Language, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not? How, and why, did language evolve in our species and not in others? Since Darwin's theory of evolution, questions about the origin of language have generated a rapidly-growing scientific literature, stretched across a number of disciplines, much of it...

This new four-volume collection, part of Routledge's Critical Concepts in Linguistics series, assembles the most important scholarly writings concerning the biological evolution of language, particularly those incorporating a Darwinian view of evolution. Including excerpts from ancient sources such as the Bible, Plato, and Aristotle, along with classical sources like Condillac, Rousseau, and Herder, Language Evolution provides an overview of the intensive debate on language evolution following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. It also outlines each of the major conceptions of...

Although the fundamental principles of vocal production are well-understood, and are being increasingly applied by specialists to specific animal taxa, they stem originally from engineering research on the human voice. These origins create a double barrier to entry for biologists interested in understanding acoustic communication in their study species. The proposed volume aims to fill this gap, providing easy-to-understand overviews of the various relevant theories and techniques, and showing how these principles can be implemented in the study of all main vertebrate groups. The volume will...