Selectionist Approaches in Evolutionary Linguistics: An Epistemological Analysis

Abstract

Evolutionary linguistics is methodologically inspired by evolutionary psychology and the neo-Darwinian, selectionist approach. Language is claimed to have evolved by means of natural selection. The focus therefore lies not on how language evolved, but on finding out why language evolved. This latter question is answered by identifying the functional benefits and adaptive status that language provides, from which in turn selective pressures are deduced. This article analyses five of the most commonly given pressures or reasons why presumably language evolved. I demonstrate that these reasons depend on functional definitions of what language is. To undo this bias, I suggest that scholars move away from the ‘why’ and ‘what for’ questions of language evolution, and focus on how language actually evolved. The latter project inquires into the distinct evolutionary mechanisms enabling the evolution of the anatomical and sociocultural traits underlying linguistic behaviour.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to James W. McAllister and two anonymous referees of this journal for providing helpful comments on a previous draft of the paper.

Notes

It is presently unknown whether mirror neurons are genetically underpinned, or whether they develop during neurogenesis or ontogenesis. Nonetheless, they are often used to demonstrate how imitation, including cultural imitation, can occur.

This idea is countered by Tomasello and Call (1997), who deny that imitation is present in non-human primates.

Bickerton (1981) endorses a vocal-origin theory, while in his later works (Bickerton 2002, 2007) he argues that the first symbols might also have been gestures. Bickerton does not endorse a continuity between animal, non-human primate calls, and human language.

See e.g. Lachapelle, Faucher, and Porrier (2006) for a more thorough overview of Deacon's use of the Baldwin effect in language evolution.