Multidisciplinary approaches in evolutionary linguistics

Abstract

Studying language evolution has become resurgent in modern scientific research. In this revival field, approaches from a number of disciplines other than linguistics, including (paleo)anthropology and archaeology, animal behaviors, genetics, neuroscience, computer simulation, and psychological experimentation, have been adopted, and a wide scope of topics have been examined in one way or another, covering not only world languages, but also human behaviors, brains and cultural products, as well as nonhuman primates and other species remote to humans. In this paper, together with a survey of recent findings based on these many approaches, we evaluate how this multidisciplinary perspective yields important insights into a comprehensive understanding of language, its evolution, and human cognition.