Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
Theory of language is a topic in philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. [1] It has the goal of answering the questions "What is language?"; [2] [3] "Why do languages have the properties they do?"; [4] or "What is the origin of language?". In addition to these fundamental questions, the theory of language also seeks to understand ...
Philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. [1] Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning , intentionality , reference , the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning , and thought .
The monogenetic theory points to a single origin of all of the world's languages and it is the most accepted theory. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It states that all current languages have formed through language change from a single tongue that gradually differentiated into unintelligible languages.
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
Noam Chomsky spearheaded the debate on the faculty of language as a cognitive by-product, or spandrel. As a linguist, rather than an evolutionary biologist, his theoretical emphasis was on the infinite capacity of speech and speaking: there are a fixed number of words, but there is an infinite combination of the words. [3]
With this said, "language acquisition is a matter of growth and maturation of relatively fixed capacities, under appropriate external conditions". The 17th century's amenable approach to language learning was very non-conforming, as the overall perception was that knowledge arose on the basis of scattered, inadequate data.
Statistical learning theory suggests that, when learning language, a learner would use the natural statistical properties of language to deduce its structure, including sound patterns, words, and the beginnings of grammar. [46] That is, language learners are sensitive to how often syllable combinations or words occur in relation to other syllables.