Language as Cognitive Adaptation
Összefoglaló
The present book is the outcome of research I have been doing in two distinct areas, connected seemingly only by the fact that they are both concerned with language. These areas are the cognitive-biological aspects of language evolution and the cognitive aspects of semantic change. Within the first area I have mainly dealt with the question of how the biologically separate functions of communica-tion and cognition have become combined in the capacity for language and what evolutionary biological mechanisms were responsible for this development. In connection with semantic change I have mainly studied the cognitive processes behind speakers’ synchronic linguistic behavior when they modify conventional meanings and the diachronic linguistic process in which such new meanings become conventionalized.
