The “tip of the tongue” phenomenon is a fairly common situation in which someone is unable to retrieve a known word (usually a noun or proper name) without a protracted series of attempts at associated words or ideas to prompt one’s memory. This has been the subject of substantial research, since the causes remain unknown.… Continue reading

I mentioned Chomsky’s “Merge” hypothesis briefly in Chapter 2, but this is another topic that merits (and has certainly received) many chapters (and books) of its own. Some of the more interesting recent articles that have dealt with aspects of “Merge” in reference to the evolution of language include: Hartmann’s 2020 “Language Change and Language… Continue reading

There is so much going on with animal communication research, particularly in relation to the evolution of human language (far more than the brief account that I provided in Chapter 2), that I thought I’d start this post with a link to Berthet and colleagues’ 2023 primer on “Animal Linguistics” in Biological Reviews, which provides… Continue reading

2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of C. K. (Charles Kay) Ogden and I. A. (Ivor Armstrong) Richards’ 1923 book, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language on Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, which the late Umberto Eco termed “A seminal book, whose merit was to say… Continue reading

Charles (“Chas”) Hockett of Cornell University was a towering figure in linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s, primarily as a leading proponent of Leonard Bloomfield’s approach to structural linguistics, which purported to offer a systematic, scientific approach to the study of languages, but which has suffered a dramatic decline in popularity in America during the… Continue reading

In Chapter Two, I very briefly mention one of the key figures in the study of cross-species communication: the late Thomas Sebeok. Born in Hungary, he came to the United States in 1937, graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree and from Princeton University with master’s and doctoral degrees. As a linguist,… Continue reading

One of the great pleasures of writing a book is having the opportunity to become more familiar with the work of those perhaps not directly in one’s own discipline (whatever that may be) but a knowledge of whose work may immeasurably enrich one’s own. Even though I had come across The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary… Continue reading