The emergence of language

Mind and Language 32 (5):579-590 (2017)
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Abstract

This paper argues that the faculty of language comes essentially for free in evolutionary terms, by grace of a capacity shared with some evolutionarily quite distantly related animals for deliberatively planning action in the world. The reason humans have language of a kind that animals do not is because of a qualitative difference in the nature of human plans rather than anything unique to language.

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10.1111/mila.12160

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Mark Steedman
University of Edinburgh

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References found in this work

Vision.David Marr - 1982 - W. H. Freeman.
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.Noam Chomsky - 1965 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.Ann S. Ferebee - 1965 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 35 (1):167.

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