Minimal requirements for the cultural evolution of language
Matt Spike (Edinburgh)
Tuesday 25 October 2016, 10:00–10:30
S38 7 George Square
Human language is a product of both cognition and culture. Any evolutionary account of language, then, must address both biological and cultural evolution. I look at how a cultural evolutionary perspective can shed light on two main questions: firstly, how do working systems of learned communication arise in interacting populations? Secondly, how do human communication systems take on their characteristic duality of patterning, i.e. systematicity at both a meaningless and meaningful level? A large, multi-disciplinary literature exists for each question, full of apparently conflicting results and analyses. I survey this work, find the commonalities, and tie them together to propose a minimal account of the cultural evolution of language.