Category archives: Linguistics

Language evolution: The origin

Language evolution: The origin

Linguistics

By Pablo Bernabéu

1 Introduction Evolutionary linguistics encompasses the origins of language, the change within and across different languages, and the acquisition of language and languages by children and adults (Gong, Shuai, & Zhang, 2014). We shall start framing this voyage by looking back two centuries. Then, some theories of language origins seem to have displayed considerable ‘imagination’ […]

Studying language in people with dementia

Studying language in people with dementia

LinguisticsNeurobiology

By Adrià Rofes

People who are diagnosed with dementia may initially report problems on memory and/or language that affect their activities of daily living. Once factors such as depression, delirium, or mild cognitive impairment, are disregarded, these people are typically referred to a neurologist, radiologist, and neuropsychologist or speech therapist who will help them to understand the reason […]

Language, semantics and discourse: into the Landscape Model of reading

Language, semantics and discourse: into the Landscape Model of reading

Linguistics

By Pablo Bernabéu

Researchers seem to be reassured and perhaps compete in remarking the complexity of their own topics of study. We language scientists, however, can sit back and let our topic do the talking. Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics are, broadly, the super-cogs in the language machinery, each recruiting a set of brain systems in […]

History and legend in the origins of Islam (and IV)

History and legend in the origins of Islam (and IV)

AnthropologyHistoryLinguistics

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

We shall close with this entry our series (I, II, III) about the origins of Islam, indicating some further interesting facts about the Qur’an. 4) By Muhammad’s time, the Arabic alphabet contained no marks for vowels; furthermore, some groups of consonants were written with exactly the same character (e.g., the symbols for sounds b, t […]