Short description: Under a gradualist rather than an emergent view of language evolution, we can see how functional elements and linguistic morphology evolved.

Abstract:

The emergent view of language evolution argues that the language faculty appeared quite recently in human evolution and had no earlier pre-syntactic stages. Under this view, language is said to be an amalgamation of two pre-existing systems that also occur in animal communication: an ‘E’ system, for ‘expressive’, which is likened to systems of learned birdsong, and an ‘L’ system, for ‘lexical’, which is likened to monkey alarm calls. What occurred solely in the case of humans was the advent of a Merge operation, which integrated the two systems. Here we argue against this ‘integration hypothesis’. None of the proposed analogues in animal communication have the critical properties occurring in human language. The syntax of birdsong is unlike the syntax of language in all relevant respects. There are no analogues to the functional elements of the E-system in animal communication. However, under a gradualist rather than an emergent view of language evolution, we can see how functional elements and linguistic morphology evolved.

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Citation:

Tallerman M. (2016). Against The Emergent View Of Language Evolution. In S.G. Roberts, C. Cuskley, L. McCrohon, L. Barceló-Coblijn, O. Fehér & T. Verhoef (eds.) The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11). Available online: http://evolang.org/neworleans/papers/6.html