Peter Bradley

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This matter arises in various aspects of the invention of language, such as in the fact that language is ‘just good enough’. Far from being a perfect biological system of any sort, language just gets by, often failing to communicate as well as one might imagine, its hearers employing general facts of the environmental context and world knowledge to interpret what is being said. And this echoes the strategies of aphasics and Homo erectus. Context and general knowledge are crucial to figure out the meanings of what people are hearing and in order to understand how to respond in the course of the ...more
How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention
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