Evolutionary linguistics/Bibliography
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Books
- Christiansen MH, Kirby S. (editors/authors) (2003) Language evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199244847. | 21 authors, 17 chapters, 395 pages. | Google Books preview.
- From free full-text review of book in PLoS Biology: "Linguists, cognitive scientists, behavioural ecologists, and theoretical biologists all offer their view on the origin of human language and, refreshingly, do not shy from pointing out the real or assumed weaknesses of the other approaches."
Chapters in books
Articles in journals
- Toni, I.; F.P. De Lange & M.L. Noordzij et al. (2008), "Language beyond action", Journal of Physiology-Paris 102: 71-79, DOI:10.1016/j.jphysparis.2008.03.005 [e]
"Without denying the enormous importance of the discovery of mirror neurons, we highlight the limits of their explanatory power for understanding language and communication."
- Atkinson,Q.D.; Meade,A.; Venditti,C.; Greenhill,S.J.; Pagel,M. (2008) Languages evolve in punctuational bursts. Science 319:588. PMID 18239118.
- Linguists speculate that human languages often evolve in rapid or punctuational bursts, sometimes associated with their emergence from other languages, but this phenomenon has never been demonstrated. We used vocabulary data from three of the world's major language groups-Bantu, Indo-European, and Austronesian-to show that 10 to 33% of the overall vocabulary differences among these languages arose from rapid bursts of change associated with language-splitting events. Our findings identify a general tendency for increased rates of linguistic evolution in fledgling languages, perhaps arising from a linguistic founder effect or a desire to establish a distinct social identity.