Theories for the Origin of Language
This is a piece of research which I produced for the Linguistics Department of UCLan (University of Central Lancashire), which explores two papers – the first, by Carina Buckley and James Steele, entitled “Evolutionary Ecology of Spoken Language: co-evolutionary hypotheses are testable“; the second, an article by Steven Pinker, entitled “Language as an Adaptation to the Cognitive Niche“.
The purpose of the report was to explore two different theories of language evolution and emergence and to then comparatively explore them. I also drew on Guy Deutscher’s excellent book The Unfolding of Language: The Evolution of Mankind’s Greatest Invention, which I highly recommend.
