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| | Edge: LANGUAGE, BIOLOGY, AND THE MIND |
 | | Instead of assuming that everything about language is sui generis—independent of the rest of the cognitive system—or the opposite extreme, which the anti-nativists might assume—that there's nothing special about language—I'm assuming there's something special about language, but that it's a variation on a theme. |
 | | Language is going to be understood in that fashion, as variations on existing themes, putting together kinds of circuits that are already there and making new copies of them, twiddling with them in different ways to make them more efficient, and connecting them in different ways. |
 | | You're going to see the hallmarks of cognition throughout language, because the general cognitive system is at least built in much the same way as the language system. |
| www.edge.org /3rd_culture/marcus03/marcus_index.html (5415 words) |
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