The contributors to this volume are linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, primatologists, and anthropologists who share the assumption that language, just as mind and brain, are products of biological evolution. The rise of human language is not viewed as a serendipitous mutation that gave birth to a unique linguistic organ, but as a gradual, adaptive extension of pre-existing mental capacities and brain structures. The contributors carefully study brain mechanisms, diachronic change, language acquisition, and the parallels between cognitive and linguistic structures to weave a web of hypotheses and suggestive empirical findings on the origins of language and the connections of language to other human capacities. The chapters discuss brain pathways that support linguistic processing; origins of specific linguistic features in temporal and hierarchical structures of the mind; the possible co-evolution of language and the reasoning about mental states; and the aspects of language learning that may serve as models of evolutionary change.

Table of Contents

The visual information-processing system as an evolutionary precursor of human language T. Givón 3 Embodied meaning Don M. Tucker 51 Missing links, issues and hypotheses in the evolutionary origin of language Charles N. Li 83 Sequentiality as the basis of constituent structure Joan L. Bybee 107 The internal structure of the syllable Barbara L. Davis and Peter F. Macneilage 133 On the origins of intersyllabic complexity Peter F. Macneilage and Barbara L. Davis 153 On the pre-linguistic origins of language processing rates Marjorie Barker and T. Givón 169 The clausal structure of linguistic and pre-linguistic behavior Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon and August Fenk 213 The gradual emergence of language Brian MacWhinney 231 The relation between language and theory of mind in development and evolution Bertram F. Malle 263 The rise of intentional understanding in human development Dare A. Baldwin 283 The emergence of grammar in early child language Michael Tomasello 307 Why does exposure to language matter? Jill P. Morford 327 Getting a handle on language creation Susan Goldin-Meadow 341 Language evolution, acquisition, diachrony Dan I. Slobin 373