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""Ideophones have been recognized in modern linguistics at least since 1935, but they still lie far outside the concerns of mainstream (Western) linguistic debate, in part because they are most richly attested in relatively unstudied (often unwritten) languages. The evolution of language, on the other hand, has recently become a fashionable topic, but all speculations so far have been almost totally data-free. Without disputing the tenet that there are no primitive languages, this book argues that ideophones may be an atavistic throwback to an earlier stage of communication, where sounds and gestures were paired in what can justifiably be called a 'prelinguistic' fashion. The structure of ideophones may also provide answers to deeper questions, among them how communicative gestures may themselves have emerged from practical actions. Moreover, their current distribution and behaviour provide hints as to how they may have become conventional words in languages with conventional rules"--"

"Evolution has not typically been recognised by linguists as a constraining factor when developing linguistic theories. This book demonstrates that our theories of language must reflect the fact that language has evolved. It critiques a currently dominant framework in the field of linguistics, the Minimalist Program, by showing how it fails to take evolution into account. It approaches the question of the evolution of human language in a novel way by applying findings from the field of evolutionary biology to language. Key properties associated with typically evolving systems are identified in language, and the shortcomings of the Minimalist Program in its outright rejection of these features are exposed. "

"This is a new and groundbreaking study ofho w children acquire language and howthis affects language change over the generations. Written by an international team ofe xperts, the volume proceeds from the basis that we should address not only the language faculty per se within the framework of evolutionary theory, but also the origins and subsequent development oflanguages themselves; languages evolve via cultural rather than biological transmission on a historical rather than genetic timescale. The book is distinctive in utilizing computational simulation and modeling to help ensure that the theories constructed are complete and precise. Drawing on a wide range ofe xamples, the book covers the why and how ofspecific syntactic universals, the nature ofsyntactic change, the language-learning mechanisms needed to acquire an existing linguistic system accurately and to impose further structure on an emerging system, and the evolution oflanguage(s) in relation to this learning mechanism."