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Cited by 335

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 access
Bolhuis, Johan J., Tattersall, Ian, Chomsky, Noam, Berwick, Robert C.·2014·PLoS Biology
DOI 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001934
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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}.

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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
DOI
10.1371/journal.pbio.1001934
OpenAlex
W1507846153
Cited by
335
References
51
FWCI
367.72
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

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