Abstract
In the last quarter century we have seen an explosion of interest in the field of language evolution, and the pace is only picking up. This is deservedly so, as without understanding how human language evolved, we can hardly understand what language really is, or what defines humanhood.
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Notes
- 1.
Curiously, the scholars who advocate rejecting this topic have themselves published books and/or articles on language evolution. This is certainly the case with Berwick, Chomsky, and Boeckx.
- 2.
Of note is that subscribing to a saltationist (sudden) view does not necessarily force one to the recent scenario view; it is logically possible that language emerged suddenly, in its full complexity, in some other species, such as H. heidelbergensis, our common ancestor with Neanderthals, but as far as I am aware, this idea has not been entertained by saltationists. They insist on the abrupt discontinuity between humans and any other species.
- 3.
Such researchers seem to have already decided, in advance of any systematic investigation, that addressing the Decomposition Problem is too hard a puzzle to crack.
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Progovac, L. (2019). Introduction to Divergent Views. In: A Critical Introduction to Language Evolution. SpringerBriefs in Linguistics(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03235-7_1
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