Keywords In and Out of Context

Neanderthal language capabilities are back in the news. According to well-known prehistorian Steven Mithen (whose “Hmmmmm” theory of language evolution I cited in Chapter 3), “the evidence points to key differences in the brains of our species and those of Neanderthals that allowed modern humans (H. sapiens) to come up with abstract and complex ideas Continue reading

I worked in marketing at Cornell University Press in Ithaca while completing my dissertation years ago, and one book on our backlist there happened to be Walter Ong’s 1977 Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, which is one of the lesser-known of his several works on “the word” (his Continue reading

One of the reasons that I chose to create this “post-book” blog is to have a place in which I can add important findings of which I was not aware while I was writing Keywords In and Out of Context. This allows me to live la bella vita as a professor emerita, by which I Continue reading

Today is Earth Day, which I remember celebrating in my high school science class way back in 1970, though, as I recall, it mostly involved picking up trash around our school grounds (including cigarette butts from the “student smoking” area, which back then was an officially sanctioned part of school life.) In any event, I’m Continue reading

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

Terrence Deacon‘s 1997 The Symbolic Species is briefly mentioned in Chapter 3, but his body of work could undoubtedly have occupied multiple chapters (even if we didn’t mention his brilliant discussion of the limitations of Shannon’s information theory in “Information and Reference”) as he is a leader in the emergence of semiotic cognitive neuroscience, which 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