The evolution of speech and language

Differentiation Between Agents and Patients in the Putative Two-Word Stage of Language Evolution

“…Language evolution remains a hotly debated, yet somewhat controversial topic, due to our limited ability to experimentally investigate it and observe it in nature. While some researchers contend that modern-like language emerged in a single leap from a “languageless” state (Berwick, 1998 ; Chomsky, 2002 ; Berwick et al, 2013 ; Nóbrega and Miyagawa, 2015 ; Berwick and Chomsky, 2016 , 2019 ; Chomsky et al, 2019 ; Tattersall, 2019 ; Reboul, 2021 ), others believe language evolution followed a more gradual path (Bickerton, 1990 , 2000 , 2007 ; Arbib, 2005 ; Hurford, 2007 , 2012 ; Krause et al, 2007 ; Knight, 2009 ; Casielles and Progovac, 2012 ; Dediu and Levinson, 2013 , 2014 , 2018 ; McMahon and McMahon, 2013 ; Collier et al, 2014 ; Janković and Šojer, 2014 ; Tallerman, 2014 , 2016 ; Lieberman, 2015 ; Everett, 2016 ; Planer, 2017 ; Gabrić et al, 2018 , 2021 ; Michlich, 2018 ; Gabrić, 2019 , 2021a , b ; Progovac, 2019 ; Barham and Everett, 2020 ; Botha, 2020 ; Lameira and Call, 2020 ; Mounier et al, 2020 ; Neto, 2020 ). Several scholars from the latter school of thought have proposed that there was a two-word stage in the course of language evolution, in which utterances could not combine more than two words (Jackendoff, 1999 ; Gil, 2008 , 2009 ; Hurford, 2012 , p.…”

Palaeolithic toolmaking and the evolution of cognition and language

“…In the past two decades great interest has emerged for interdisciplinary discussion on the evolution of cognition and specifically language (e.g. Janković and Šojer 2015). Recent work strongly emphasizes the role of cumulative culture, i.e.…”