humanity lowliest languages reconciling

books:

Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages

7 reviews
Derek Bickerton

Hill and Wang, 2008

Washington Post review got it wrong
This book was reviewed in the NY Times, LA times and Washington Post all on the same day. For some reason, Amazon only posts the Washington Post review and not the other ones, which I think were much more accurate. The last sentence of the Washington Post review leaves the impression that the book may be a slog for non-linguists - but I have to say the opposite is true. I know next to ...

Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain

2 reviews
William H. Calvin, Derek Bickerton

The MIT Press, 2001

Conversation on conversation
The so-called "reconcilation" promised by the title is not entirely delivered. Both Calvin and Bickerton seem too taken with their respective ideas. It is an interesting discussion nonetheless, and good points are made by both writers.

Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans
Derek Bickerton

Hill and Wang, 2009

How did humans get to be human? Why are we so different from all other creatures? We have language and they don?t?could the answer possibly be that simple? Yes, says Derek Bickerton, one of the world?s leading researchers into the evolution of language. In Adam?s Tongue , he tells for the first time the full story of how it all happened. How a little-known episode in human evolution brought us to the top of the food chain. How ?power ...

Language and Species

1 review
Derek Bickerton

University Of Chicago Press, 1992

If you smile at me I will understand because that is something everyone does in the same language
If you smile at me I will understand because that is something that everyone does in the same language. David Crosby from the song "Wooden Ships" What songwriter David Crosby artfully offered in his song "Wooden Ships" Bickerton broadens in his thought provoking work Langauge and Species. Namely, Bickerton suggests that human language did not evolutionary just drop in out of the blue but ...

Language and Human Behavior (The Jessie and John Danz Lectures)

3 reviews
Derek Bickerton

University of Washington Press, 1996

Intelligence came from language, not vice versa
It is easy to suspect that we humans can talk because we have smart brains. Bickerton instead argues that as our brains developed the capacity for speech we thereby became smart. Like other animals we have "on-line" thinking to help us survive. This consists of sensory('objective') knowledge of the world and ('subjective') inner states of consciousness. These latter are sometimes automatic ...