Abstract
© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com How did human sound systems get to be the way they are? Collecting contributions implementing a wealth of methods to address this question, this special issue treats language and speech as being the result of a complex adaptive system. The work throughout provides evidence and theory at the levels of phylogeny, glossogeny, and ontogeny. In taking a multi-disciplinary approach that considers interactions within and between these levels of selection, the papers collectively provide a valuable, integrated contribution to existing work on the evolution of speech and sound systems.
Highlights
Research into the evolution of language and speech has exploded in recent years
Using tools from network theory, they show that the amount that unfaithful replication contributes to the diversity of phoneme inventories within a language family is a good predictor for the age of the language family. These findings show that the current structure of sound systems in modern languages can lead us to make good inferences about their evolution
Their model is able to generalise knowledge of category structure between sound classes without assumptions that sound classes are all identical. They use their model to argue that the principles of cultural transmission encourage solutions that allow for generalisation at the level of the individual. These papers suggest that in order to understand why human sound systems are structured in the way that they are, we must gather evidence from all timescales of linguistic evolution
Summary
Research into the evolution of language and speech has exploded in recent years. As Dediu and de Boer (2016) note, this is the result of an accumulation of factors making the topic more ‘amenable to empirical investigation’. The Journal of Language Evolution prides itself on being a venue that allows for a discourse between all of these sources of evidence In this vein, this special issue aims to bring together work from across disciplines on the topic of the emergence of sound systems: how did human sound systems get to be the way they are?. Journal of Language Evolution, 2017, Vol 2, No 1 of these levels and how they might interact with each other In considering such interdisciplinary contributions through the scope of these interacting timescales of the linguistic selection, this special issue provides an integrated approach to answering the difficult questions of why human sound systems are structured in the way that they are
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