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Evolutionary linguistics or Darwinian linguistics is a sociobiological approach to the study of language. [1] [2] Evolutionary linguists consider linguistics as a subfield of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.
Noam Chomsky spearheaded the debate on the faculty of language as a cognitive by-product, or spandrel. As a linguist, rather than an evolutionary biologist, his theoretical emphasis was on the infinite capacity of speech and speaking: there are a fixed number of words, but there is an infinite combination of the words. [3]
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
Saussure approaches the essence of language from two sides. For the one, he borrows ideas from Steinthal [31] and Durkheim, concluding that language is a 'social fact'. For the other, he creates a theory of language as a system in and for itself which arises from the association of concepts and words or expressions. Thus, language is a dual ...
John L. Locke is an American biolinguist who has contributed to the understanding of language development and the evolution of language.His work has focused on how language emerges in the social context of interaction between infants, children and caregivers, how speech and language disorders can shed light on the normal developmental process and vice versa, how brain and cognitive science can ...
This theory assumes an inborn capacity for language where language learning takes place from a place of priming. As such, Chomsky's view is that humans invariably have a certain language input at birth and therefore language learning after happens as enforcement based on the already present structure of grammar in the individual.
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
As mentioned above, biolinguistics challenges the idea that the acquisition of language is a result of behavior based learning. This alternative approach the biolinguistics challenges is known as the usage-based (UB) approach. UB supports that idea that knowledge of human language is acquired via exposure and usage. [25]