What is it about?
Our capacity for language is biological. Linguistic innovation comes about through our capacity to alter the environment of parts of speech.
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Why is it important?
It contrasts with 'big bang' theories about the origins of the linguistic brain. In evolutionary biology, these "bangs" are really successions of increasing significant pops that take place over tens of thousands of years in interacting populations of brains, not in sudden universal mutations. They are brought about through human- induced migrations of elements of speech.
Perspectives
To my knowledge this essentially biological understanding of the evolution of language, one which admits higher and higher orders of change is the most plausible explanation for the early rapid accelerations of linguistic capacity that get telescoped retrospectively into singular events.
Ray Jennings
Simon Fraser University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The biology of language and the epigenesis of recursive embedding, Interaction Studies Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems, March 2012, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/is.13.1.06jen.
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