Full Description
The book presents new and stimulating approaches to the study of language evolution and considers their implications for future research. Leading scholars from linguistics, primatology, anthroplogy, and cognitive science consider how language evolution can be understood by means of inference from the study of linked or analogous phenomena in language, animal behaviour, genetics, neurology, culture, and biology. In their introduction the editors show how these approaches can be interrelated and deployed together through their use of comparable forms of inference and the similar conditions they place on the use of evidence.
The Evolutionary Emergence of Language will interest everyone concerned with this intriguing and important subject, including those in linguistics, biology, anthropology, archaeology, neurology, and cognitive science.
Contents
1. Introduction: evidence and inference in the study of language evolution ; 2. What is special about the human language faculty and how did it get that way? ; 3. Language has evolved to depend on multiple-cue integration ; 4. Homesign as a way-station between co-speech gesture and sign language: the evolution of segmenting and sequencing ; 5. Kin selection, pedagogy and linguistic complexity: whence protolanguage? ; 6. Neanderthal linguistic abilities: an alternative view ; 7. The archaeology of number concept and its implications for the evolution of language ; 8. The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains ; 9. Speech-gesture links and the ontogeny and phylogeny of gestural communication ; 10. Exploring the gaps between primate calls and human language ; 11. Talking about apes, birds, bees, and other living creatures: language evolution in light of comparative animal behaviour ; 12. FoxP2 and deep homology in the evolution of birdsong and human language ; 13. Genetics, evolution, and the innateness of language ; References ; Indexes
