{"id":2271,"date":"2012-03-31T21:27:18","date_gmt":"2012-03-31T19:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/?p=2271"},"modified":"2024-02-24T10:42:01","modified_gmt":"2024-02-24T09:42:01","slug":"nick-enfield-reviews-hurfords-the-origins-of-grammar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/blogs\/icci-blog\/nick-enfield-reviews-hurfords-the-origins-of-grammar\/","title":{"rendered":"Nick Enfield reviews Hurford’s The Origins of Grammar"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the Times Literary Supplement, Nick Enfield reviews James R. Hurford’s new book The Origins of Grammar, Oxford UP, 2011 (a sequel to The Origins of Meaning, Oxford UP, 2007):<\/p>\n

“If you could travel back to a time around the dawn of humankind, and if you encountered a people there whose only form of language was a list of one-word interjections like Yuck, Wow, Oops, Hey!, No, and Huh?, would you say that these people were of a different species, not quite human? Would they be like today\u2019s apes that simply don\u2019t have it in them to fully acquire a modern human language? Or would they be the same as us only less well equipped for communication, like the eighteenth-century man who is every bit human but happens not to have been born in a world with telephones? If the latter were true, then language would be more technology than biology, more something we build than something that grows. It\u2019s clear that the earliest humans did not possess language as we know it. The question is whether this was because language as we know it hadn\u2019t yet been invented.<\/p>\n

In James R. Hurford\u2019s towering account of our species\u2019 path from being once without language to now being emphatically with it, he proposes that just such a monophrase language of the Yuck\/Wow variety was an important early human achievement. And, Hurford argues, while our earliest forms of language had no grammatical rules by which words were combined to form sentences, they were far from primitive call systems.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Times Literary Supplement, Nick Enfield reviews James R. Hurford’s new book The Origins of Grammar, Oxford UP, 2011 (a sequel to The Origins of Meaning, Oxford UP, 2007): “If you could travel back to a time around the dawn of humankind, and if you encountered a people there whose only form of language […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":685,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNick Enfield reviews Hurford's The Origins of Grammar - International Cognition and Culture Institute<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/nick-enfield-reviews-hurfords-the-origins-of-grammar\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Nick Enfield reviews Hurford's The Origins of Grammar - International Cognition and Culture Institute\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In the Times Literary Supplement, Nick Enfield reviews James R. Hurford’s new book The Origins of Grammar, Oxford UP, 2011 (a sequel to The Origins of Meaning, Oxford UP, 2007): “If you could travel back to a time around the dawn of humankind, and if you encountered a people there whose only form of language […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/nick-enfield-reviews-hurfords-the-origins-of-grammar\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"International Cognition and Culture Institute\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-03-31T19:27:18+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-02-24T09:42:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hurford-208x300.jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\">\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"The ICCI Team\">\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Estimated reading time\">\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"1 minute\">\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/\",\"name\":\"International Cognition and Culture Institute\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/?s={search_term_string}\",\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\"},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/nick-enfield-reviews-hurfords-the-origins-of-grammar\/#primaryimage\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hurford-208x300.jpeg\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/nick-enfield-reviews-hurfords-the-origins-of-grammar\/#webpage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/nick-enfield-reviews-hurfords-the-origins-of-grammar\/\",\"name\":\"Nick Enfield reviews Hurford's The Origins of Grammar - International Cognition and Culture Institute\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/nick-enfield-reviews-hurfords-the-origins-of-grammar\/#primaryimage\"},\"datePublished\":\"2012-03-31T19:27:18+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-02-24T09:42:01+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#\/schema\/person\/3663e04874ff7df2f070d2982a1474ad\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/nick-enfield-reviews-hurfords-the-origins-of-grammar\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#\/schema\/person\/3663e04874ff7df2f070d2982a1474ad\",\"name\":\"The ICCI Team\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#personlogo\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/cdc7166b2c4c44441b1c2c13cea716e8?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fcognitionandculture.local%2Fwp-content%2Fthemes%2Fbelle%2Fuser.png&r=g\",\"caption\":\"The ICCI Team\"}}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2271"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/685"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18374,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2271\/revisions\/18374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}