Botha Rudolf, Everaert Martin (Editors). The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference

Oxford University Press. 2013. — 334 p. — (Studies in the Evolution of Language). — ISBN: 0199654840The book presents new and stimulating approaches to the study of language evolution and considers their implications for future research.Leading scholars from linguistics, primatology, anthroplogy, and cognitive science consider how language evolution can be understood by means of inference from the study of linked or analogous phenomena in language, animal behaviour, genetics, neurology, culture, and biology. In their introduction the editors show how these approaches can be interrelated and deployed together through their use of comparable forms of inference and the similar conditions they place on the use of evidence.The Evolutionary Emergence of Language will interest everyone concerned with this intriguing and important subject, including those in linguistics, biology, anthropology, archaeology, neurology, and cognitive science.Introduction: evidence and inference in the study of language evolution
What is special about the human language faculty and how did it get that way?
Language has evolved to depend on multiple-cue integration
Homesign as a way-station between co-speech gesture and sign language: the evolution of segmentation and sequencing Kin selection, pedagogy, and linguistic complexity: whence protolanguage?
Neanderthal linguistic abilities: an alternative view
The archaeology of number concept and its implications for the evolution of language
The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains
Speech-gesture links in the ontogeny and phylogeny of gestural communication
Exploring the gaps between primate calls and human language
Talking about apes, birds, bees, and other living creatures: language evolution in light of comparative animal behaviour
FoxP2 and deep homology in the evolution of birdsong and human language
Genetics, evolution, and the innateness of language