Linguistics: Evolution and Language Change

Linguistics: Evolution and Language Change

Linguists have long identified sound changes that occur in parallel. Now novel research shows how Bayesian modeling can capture complex concerted changes, revealing how evolution of sounds proceeds.

Language Evolution and Change

Social evolution and language change

We propose substantive universals in the relationship between social evolution and language change. Social anthropologists have categorized societies into roughly four broad types by social organization: bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. This classification is evolutionary in the sense that the society types arose in human history in the sequence given above. We compare these society types t...

Brain, language, and linguistics.

During the past quarter of a century, Brain and Language (B & L) has recorded and stimulated research on the biological/neurological basis for human language. As noted in the Whitaker editorial in the first issue of the first volume (Whitaker, 1974), although for centuries scholars of different disciplines had been interested in the question of brain function and cognition, specifically languag...

Language, Linguistics and Cognition

Experimental research during the last few decades has provided evidence that language is embedded in a mosaic of cognitive functions. An account of how language interfaces with memory, perception, action and control is no longer beyond the scope of linguistics, and can now be seen as part of an explanation of linguistic structure itself. However, although our view of language has changed, lingu...