Home

About Us

Help

Jobs

News

Site Index

OUP Worldwide

My Account

My Wish List

View Basket

Email this to a Friend

Printer-Friendly View

Basket: 0 items | £0.00

View Larger

Resources

Visit the Higher Education Gateway

Inspection Copy requests: Contact your local Rep

Related Categories

Linguistics

Anthropology

Also Recommended

The Origins of Meaning

Language in the Light of Evolution

James R. Hurford

£34.00

The Grammar of Words

An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology

Geert Booij

£16.99

The Genesis of Grammar

A Reconstruction

Bernd Heine, Tania Kuteva

£36.00

The Evolution of Morphology

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy

Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language

272 pages | 234x156mm

978-0-19-929978-2 | Hardback | 14 January 2010

Also available as: Paperback

Price: £74.00

Add to Wish List

A radically new proposal about the nature and evolution of language
Carefully argued, informative, and innovative
Provocative and iconoclastic

This book considers the evolution of the grammatical structure of words in the more general contexts of human evolution and the origins of language. The consensus in many fields is that language is well designed for its purpose, and became so either through natural selection or by virtue of non-biological constraints on how language must be structured. Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy argues that in certain crucial respects language is not optimally designed. This can be seen, he suggests, in the existence of not one but two kinds of grammatical organization - syntax and morphology - and in the morphological and morpho-phonological complexity which leads to numerous departures from the one-form-one-meaning principle.

Having discussed the issue of good and bad design in a wider biological context, the author shows that conventional explanations for the nature of morphology do not work. Its poor design features arose, he argues, from two characteristics present when the ancestors of modern humans had a vocabulary but no grammar. One of these was a synonymy-avoidance expectation, while the other was an articulatory and phonological apparatus that encouraged the development of new synonyms. Morphology developed in response to these conflicting pressures.

In this stimulating and carefully argued account Professor McCarthy offers a powerful challenge to conventional views of the relationship between syntax and morphology, to the adaptationist view of language evolution, and to the notion that language in some way reflects 'laws of form'. This fundamental contribution to understanding the nature and evolution of language will be of wide interest to linguists of all theoretical persuasions as well as to scholars in cognitive science and anthropology.

Readership: Scholars and students of the evolution of language from advanced undergraduate level upwards, as well as linguists, cognitive sciencists and anthropologists.

Recently Viewed

Notebooks

Leonardo da Vinci, Irma A. Richter...

£7.99

Trials of the Diaspora

A History of Anti-Semitism in England

Anthony Julius

£25.00

Subrogation

Law and Practice

Charles Mitchell, Stephen Watterson...

£180.00

The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.

Subscribe to RSS feeds

The Evolution of Morphology

Share