Daniel Dor
2012
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367(1599):2152--2159, 2012
Abstract We argue that language evolution started like the evolution of reading and writing, through cultural evolutionary processes. Genuinely new behavioural patterns emerged from collective exploratory processes that individuals could learn because of their brain ...
2010
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Evolution of Language, pages 116-121, 2010
The following sections are included: Introduction; Language and Experience: A Theory of Language as a Social Technology; The Pre-History of Language: The Invention of Mutual - Identification; The History of Language: Three Stages of Technological Innovation
2001
Selection 1(1-3):33-56, 2001
This paper is an attempt to construct a programmatic framework for the evolution of human language. First, we pres- ent a novel characterization of language, which is based on some of the most recent research results in linguistics. As these results suggest, language is best ...MORE ⇓
This paper is an attempt to construct a programmatic framework for the evolution of human language. First, we pres- ent a novel characterization of language, which is based on some of the most recent research results in linguistics. As these results suggest, language is best characterized as a specialized communication system, dedicated to the expres- sion of a surprisingly constrained set of meanings. This characterization calls for an account of the evolution of lan- guage in terms of the interaction between cultural and genetic evolution. We develop such an evolutionary model on the basis of the mechanism of culturally-driven genetic assimilation. As we show, a careful analysis of the diverse effects of this mechanism derives some of the most crucial properties of the evolved linguistic capacity as a specific, functional communication system.