Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

On the one hand, numerous hypotheses have been put forward to account for the emergence of language during the last million years of human evolution. On the other hand, a large majority of linguists considers that nothing can be said about past languages before 8,000 or 10,000 years in the past, given our current knowledge on modern languages. A large gap obviously separates such approaches and conceptions, and has to be crossed to provide a better account of the development of our communicative system. To partially bridge the gap between the former domains, we aim at proposing a plausible scenario for the emergence of languages, with an emphasis on the development of linguistic diversity. The present study will address the question of the monogenesis or polygenesis of modern languages, which is often implicitly biased toward the first hypothesis. Probabilistic and computational models, as well as palaeo-demographic data and evolutionary considerations, will constitute the key points of our proposals.