1 Introduction
Studies of the biological origins and evolution of the human language faculty (evo-
lutionary (bio)linguistics) are a highly inter-/cross-disciplinary field of research in
which a huge variety of researchers, including not only linguists and biologists
but psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, archaeologists, primatologists,
computer scientists and many more need to gather together and collaborate in
order to explore how language first came into being (more precisely, how the
new genus Homo with the faculty of language, H. sapiens, came into being).
As is often the case with other inter-/cross-disciplinary areas, evolutionary
linguistics has suffered from a lack of enough agreement among researchers on
the target of inquiry and some fundamental ideas. Language evolution is itself
a very tricky notion of which different people have different understandings.
To begin with, there is almost no consensus on what language and evolution
exactly refer to when people talk about language evolution. Typically, many
researchers are, in fact, studying the evolution of linguistic communication
when they purport to study language evolution, the two of which must be
sharply distinguished.
This chapter takes a close look at four major fallacies which can be easily
detected in current evolutionary linguistics. A possible scenario of language
evolution which helps eliminate these fallacies will be suggested. The goal is
to eliminate these fallacies in order to establish the underpinnings for a truly
inter-/cross-disciplinary development of evolutionary linguistics.
2 Fallacy of communication (or fallacy of thought)
There is one recurring statement one often hears in the context of language evo-
lution: “Language evolved for the purpose of communication.” This apparently
innocent claim is the best illustration of what I call the fallacy of communication
and is plainly wrong in two important respects (see Balari and Lorenzo (2010)
for relevant discussions). Firstly, biological evolution is a blind process and has
no purpose in sight; nothing evolves for any specific function. X evolved for Y
is only a metaphorical description of X evolved and then began to be used for Y.