The Evolution of Language

This book brings together the most important insights from the vast amount of literature on the origin of language.

W. Tecumseh Fitch (Author)

9780521677363, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 1 April 2010

624 pages, 25 b/w illus. 6 tables
24.7 x 17.4 x 2.8 cm, 1.21 kg

'Tecumseh Fitch's book reads like a novel, telling the story of the long and complex search for a theory of language evolution very clearly and engagingly … comprehensive, analytic, and fair.' Merlin Donald, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario

Language, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not? How, and why, did language evolve in our species and not in others? Since Darwin's theory of evolution, questions about the origin of language have generated a rapidly-growing scientific literature, stretched across a number of disciplines, much of it directed at specialist audiences. The diversity of perspectives - from linguistics, anthropology, speech science, genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology - can be bewildering. Tecumseh Fitch cuts through this vast literature, bringing together its most important insights to explore one of the biggest unsolved puzzles of human history.

Introduction
Part I. The Lay of the Land: 1. Language from a biological perspective
2. Evolution
3. Language
4. Animal cognition and communication
Part II. Meet the Ancestors: 5. Meet the ancestors
6. The last common ancestor
7. The hominid fossil record
Part III. The Evolution of Speech: 8. The evolution of the human vocal tract
9. The evolution of vocal control
10. Modelling the evolution of speech
Part IV. Phylogenetic Models of Language Evolution: 11. Language evolution before Darwin
12. Lexical protolanguage
13. Gestural protolanguage
14. Musical protolanguage
15. Conclusions and prospects.

Subject Areas: Evolution [PSAJ], Anthropology [JHM], Historical & comparative linguistics [CFF], Linguistics [CF]