Overview

Tool Intelligence taps primatological and linguistic field research to draw an analogy between prelinguistic material cultures of nonhuman primates and natural human languages. Linguistics and cognitive science are given new incentives to search for cognitive homology in areas of extended problem awareness and manipulative intentionality.

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9781498561211

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In her new book, Tool Intelligence as an Explanation of Cross-Linguistic Variation and Family Resemblance: An Evolutionary and Typological Investigation, Anneliese Kuhle has rendered the cognitive, linguistics, and evolutionary communities a great service. She provides a well-researched and clearly argued uniformitarianist thesis of language evolution. Carefully researching human linguistic abilities as an outgrowth of tool use, she provides new arguments for the thesis that the roots of human linguistic abilities reach back beyond the dawn of our species and are continuous with similar skills found in other species. Her ideas present a challenge for the simplistic view that human language is a recent mutation and utterly unlike the skills we see in other primates. I strongly recommend this book to serious students of linguistic and cognitive evolution. I learned a great deal from reading this marvelous study. -- Daniel L. Everett, Bentley University, Author of <i>How Language Began</i> In an impressive tour de force, Kuhle takes on one of the most intractable issues in the language sciences. This book formulates and provides a wealth of cross-disciplinary evidence for a radically new theoretical hypothesis regarding the evolutionary development of language. Postulating a direct continuity between prelinguistic tool intelligence, as is manifested in the tool-using behavior of great apes, and the linguistic intelligence of Homo sapiens, the book's argument rests on a finely worked convergence of empirical findings from a wide range of research fields, from evolutionary biology, primate studies, gestalt psychology, learning theory, and ape language research to language typology, linguistic anthropology, functional grammar, and cognitive linguistics. For many years to come, this highly stimulating and articulate work will be a rich source of ideas and productive insights for readers and researchers interested in the cognitive foundations and evolutionary development of the human capacity for language. -- Talbot J. Taylor, The College of William and Mary Only humans use language for social communication. Does this uniqueness exclude evolutionary roots in animals? Anneliese Kuhle presents incisive, in-depth discussions about the underlying essential cognitive faculties of language within the conceptual frame of general intelligence deriving the arguments from the viewpoints of comparative behavioral biology, neuroscience, psychology and linguistics. Tool intelligence is identified as the key evolutionary driving force leading from innovative and socially transmitted use of physical tools in great apes to the mental tools required for language acquisition in humans. The broad cross-disciplinary approach enriches enormously the current debate about the biological conditions of language evolution. -- Randolf Menzel, Freie Universitat Berlin The greatest challenge in explaining the evolutionary origins of human language arises from its unique standing in the animal kingdom. Bridging the gap between language and other cognitive faculties, in humans and in other animals, is not made easier by the theoretical landscape in either of the two major schools of linguistics. On the one hand, the generativist concept of Universal Grammar is predicated on human biological uniqueness and on the special status of language in cognition. On the other hand, the functionalist theories, which reject those tenets, shift the explanatory burden to the domains of cumulative culture and social dynamics, where humans seem to be no less of an outlier. The work of Anneliese Kuhle suggests a way out of this double bind. In her new book, Kuhle brings together findings from comparative ethology with extensive language-typological data and analysis to argue that tool intelligence, which humans share to various degrees with many other species, can not only explain the patterns of cross-linguistic variation and family resemblance, but also, ultimately, shed light on the question of language evolution. -- Shimon Edelman, Cornell University This impressive book develops a novel perspective on the evolution of language that involves the discovery of material cultures in nonhuman primates as a major stepping stone for the reconstruction of hominin evolution. The discussion sets out with a broad consideration of different theories of learning, ranging from the biolinguistic to the functionalist notion of human linguistic capacity. Building on the functionalist notion of general intelligence, Kuhle subsequently turns to her own hypothesis that tool intelligence in particular promoted the early transitional phase from non-intentional to human-style linguistic communication by means of social transmission and cumulative cultural development. Kuhle supports her line of argument based on various criteria of cultural development independently of language and verifies her predictions with reference to grammatical constructions from minority languages spoken in Aboriginal Australia and the Pacific region. The work concludes with a broad outlook on how the tool hypothesis benefits the current debate on human languages and how the notion of `language as tool' connects to other influential views of linguistic embodiment and distributed cognition. Overall, I consider this book as an outstanding contribution to the field and I am confident that it will make a significant impact. -- Farzad Sharifian, Monash University

In her new book, Tool Intelligence as an Explanation of Cross-Linguistic Variation and Family Resemblance: An Evolutionary and Typological Investigation, Anneliese Kuhle has rendered the cognitive, linguistics, and evolutionary communities a great service. She provides a well-researched and clearly argued uniformitarianist thesis of language evolution. Carefully researching human linguistic abilities as an outgrowth of tool use, she provides new arguments for the thesis that the roots of human linguistic abilities reach back beyond the dawn of our species and are continuous with similar skills found in other species. Her ideas present a challenge for the simplistic view that human language is a recent mutation and utterly unlike the skills we see in other primates. I strongly recommend this book to serious students of linguistic and cognitive evolution. I learned a great deal from reading this marvelous study. -- Daniel L. Everett, Bentley University

Author Information

Anneliese Kuhle is postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for English Language and Literature, Freie Universität Berlin.

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