The Transition to Language

Alison Wray gained her BA and D.Phil. degrees from the University of York. She has worked in departments of music, linguistics, and communication, and her research focuses on three major areas: historical pronunciation for early music, formulaic language, and language evolution. She has published papers and chapters on all three areas, and her books include: The Focusing Hypothesis (1992), Projects in Linguistics (1998, with Trott and Bloomer) and Formulaic Language and the Lexicon (2002).

• PART I: MAKING READY FOR LANGUAGE: NECESSARY, BUT NOT SUFFICIENT ; PART II: INTERNAL TRIGGERS TO TRANSITION: GENES, PROCESSING, CULTURE, GESTURE, AND TECHNOLOGY ; PART III: EXTERNAL TRIGGERS TO TRANSITION: ENVIRONMENT, POPULATION, AND SOCIAL CONTEXT ; PART IV: THE ONWARD JOURNEY: DETERMINING THE SHAPE OF LANGUAGE

... a thought-provoking volume, with implications not just for language evolution but for how we conceptualise language acquisition, language structure and language change.