It has been observed that languages with huge numbers of speakers tend to be structurally simple while small communities can sometimes develop languages with great structural complexity. Paradoxically, an apparent opposite pattern appears to be observed in relation to non-structural properties of language such as number of content words. These apparent contradictory patterns pose a challenge fo...

An element shared by sociology and history, and to a certain extent by social or cultural anthropology as well, is their claim to study society as a whole. Whereas economy, law, political science, religious studies or linguistics concentrate on a single aspect of society, the aforementioned disciplines aspire to integrate all aspects into a comprehensive and coherent picture. This requires, fir...

In a narrow critique of two early papers in the literature on cumulative cultural evolution, Vaesen et al. (1) misunderstand the work they criticize, mischaracterize multiple lines of research, and selectively ignore much evidence. While largely recycling prior criticisms, they provide no new models, evidence, or explanations (2). Not only do their criticisms of Henrich’s (3) and Powell et al.’...

The beginning of this century hailed a new paradigm in linguistics, the paradigm brought about by de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Genérále and subsequently elaborated by Jakobson, Hjelmslev and other linguists. It seemed that the linguistics of this century was destined to be structuralistic. However, half of the century later a brand new paradigm was introduced by Chomsky's Syntactic Struc...

H uman language is unique among communication systems in being a cultural system characterized by prodigious and pervasive variation and flux on many dimensions [1, 2]. Until the advent of global communication, linguistic varieties were predominantly localized to spatially bound areas, and much research in dialectology has been devoted to understanding the shape and distribution of these dialec...

Understanding language evolution in terms of cultural transmission across generations of language users raises the possibility that some of the processes that have shaped language evolution can also be observed in historical language change. In this paper, we explore how constraints on production may affect the cultural evolution of language by analyzing the emergence of the Romance languages f...

The 15 archipelagos of East Polynesia, including New Zealand, Hawaii, and Rapa Nui, were the last habitable places on earth colonized by prehistoric humans. The timing and pattern of this colonization event has been poorly resolved, with chronologies varying by >1000 y, precluding understanding of cultural change and ecological impacts on these pristine ecosystems. In a meta-analysis of 1,434 r...

Dunn et al. (2011) argue for the following four theses. First, they argue that there is no evidence of a crosslinguistic word order correlation between certain pairs of elements for which a correlation has been claimed in the previous literature. Second, they argue that although some correlations do exist, they are specific to individual families and not universal. Furthermore, they argue that,...

This study compares the handling of agreement and disagreement by speakers from two different cultural groups: London’s British West African community and its mainstream British white community. Using data from elicited conversations, we consider naturally-occurring agreements and disagreements at three different linguistic levels. Firstly, based on Pomerantz’s (1984) observations of turn-takin...

Although there may be no true language universals, it is nonetheless possible to discern several family resemblance patterns across the languages of the world. Recent work on the cultural evolution of language indicates the source of these patterns is unlikely to be an innate universal grammar evolved through biological adaptations for arbitrary linguistic features. Instead, it has been suggest...