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Vilnius University Press
Verbum E-ISSN 2538-8746
https://dx.doi.org/10.15388/Verb.15.08
2024, vol. 15
The Origins of Language: An Introduction to Evolutionary Linguistics
Norbert Francis
College of Education
Northern Arizona University
[email protected]https://ror.org/0272j5188
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7941-0883
Research interests: bilingualism and second language acquisition, literacy learning, literary language
and musical cognition
Joanna DORNBIERER-STUART. The origins of language: An introduction to evolutionary
linguistics, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, 188 p.
The scientific interest in the evolutionary origins of language has grown recently among both researchers
from a wide array of fields and in the general reading public. Despite the widely recognized problem of
access to evidence, the theoretical importance of the question itself prevents us from setting it aside.
Every comprehensive theory of language, not to mention the related fields in the cognitive sciences, faces
the question. If the findings from ongoing empirical work cannot at some point consider plausible
hypotheses about evolutionary origins that are compatible in some way with the conceptual framework of
this work then there is the possibility of a wider inconsistency. Thus, even though the evidence appears
as remote, the research problem is irresistible.
The author comes to the topic from the field of language learning, in linguistics at the other end from
theoretical and remote. This gives her a special vantage point (the first that the present reviewer has
encountered as book author on the subject), perhaps in some ways an advantage, or perhaps not. We
are inclined to lean toward the former because the main concern of inquiry into evolutionary antecedents
is closely related to better understanding learning, or acquisition, capacity in our species.
The format of the book serves as a textbook for a graduate level course in the different branches of
cognitive science, and at the same time can be of value to researchers who will appreciate a review of
the current state of the field. For this purpose, and the first, the presentation of the competing hypotheses
and points of view on the topics are up to date. On this point, readers might get the sensation that along
the way the author shifts from favoring one or another of the proposals in contention (as opposed to
consistently arguing for just one). Thus, considering the treatment of each one in turn we pause to reflect
on the debates and try to predict the overall direction of the chapters. But aside from keeping us on our
toes, the alternating arguments and presentation of evidence provide an even-handed introduction, as
the title of the book announces.
A major theme of the book is devoted to better understanding the relationship between:
o the generation-to-generation learning and transmission of proto-linguistic and linguistic knowledge,
and
o language evolution.
One might at first assume that the first process of unfolding (generation-to-generation transmission) is
the strictly “cultural” as distinct from the second (evolution) that would be the “biological.” The “cultural”
would be the external and the “biological” the internal. But this framing would not be a good way to begin.
Copyright © 2024 Norbert Francis. Published by Vilnius University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the
terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original author and source are credited.
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While the research problems of evolution evidently fall within the broader disciplines of biology, the study
of cultural knowledge also involves domains of competence and information processing that are just as
“internal.” Both kinds of trait in humans, cultural and evolutionary, rest upon, in different ways, cognitive
substrates that are an inheritance from our lineage. In this regard, a more helpful distinction, that we will
revisit, is that between kinds of knowledge and processing that are domain-general and domain-specific;
and as we will see, the popular, informal, contrast between “culturally acquired” and “innate” is not
especially helpful for our topic either.
For this theme in particular the book brings together in Chapter 10 the most pertinent threads, with the
final figure: that of Mendívil-Giró’s (2019) model, originally titled: “The evolutionary relationship between
two Faculties of Language.” The intervening chapters guide us through the different points of view toward
a concluding discussion that takes the Mendívil-Giró figure as its reference. As a preview, one of the
guidelines for following this theme will be to keep the concepts “language development,” “language
change” and “language evolution” separate, at least to some extent, and provisionally. In other realms of
study, and in everyday discourse, the meanings of “development,” “change” and “evolution” often overlap
or even come to be interchangeable. In this book, readers will try to keep them in mind as different but
ultimately related and interacting processes:
o language development – over the lifespan of individual language users, particularly in regard to chil-
dren’s capability to acquire language.
o language change – typically we think of it in terms of recent historical time, since the emergence of
fully formed language capacity in H. sapiens. But we can also apply the idea of change to the ancient
epoch prior to the appearance of our species when primitive communicative ability advanced incre-
mentally toward greater and greater complexity.
o language evolution – over geologic/evolutionary time that spans the periods corresponding to the di-
versification of biological species, and how knowledge of language, as we know it today, came to be
formed as a cognitive faculty, biologically.
