A few swipes of a cloth, and many centuries of Northern European language evolution disappeared.
Language evolution can be compared to biological evolution, but whereas genetic change is driven by environmental pressures, languages change and develop through social pressures.
Students of animal communication justify their work by seeing it as adding to our knowledge of human language evolution.
She notes that more than a thousand studies on language evolution have been published since 1990, and she seems determined to cite as many as possible.
He is, after all, a professor of language evolution – "possibly the only one in the world," he says, without a hint of arrogance.
Chomsky's view of language evolution, based on his word-centric, rule-driven generative grammar model of language can't explain some of the observable properties of idiom use.
The topic remained disreputable for more than a century, but in the last decade or so, language evolution has eased toward the front burner, attracting the attention of linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and geneticists.
Ms. Kenneally, a linguist trained at the University of Cambridge, covers an enormous expanse of ground as she brings the reader up to date on developments in a wide variety of disciplines touching on language evolution.
Steven Pinker, a linguist at Harvard who collaborated on the Science paper's section about language evolution, has been studying changes in grammar and past tense forms for 20 years.
Although obviously taken with the idea of language evolution and language acquisition as a continuum seen in primitive form in other species, she gives Mr. Chomsky his due, despite his withering scorn for most of the ideas she presents, and defends him from his most vehement detractors.
