Evolutionary Linguistic Theory

Abstract

Evolutionary Linguistic Theory (ELT) is an international peer-reviewed journal intended as a platform for discussing the question of the origin and development of the language faculty understood as a specifically dedicated part of the human mind/brain and its connection with the human cognition. The specificity of the journal is to contribute to the ongoing debate on language origin from an explicitly linguistic viewpoint which examines its complex subject from a well-grounded knowledge in theoretical linguistics (with its subsystems, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language acquisition and language change, historical linguistics and philosophy of language), and reaching out into the contiguous scientific disciplines, as psychology, philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. In the following we give a not exhaustive list of matters ELT is concerned with: The design of the language faculty The role of the lexicon in the architecture of the language faculty The role of categorization and features for the origin of language The question of protolanguage Language and thought Language, music and action from an evolutionary perspective Language and other cognitive domains like vision and spatiality from an evolutionary perspective The connection between the internal reality molded by language and the external world Language and the origin of consciousness and subjectness Language and shared intentionality Historical perspectives on the question about the origin of language