The DOI matches its Crossref record; 51 of the 51 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
How Could Language Have Evolved?
Open accessAbstract
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}.
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Cites
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Self-citationFoundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution
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Self-citationGenetic Signatures of Strong Recent Positive Selection at the Lactase Gene
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Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africa
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Cited by
The Cortical Organization of Syntax
Matchin, W., & Hickok, G. (2020) · Cerebral Cortex · doi:10.1093/cercor/bhz180 · Cited by 370
Friederici, A. D., Chomsky, N., Berwick, R. C., Moro, A., & Bolhuis, J. J. (2017) · Nature Human Behaviour · doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0184-4 · Cited by 341
Self-citationThe Molecular Basis of Human Brain Evolution
Enard, W. (2016) · Current Biology · doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.09.030 · Cited by 55
Evolutionary Dynamics Do Not Motivate a Single-Mutant Theory of Human Language
de Boer, B., Thompson, B., Ravignani, A., & Boeckx, C. (2019) · doi:10.1101/517029 · Cited by 10
Metadata
- Authors
- Bolhuis, J. J., Tattersall, I., Chomsky, N., & Berwick, R. C.
- Venue
- PLoS Biology
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2014-08-26
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- e1001934
- ISSN
- 1544-9173 (ISSN-L)
- 1545-7885
- OpenAlex
- W1507846153
- Cited by
- 335
- References
- 51
- FWCI
- 367.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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