ABSTRACT
The question of how human language evolved has long been a matter of controversy, so much so that in 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all discussion on the topic. Shortly afterwards, the Philological Society of London followed suit. Indeed, language has seemed so special and inexplicable that it has been deemed a gift from God: “In the beginning,” says St John in the Bible, “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). This was endorsed by Descartes (1647/1985), who regarded language as too unconstrained to be dependent on the mechanical workings of the body. The idea that language arose from some miraculous event, if not decreed by God, has persisted in theories of language and language evolution that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, largely under the influence of the most distinguished linguist of recent times, Noam Chomsky.
