How Could Language Have Evolved?
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Bolhuis-2014-How Could Language H.pdf
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Author(s)
Bolhuis, Johan J.
Tattersall, Ian
Berwick, Robert C.
Chomsky, Avram Noam
Date Issued
August 2014
Journal
PLoS Biology
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Citation
Bolhuis, Johan J., Ian Tattersall, Noam Chomsky, and Robert C. Berwick. “How Could Language Have Evolved?” PLoS Biology 12, no. 8 (August 26, 2014): e1001934.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language “phenotype.” According to the “Strong Minimalist Thesis,” the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary theory must explain) is hierarchical syntactic structure. The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000–100,000 years ago, and does not seem to have undergone modification since then, though individual languages do of course change over time, operating within this basic framework. The recent emergence of language and its stability are both consistent with the Strong Minimalist Thesis, which has at its core a single repeatable operation that takes exactly two syntactic elements a and b and assembles them to form the set {a, b}.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001934
