The Evolution of Language

by W. Tecumseh Fitch

• ISBN13: 9780521859936
• ISBN10: 052185993X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-05-17
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Language, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not? How, and why, did language evolve in our species and not in others? Since Darwin's theory of evolution, questions about the origin of language have generated a rapidly-growing scientific literature, stretched across a number of disciplines, much of it directed at specialist audiences. The diversity of perspectives - from linguistics, anthropology, speech science, genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology - can be bewildering. Tecumseh Fitch cuts through this vast literature, bringing together its most important insights to explore one of the biggest unsolved puzzles of human history.

Table of Contents

List of figures	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
The Lay of the Land
Language from a biological perspective	p. 13
Evolution: consensus and controversy	p. 35
Language	p. 73
Animal cognition and communication	p. 143
Meet the Ancestors
Meet the ancestors	p. 205
The LCA: our last common ancestor with chimpanzees	p. 234
Hominid paleontology and archaeology	p. 250
The Evolution of Speech
The evolution of the human vocal tract	p. 297
The evolution of vocal control: the neural basis for spoken language	p. 338
Models of the evolution of speech and phonology	p. 364
Evaluating Phylogenetic Models of Language Evolution
Historical overview: Western theories of language origin before Darwin	p. 389
Lexical protolanguage	p. 401
Signs before speech: gestural protolanguage theories	p. 433
Musical protolanguage	p. 466
Conclusions and prospects	p. 508
Glossary	p. 513
Appendix: species names	p. 519
References	p. 521
Author index	p. 605
Subject index	p. 607
Species index	p. 611
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