Chapter 1 begins with Charles Darwin and The descent of man ([1981]1871). Many years before our
more complete understanding of the genetic mechanism of natural selection, Darwin’s speculation on the
origins of language still forms part of current theorizing, regarding both analogous traits (of convergent
evolution) and homologous traits. His contribution to the study of these important concepts is taken up
again in chapters 3, 5 and the concluding 10. In addition, Darwin was the first to suggest the idea that the
musical and linguistic competencies can be traced to a common proto-linguistic/proto-musical precursor
capability in archaic humans (pre-sapiens). An inheritance of this once integrated cognitive structure,
hypothetically, can be found in the modules that linguistic and musical competence share today.
The culmination of the evolution of language capacity coincided with the African emergence of H. sapiens,
plausibly the former definitively defining, cognitively, the latter. Fully formed language acquisition capacity
represented the crowning attainment of the evolving human mental architecture. All modern populations
may have descended from a recent dispersal around only 70,000 years ago. Then, looking back to
ancestral lineages, how should we frame the question about antecedents of this acquisition capacity in
the greater animal kingdom, from the point of analogy and homology?
Chapter 2 is the necessary overview of the overall design features of language and its component
subsystems, with Chapter 3 covering the purpose of language.
In regard to design, there are two dimensions:
(1) The duality of patterning—How a small number of finite elements without meaning combine to
systematically form a large lexicon and an infinite number of meaningful sentences.
(2) Internal hierarchical structure of morphology and syntax—in parallel, the musical subsystem of speech
(prosody) is structured according to its own hierarchical organization. Intricately interwoven in speech
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and comprehension, the systems are represented separately, by hypothesis, with different
evolutionary trajectories. For example, phonological knowledge is of a different kind than the
knowledge of syntax; and even though both phonology and knowledge of prosodic structures are
about patterns of sound, the underlying competence subsystems are probably not the same.
When considering purpose (Chapter 3), our attention shifts to the communicative function of language,
important for the discussion of evolution as it brings to the forefront the adaptationist hypothesis. What
was it in the environmental and communicative challenges that archaic humans faced that set the stage
for selection pressures, relevant to expression and comprehension, that increased reproductive success?
In Chapters 4 and 5 we continue with the topic of how language, in its formative pre-history (language-
before-it-was-language), could have been shaped by the physical and socio-cultural environment.
Chapter 6 begins to pin down the relationship between language change and language evolution.
Readers will take note that this review is also making an initial attempt to do this. The research from the
field of psycholinguistics and child language development is the topic of Chapters 7 and 8.
Chapters 9 and 10 are the conclusion: how the evolution of communication (that other animals have also
acquired via natural selection) led to a linguistic competence that is unique, by any metric. The concluding
chapters hint that the idea of “led to” here may not be exactly correct (because of the “unique” part). This
is the view of leading scholars in the field. On the other hand, the evidence gathered so far, indirect as all
of it is, might suggest that the incremental evolution idea is actually more plausible, even as we accept
that the language capacity of modern humans really is unique. The problem with the idea of exceptionality,
then, is that modern human language is exceptional only in contrast to the communicative abilities of our
surviving primate cousins.
The final passage of the book features the assessment of Mendívil-Giró’s model as Chapter 6 promised
because it serves to help “put it all together,” subtitle of the concluding chapter.
Figure 1. The evolutionary relationship between two Faculties of Language: FL(x) and FL(y)
Slightly adapted from Dornbierer-Stuart’s adaptation of Mendívil-Giró (2019, Figure 5)
The first distinction between Faculty of Language-x (FLx) and Faculty of Language-y (FLy) that Mendíval-
Giró calls to our attention is that the former spanned many hundreds of thousands, millions, of years. FLx
corresponds to the biological evolution of the language capacity (faculty). FLy is recent, the modern
language faculty of Homo sapiens that finally emerged in East and South Africa during the years prior to
the great exodus of our species that then colonized the Old and New Worlds. Historical language change,
corresponding to FLy, is the variation over time of specific languages and language families, all of which
trace their lineage back to the African genesis of the fully formed language acquisition capacity,
culminating result of biological evolution. Mendívil-Giró might say that the recent cultural-historical
changes corresponding to FLy are all instantiations (without exception) of this culminating result of
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biological evolution. Or to be more precise, the instantiations of FLy are of the language acquisition
capacity of all human speech communities today.
