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Humans uniquely are the big-brained animals with language. Explore what language is, how your mind makes it happen, and thereby what it means to be human.
Soon we will talk to artificial minds: minds that were created not by natural evolution, but by human design. In this paper, we will use human language to discover how the mind works and where the mind ends: at the brain, the body or beyond? We look at language as symbol, as a network and as ecology. After studying what language is, we examine competing theories of how our species evolved language in the first place.
| Paper title | Language, Brain, and Being Human |
|---|---|
| Paper code | LING140 |
| Subject | Linguistics |
| EFTS | 0.1500 |
| Points | 18 points |
| Teaching period | Not offered in 2022 (Distance learning) |
| Domestic Tuition Fees (NZD) | $929.55 |
| International Tuition Fees | Tuition Fees for international students are elsewhere on this website. |
- Restriction
- LING 240
- Schedule C
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All course materials available online.
- Graduate Attributes Emphasised
- Interdisciplinary perspective, Scholarship, Communication, Critical thinking, Teamwork.
View more information about Otago's graduate attributes. - Learning Outcomes
- Summarise arguments from complex resources
- Differentiate theories of the human mind and language
- Propose a model of the human language faculty
- Assess and evaluate competing theories of language evolution
