Evolutionary approaches to cultural change are increasingly influential, and many scientists believe that a 'grand synthesis' is now in sight. The papers in this Theme Issue, which derives from a symposium held by the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity (University College London) in December 2008, focus on how the phylogenetic tree-building and network-based techniques used to ...

Our aim in this article is to argue that an adequate account of semantic development in early ®rst language acquisition requires a theory and methodology that synthesize the insights of cognitive and cultural linguistics with a Vygotskian sociocultural approach to human development. This involves recasting and extending the notion of embodiment, which is a central philosophical underpinning of ...

Text analysis traditions in France and the United States include discourse analysis, critical linguistics, French functional linguistics, Bakhtinian dialogics, and “generous reading.” These frames have not been used, however, in crosscultural analysis of university student writing. The author presents a study of 250 student texts from French and U.S. introductory university courses, using a met...

A language evolves by modification and cultural inheritance. This legitimizes the attempt to reconstruct language history and describe the processes governing language evolution. The techniques developed in linguistics are also used in sequence analysis, where inheritance is genetic instead of cultural. These problems are exciting and hard. For sake of realism the project will entail major simp...

Narrowly defined, contrastive linguistics can be regarded as a branch of comparative linguistics that is concerned with pairs of languages which are ‘socio-culturally linked’. Two languages can be said to be socio-culturally linked when (i) they are used by a considerable number of bior multilingual speakers, and/or (ii) a substantial amount of ‘linguistic output’ (text, oral discourse) is tran...

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the future of Cultural Linguistics (see Chapter 32 this volume) as a tool for exploring a variety of linguistic phenomena along with their intra-group and inter-group cultural instantiations. As a subfield of linguistics, Cultural Linguistics has the potential to bring forth a model that successfully melds together complementary approaches, e.g., viewing...

Many “histories” of linguistics have been written over the last two hundred years, and since the 1970s linguistic historiography has become a specialized subfield, with conferences, professional organizations, and journals of its own. Works on the history of linguistics often had such goals as defending a particular school of thought, promoting nationalism in various countries, or focussing on ...