than a century, linguists honored the Linguistic Society of Paris's ban on all discussion of language evolution; other disciplines went ahead with it regardless. Now that the centrality of language evolution to any study of our species is becoming apparent, linguists are desperately trying to play catchup, and the two volumes reviewed here both appeared in the last couple of years. Both authors are linguists, albeit hyphenated ones. Donald Loritz teaches computational linguistics at Georgetown University; his doctorate was in psycholinguistics. Lyle Jenkins works in the Biolinguistics Institute in Cambridge, MA; however, his doctorate was in unhyphenated linguistics. It would be difficult to find two authors whose ideas were more diametrically opposed.

THE BEGINNING, THE MIDDLE AND THE END OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-534
Author(s):  
ANYA SUSCHITZKY
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas

Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)Until recently, serious students of music did not read sweeping histories of music. In a time of increasing specialization, we do not expect to find new ideas in such work. This has changed with the publication of Richard Taruskin's History of Western Music. Monumental in its scope and original in its approach but informal in its prose and always engagingly direct, it offers a provocative perspective on the whole of music's history and sets fresh agendas for anyone interested in music and its relation to the history of ideas, politics and culture. Taruskin's History differs from all previous projects of its kind in that it does not principally survey famous works by famous composers. Focusing instead on particular issues within a chronological framework (his chapter titles refer, amongst other things, to feudalism, humanism, enlightenment, virtuosos, transcendentalism and totalitarianism), and selecting composers whose music contributes to the consideration of those issues (sometimes omitting well-known figures or placing familiar works in radically new contexts), he sets out quite simply to explain why music has been composed as it has, and to show how its existence has relied not on composers in isolation but on a whole musical culture of composers, patrons, performers, critics and many others. Rather than relegating historical events and ideas to the status of context or calling them extra-musical, he places them at the centre of his narrative and in intricate dialogue with music; so while his close analyses of music will mean most to those with musical training, they are part of an argument about history that will be suggestive and illuminating to any reader.

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