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lectures > lectures spring 1999

Language and Human Nature

Professor James Hurford
May 29 1999

Only humans have complex language. Exploring human languages, we gain insight into the human traits that make language possible. Languages also serve as windows into human minds and societies.

Professor James Hurford received a degree from St. John's College, Cambridge, where he read Modern and Medieval Languages. He received his PhD at the University of London in 1967, where his thesis was The Speech of One Family: a phonetic comparison of the speech of three generations in a family of East Londoners. He has since been Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language, University of Lancaster, and is now Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. He has published several books which include: Language and Number: the emergence of a cognitive system (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1987); Grammar: a Student's Guide (CUP, 1994) and (edited with Michael Studdert-Kennedy and Chris Knight) Approaches to the Evolution of Language: social and cognitive bases (CUP, 1998). He is perhaps best known for his computer simulations of various aspects of the evolution of language.