The evolution of language has developed into a large research field. Two questions are
particularly relevant for this strand of research: firstly, how did the human capacity for …

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The chapter discusses how the theory of Cognitive Linguistics relates to the study of the
emergence of language in human evolution. It examines what the Cognitive Linguistics …

Why is language the way it is? How did language come to be this way? And why is our
species alone in having complex language? These are old unsolved questions that have …

In The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, sixty leading scholars present critical
accounts of every aspect of the field. The Volume's five parts are devoted to insights from …

How did the biological, brain and behavioural structures underlying human language
evolve? When, why and where did our ancestors become linguistic animals, and what has …

The historical origins of natural language cannot be observed directly. We can, however,
study systems that support language and we can also develop models that explore the …

What is it that makes us human? This is one of the most challenging and important questions
we face. Our species' defining characteristic is language-we appear to be unique in the …

Why do humans have language at all and how did we become language users? These are
central questions in language evolution, but no general consensus exists on the answers …

In this paper we argue that we can gain important insights on the evolution of language and
cognition by integrating evolutionary linguistics and the framework of Cognitive Linguistics …