The Evolutionary Emergence of Language

Language has no counterpart in the animal world. Unique to Homo sapiens, it
appears inseparable from human nature. But how, when and why did it emerge?
The contributors to this volume – linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists and
others – adopt a modern Darwinian perspective to offer a bold synthesis of the human and natural sciences. As a feature of human social intelligence, language evolution is driven by biologically anomalous levels of social cooperation. Phonetic competence correspondingly reflects social pressures for vocal imitation, learning and other forms of social transmission. Distinctively human social and cultural strategies gave rise to the complex syntactic structure of speech. This book, presenting language as a remarkable social adaptation, testifies to the growing influence of evolutionary thinking in contemporary linguistics. It will be welcomed by all those interested in human evolution, evolutionary psychology, linguistic anthropology and general
linguistics.

Chris Knight is Reader in Anthropology at the University of East London. His
highly acclaimed and widely debated first book, Blood Relations: Menstruation
and the Origins of Culture (1991), outlined a new theory of human origins. He
has also authored many book chapters and journal articles on human cognitive and
linguistic evolution and was coeditor of Approaches to the Evolution of Language
(1998).
Michael Studdert-Kennedy is past President of Haskins Laboratories and Professor
Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Connecticut and of Communications
at the City University of New York. He has published numerous articles on speech
perception and speech development and edited or coedited several books, including
Psychobiology of Language (1983) and Approaches to the Evolution of Language
(1998).
James R. Hurford has been Professor of General Linguistics at the University
of Edinburgh since 1979. He is the author of many books, including Language
and Number: The Emergence of a Cognitive System (1987), and was coeditor of
Approaches to the Evolution of Language (1998). He is perhaps best known for his
computer simulations of various aspects of the evolution of language.

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