Nothing in Language Makes Sense…

… Except in the Light of Biological and Cultural Evolution

Sean mentioned in one of his many Evolang posts that, based on de Boer’s talk, the real audience for researchers of cultural evolution should be biologists. Well, deciding that actions plus words can work far better together, I decided to get in contact with Jeremy Yoder of the excellent group blog, Nothing in Biology Makes Sense. The result: an introductory post on the biological and cultural evolution of language called Crossing Those Curious Parallels (after Darwin’s famous passage describing the similarities between linguistic and biological change). Most regular readers will be familiar with the content and argument as the article is a pastiche of earlier pieces I wrote on this blog, but there is a sprinkling of some original paragraphs here and there. So feel free to go over, leave a comment and help foster some cross-disciplinary discussions. Actually, on cross-disciplinary note: since physicists seem so keen to solve problems in linguistics, maybe we should lend them a hand and run a corpus analysis to discover that elusive mass of the Higgs boson.

 

 

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