Linking the Processes of Language Evolution and Language Change: a Five-level Hierarchy

The class of problems that can be categorized under language evolution and change is very heterogeneous and involves many different timescales and spatial/social scales. In order to better understand the underlying evolutionary processes and the link between language evolution and language change, we introduce a five-system hierarchy based on social structures of the population and apply it to the study of the transition from protolanguage to language. This problem is composed of a biological subproblem and a cultural subproblem. Using our hierarchy, we argue that Bickerton’s “living fossils” of language can give some insight only on the cultural subproblem, but not on the biological one or on the coevolution of the two.