Who forgot Paul Broca? The origin of language as test case for speciation theory Jürgen Trabant & Sean Ward (eds.), New essays on the origin of language (Trends in Linguistics). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001. Pp. vi+258. Morten H. Christiansen & Simon Kirby (eds.), Language evolution (Studies in the Evolution of Language 3). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xvii+395.

Abstract

In December 1999, as part of its tricentenary celebrations, the Berlin Academy of Sciences invited eleven speakers to discuss the Origin of Language (cf. the Trabant & Ward volume, henceforth T&W). In March 2000 a workshop (Crow 2002a) under the auspices of the British Academy and the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, ‘The speciation of modern Homo sapiens’, addressed the same problem. The speciation of Homo sapiens and the origins of language are surely two sides of the same coin. At about the same time, the Christiansen & Kirby volume on Language Evolution (henceforth C&K) was conceived at the Fifth Australasian Cognitive Science Conference. Together the contributions of these volumes constitute a substantial contemporary archive on the origin of language. Their publication provides an opportunity to review the status of attempts to account for the evolution of language. Do the contributions converge on a solution?