The Role of Historical Language Change in the Evolution of Language

One of the aims of evolutionary linguistics is to discover how historical language change fits into the larger scheme of language evolution. At one extreme, authors such as Berwick and Chomsky assume language change merely constitutes superficial modifications to the biological faculty of language, while authors at the other extreme (e.g. Heine and Kuteva) believe language change is a crucial mechanism in the emergence of human language. This chapter attempts to reconcile these opposing perspectives by investigating what language change is and how it is caused. We will see that through everyday language use and children's language learning, language is modified due to internal (cognitive) constraints and external (social) influences, suggesting language change is as much a biological as a cultural phenomenon.