Here we will consider a possible difference of viewpoint between the original figure in Mendívil-Giró (2019)
and the way the book explains the “synthesis of biological and cultural evolution” (the adapted title that
the author gives to the figure 10.4 on p. 150). The difference gives us a good opportunity to delve into the
interesting debate on language evolution between continuity theory (that Dornbierer-Stuart appears to
favor) and discontinuity theory (that Mendívil-Giró appears to favor). Both authors in this, unintended,
exchange side-step the full implications of the difference, in both cases probably for space limitations,
because it is complicated. This review will also only scratch the surface.
In chapter 10, the proposal of “synthesis of biological and cultural evolution” unambiguously belongs to
the family of continuity theories. The chapters 1, 3, 8, 9, and 10 prominently cite the papers by Pinker and
Jackendoff (see references below) as representative summaries. The possible continuity scenarios for
an interaction between cultural learning/transmission and biological evolution all imply gradual
emergence of a Faculty of Language and, very summarily, could have proceeded something like the
following. Archaic humans (e.g. from the era of H. heidelbergensis) began to acquire (via cultural learning)
the first approximations to word-like utterances and/or holistic expression. In the child generation some
individuals appear with a greater predisposition to learn them, the trait (acquisition capability) conferring
survival advantage in the social-communicative culture of our ancient ancestors. Over time, the trait was
selected – successful, surviving, learners more likely to leave offspring. For example, during breast-
feeding and “bedtime,” infants with a greater ability to correctly interpret intention in their mother’s
vocalization would have been more likely to avoid predation and to survive to child-bearing age (Mehr &
Krasnow, 2017). Over (evolutionary) time, all of the same would apply, in general, to an aptitude for
merging protoword-like utterances to form two and three-word constituents and for segmenting holistic
communication. Thus, cultural innovations gradually led to changes in the genome. Discontinuity theories,
in contrast, argue against the above natural selection driven emergence of the Faculty of Language,
seeking explanation rather in a kind of saltationist model (Hauser et al., 2002). The seminal Hauser et al.
paper rejects the (continuity) hypothesis of a relationship of homology between the core grammar of
modern language and protolanguage-type approximations that emerged in ancestral lineages (none of
which have survived to the present, except that of H. sapiens). An important clarification on the point is
made from the beginning, in Chapter 1, that the continuity hypothesis could cut across the division
between Universal Grammar (UG)-oriented and Functionalist approaches to the question of evolutionary
emergence of language. Both, in general, work on the problem from the point of view that the forces of
natural selection played a central role. In addition, even on the question of so-called “nativism,” the
fundamental difference between UG and Functionalism, here, is perhaps not so much about innate
knowledge of language per se, but rather regarding the contribution of domain-specific versus domain-
general capabilities.
In the manner of full disclosure, it should be mentioned that the present review is the third and final
installment of a three part series on language evolution, the first two appearing as Francis (2024, 2025).
Of the three books reviewed, Origins of Language, stands out for its clarity of exposition and coherent
presentation of the central topics and ongoing controversy. This contribution to the study of origins is
different in other ways that interested readers will find useful.
References
DARWIN, C., 1981[1871]. The descent of man and selection in relation to sex. Princeton: Princeton University
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FRANCIS, N., 2024. The evolution of communication and language in the voices of nature. Biology & Philosophy,
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FRANCIS, N., 2025. Review of Steven Mithen, The language puzzle: Piecing together the six-million-year story of
how words evolved. Journal of Linguistics, forthcoming.
HAUSER, M., CHOMSKY, N. & TECUMSEH FITCH, W., 2002. The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and
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Norbert Francis, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1994), is Professor
Emeritus at Northern Arizona University. His current research program focuses on problems of language and literacy
learning from a cognitive science point of view, in particular in contexts of majority and minority language contact.
Reports of research include: Bilingual and multicultural perspectives on poetry, music and narrative: The science of
art (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Bilingual development and literacy learning: East Asian and international
perspectives (City University of Hong Kong Press, 2013), and Bilingual competence and bilingual proficiency in child
development (MIT Press, 2012).
