Did language evolve through language change? On language change, language evolution and grammaticalization theory

Language Evolution and Change

Language Change and Language Contact

Language acquisition and language change.

Children acquire a mature language system and sometimes this system differs from that of their parents. This is a significant part of language change and understanding acquisition is key to understanding this kind of change in people's internal grammars. I outline one approach to language acquisition, based on children finding cues expressed in the input they are exposed to. This enables us to ...

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...

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.