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19 - The Evolution of Language

A Darwinian Approach

from Part V - Evolution and Cognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2020

By
Michael C. Corballis
Edited by
Lance Workman ,
Will Reader  and
Jerome H. Barkow
Lance Workman
Affiliation:
University of South Wales
Will Reader
Affiliation:
Sheffield Hallam University
Jerome H. Barkow
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
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Summary

It is commonly assumed that expressive language is a secondary consequence of an abrupt change in human thought that emerged uniquely in humans within the past 100,000 years. This is difficult to reconcile with the theory of evolution by natural selection. An alternative view is that human thought evolved gradually over many millennia and has properties shared with other species. Some of these properties are critical to language; they include mental time travel, which underlies the linguistic properties of generativity and displacement, and theory of mind, which is critical to meaningful discourse. What does seem to be unique to humans is the ability to communicate our thoughts, rather than the nature of the thoughts themselves. Expressive language depended on the relatively late emergence of output systems flexible enough to map onto internal experience. I argue here that it was built first on manual gesture, with the gradual addition of vocalization.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior , pp. 233 - 240
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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