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Interest in the relationship between Darwinism and the study of literature began in the nineteenth century, for example, among Italian literary critics. [2] For example, Ugo Angelo Canello argued that literature was the history of the human psyche, and as such, played a part in the struggle for natural selection, while Francesco de Sanctis argued that Emile Zola "brought the concepts of ...
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.
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 ...
Progressionism is the view that evolution is progress towards some goal of perfection, and that it is in some way directed towards that goal. [4] Lamarckism, a philosophy that long predates Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, is the view that evolution is guided by the inheritance of characteristics acquired by use or disuse during an animal's lifetime. [5]
Approaches to language as part of cultural evolution can be roughly divided into two main groups: genetic determinism which argues that languages stem from the human genome; and social Darwinism, as envisioned by August Schleicher and Max Müller, which applies principles and methods of evolutionary biology to linguistics.
Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. [1] It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages.
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]
Dating back to 1821, German linguist August Schleicher was the representative pioneer of biolinguistics, discussing the evolution of language based on Darwin's theory of evolution. Since linguistics had been believed to be a form of historical science under the influence of the Société de Linguistique de Paris , speculations of the origin of ...