Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and Cognitive Bases

This is one of the first systematic attempts to bring language within the neo-Darwinian framework of modern evolutionary theory. Twenty-four coordinated essays by linguists, phoneticians, anthropologists, psychologists and cognitive scientists explore the origins of the complex structure of human language, emphasizing its social (as opposed to purely practical) bases, and showing the mechanisms by which this structure emerges, is maintained, and develops.