| Abstract: | The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language''s evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language “phenotype.” According to the “Strong Minimalist Thesis,” the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary theory must explain) is hierarchical syntactic structure. The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000–100,000 years ago, and does not seem to have undergone modification since then, though individual languages do of course change over time, operating within this basic framework. The recent emergence of language and its stability are both consistent with the Strong Minimalist Thesis, which has at its core a single repeatable operation that takes exactly two syntactic elements a and b and assembles them to form the set {a, b}.It is uncontroversial that language has evolved, just like any other trait of living organisms. That is, once—not so long ago in evolutionary terms—there was no language at all, and now there is, at least in Homo sapiens. There is considerably less agreement as to how language evolved. There are a number of reasons for this lack of agreement. First, “language” is not always clearly defined, and this lack of clarity regarding the language phenotype leads to a corresponding lack of clarity regarding its evolutionary origins. Second, there is often confusion as to the nature of the evolutionary process and what it can tell us about the mechanisms of language. Here we argue that the basic principle that underlies language''s hierarchical syntactic structure is consistent with a relatively recent evolutionary emergence. |
