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The phenomenon of human language and language use is remarkable. The spectacular complexity and subtlety of the world’s languages, and our astonishing ability to acquire and use them to convey instructions, depths of feeling, scientific theories, and so much more, may indeed be the most distinctive collective human achievement. In this book, we argue that to begin to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must look at its origins. That is, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire the skill of generating and understanding; and generation by generation, as languages change, split and fuse, through processes of cultural evolution, from what we imagine to be the rudimentary communicative systems of our far distant ancestors to the richness and diversity of natural languages today. It turns out, as we shall see, that understanding the creation of language across the three timescales of language processing, acquisition, and evolution, throws new light on each level. By considering the cascade of processes that led language to come to be, we can perhaps better understand what language is. This book attempts to show that this can be done, and, in the process, how we can think afresh about some of the profound puzzles in the science of human language—why language has the structure it does, how we process it so effortlessly, why languages are learnable, and how languages have evolved.
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