For a long time, human language has been assumed to be genetically determined and
therefore the product of biological evolution. It is only within the last decade that researchers …

Models developed to study the origins of language—both theoretical and computational—
often tacitly assume that linguistic signals fully specify the meanings they communicate …

Human language is unique among the communication systems of the natural world: it is
socially learned and, as a consequence of its recursively compositional structure, offers …

Human language is both a cognitive and a cultural phenomenon. Any evolutionary account
of language, then, must address both biological and cultural evolution. In this thesis, I give a …

There are two possible sources of structure in language: biological evolution of the
language faculty, or cultural evolution of language itself. Two recent models (Griffiths & …

The evolution of language has developed into a large research field. Two questions are
particularly relevant for this strand of research: firstly, how did the human capacity for …

Pragmatics has historically played a relatively peripheral role in language evolution
research. This is a profound mistake. Here I describe how a pragmatic perspective can …

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that addresses the relationship between language
and its external environment–in particular the communicative context. Social evolution (or …

A central issue of debate in linguistics is the nativist hypothesis: the proposal that universally
observed features of languages can be explained by a universally shared and biologically …

Abstract Language is one of only a handful of human cultural systems that is both unique to
our species, and universal. This chapter will focus on the cultural evolution of language …