Evolution of language

Writing - 5000 years

Piattelli-Palmerini

language is a spandrel

Chomsky

Language not naturally selected
Probably product of principles of neural organization grounded in physical laws

Pinker and Bloom (1990)

Incremental evolution
Enhances cooperation

Givon (1995) Bickerton (1990)

Two main stages of evolution
Proto-language => Modern language (50000 yrs ago)

Elements

Non-situation specific language use
Conventional and unlimited symbols
Concatenation
Grammatical categories
Recursion

LanguageHumanUnique