Analyzing Everyday Texts: Discourse, Rhetoric, and Social Perspectives, Vol. 3 Book

An overview of the unique human adaptations to speaking, both those in the mouth and those in the brain. It's aimed at a popular audience, but that doesn't mean it ever talks down to you or tries to oversimplify. It deliberately takes sides in the controversies about language evolution, arguing that Neanderthals had language but significantly inferior to that of modern humans, and that there is no instinctive Universal Grammar underlying the world's languages. (In this second point, Lieberman disagrees with Chomsky, no less). I would have preferred to read a book that gathered a wider variety of authors and theories on language evolution, but no such book was available at the local libraries. In a pinch, I think it's possible to get some sense of the disputes in a balanced way by reading this book together with The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, a linguist and popular writer who supports the Chomskian orthodoxy.