James R. Hurford is Professor of General Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. He is co-editor, with Kathleen Gibson, of OUP's Studies in Language Evolution, co-founder, with Simon Kirby, of the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit at the University of Edinburgh, and co-founder, with Chris Knight, of the EVOLANG series of international conferences on the evolution of language. His books include The Linguistic Theory of Numerals (CUP, 1975), Language and Number: The Emergence of a Cognitive System (Blackwell, 1987), and Grammar: A Student's Guide (CUP 1994).

• Part I Meaning Beford Communication


• 1: Let's Agree on Terms


• 2: Animals Approach Human Cognition


• 3: A New Kind of Memory Evolves


• 4: Animals Form proto-propositions


• 5: Towards Human Semantics


• Part II Communication: What and Why?


• 6: Communication by Dyadic Acts


• 7: Going Triadic: Precursors of Reference


• 8: Why Communicate? Squaring With Evolutionary Theory


• 9: Cooperation, Fair Play and Trust in Primates


• 10: Epilogue


• Bibliography


• Index

In this, the first of two ground-breaking volumes on the nature of language in the light of the way it evolved, James Hurford looks at the origins of meaning and of its expression in language and reviews a mass of evidence to uncover the evolutionary path between the non-speaking minds of apes and our own speaking minds. This is a landmark contribution to the understanding of linguistic and thinking processes, and the fullest account yet published of the evolution of language and communication.