LING 100 Lecture 2: LING 100 Week 2

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 100
• Professor: Clifford Burgess

Document Summary

Readings: course text chapter 16, two articles noted in syllabus for week 4. The age-old difficulty with all theories of language origin: the discontinuity problem. Changes to the brain, hearing, and other physiological aspects of humans coincided with changes in our oral cavity. Our oral cavity is great for speech, but it can also kill us. Early theories of language origin look very dated now, but all have at least a small insight or two. We get things done with people cooperatively (origins of language; theories) Foxp2 gene is implicated in some language disorders. Maybe that gene was essential to development of language in the first place. Same parts of the brain are involved in both. Speech may be overlay to bodily changes that were required for other purposes. Marcus: language as only part of a larger cognitive system rooted in operation of memory. Holden: language readiness , tool-making as precursor to language.