Publisher's Synopsis
All men speak. All human groups speak. Each indigenous society has its language. The slaves in tropical islands made their languages and spoke them. In modern societies, language is everywhere. It is uttered, written, kept in books or on records, and exchanged on social networks. In restaurants and streets and on phones, radio and TV, humans speak. Children speak a lot. Love implies language. Politics is founded on language. As early as 1250 BC, Ramses II used hieroglyphic writing for his propaganda. In modern societies, humans are solicited by enormous amounts of uttered sentences delivered on media, while written language has invaded their private lives through technical documents, SMS and social network texts. Nowadays, an individual is submitted to a permanent receptive language flow. The new human era on earth is often called "anthropocene". It might be coined "language-cene." In this book, the author hypothesizes that syntax, precisely defined, is a cultural and functional autonomous entity with a profound specificity and particular internal mechanisms. We speak of a "basic syntax." We would like to understand how all types of human beings in the entire world, and possibly for millennia, have organized a basic sequence of their words, so that they can describe their environment, and express their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.
