Pleyer and Hartmann

The evolution of language has developed into a large research

field. Two questions are particularly relevant for this strand of
research. Firstly, how did the human capacity for language
emerge? Secondly, which processes of cultural evolution are
involved both in the evolution of human language from non-
linguistic communication and in the continued evolution of Cognitive
human languages? Much research on language evolution
that addresses these two questions is highly compatible with Linguistics
the usage-based approach to language pursued in cognitive
linguistics. Focusing on key topics such as comparing human
language and animal communication, experimental approaches
to language evolution, and evolutionary dynamics in language,

Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution

this Element gives an overview of the current state-of-the-art
of language evolution research and discusses how cognitive
linguistics and research on the evolution of language can cross-
Cognitive Linguistics
fertilise each other. This title is also available as Open Access on
Cambridge Core.
and Language
Evolution
About the Series Series Editors
Cambridge Elements in Cognitive Sarah Duffy
Linguistics aims to extend the theoretical Northumbria
and methodological boundaries of University
cognitive linguistics. It will advance and
develop established areas of research
Nick Riches
Newcastle
Michael Pleyer and
in the discipline, as well as address University
Stefan Hartmann

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areas where it has not traditionally been
explored and areas where it has yet to
become well-established.

This title is also available as Open Access on

Cambridge Core at www.cambridge.org/core

Cover image: KTSDESIGN/Science Photo

Library/Getty Images ISSN 2633-3325 (online)
ISSN 2633-3317 (print)
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009385022 Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Elements in Cognitive Linguistics
edited by
Sarah Duffy
Northumbria University
Nick Riches
Newcastle University

COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS
AND LANGUAGE
EVOLUTION

Michael Pleyer
Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009385022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Stefan Hartmann
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
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 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution

Elements in Cognitive Linguistics

DOI: 10.1017/9781009385022
First published online: March 2024

Michael Pleyer
Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń
Stefan Hartmann
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
Author for correspondence: Michael Pleyer, [email protected]

Abstract: The evolution of language has developed into a large

research field. Two questions are particularly relevant for this strand of
research. Firstly, how did the human capacity for language emerge?
Secondly, which processes of cultural evolution are involved both in the
evolution of human language from non-linguistic communication and
in the continued evolution of human languages? Much research on
language evolution that addresses these two questions is highly
compatible with the usage-based approach to language pursued in
cognitive linguistics. Focusing on key topics such as comparing human
language and animal communication, experimental approaches to
language evolution, and evolutionary dynamics in language, this
Element gives an overview of the current state-of-the-art of language
evolution research and discusses how cognitive linguistics and research
on the evolution of language can cross-fertilise each other. This title is
also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009385022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Keywords: cognitive linguistics, usage-based approaches, language

evolution, animal communication, cultural evolution

© Michael Pleyer and Stefan Hartmann 2024

ISBNs: 9781009476065 (HB), 9781009384988 (PB), 9781009385022 (OC)
ISSNs: 2633-3325 (online), 2633-3317 (print)
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Comparing the ‘Design Features’ of Language

and Animal Communication 4

3 Signing Apes and Talking Birds: Language-Trained Animals 20

4 Cooperation and Communication: The Joint Attention

Hypothesis 26

5 Language Evolution in the Lab 30

6 Real-World Language Dynamics: What Language

Emergence and Change Reveal about Evolution 40

7 A Usage-Based Perspective on the Evolution of Language 49

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009385022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

References 59
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 1

1 Introduction
The question of how language evolved is probably as old as the scientific study of
language itself, and it continues to stir controversial debates that often relate to the
very nature of language. Any account of the evolution of language has to answer
the question of what it actually is that evolved: is it an innate capacity or
a complex configuration of domain-general cognitive skills? Such questions are
at the centre of language evolution research, an interdisciplinary field that has
been enjoying growing popularity since the 1990s. In this Element, we offer
a brief review of pertinent research on language evolution from the perspective of
cognitive linguistics, and we discuss what a cognitive-linguistic perspective can
add to the study of language evolution. In doing so, we follow up on previous
work, including our own, that has argued that cognitive linguistics, and particu-
larly Construction Grammar as arguably the most influential approach under the
broad umbrella of ‘cognitive linguistics’, provides a suitable framework for
studying the evolution of language (e.g., Arbib 2012; Hurford 2012; Pleyer &
Winters 2014; Sinha 2017; Pleyer & Hartmann 2020; Verhagen 2021). We will
also discuss how findings from language evolution research can, in turn, inform
cognitive-linguistic theorising.
Before doing so, we briefly need to define the scope of language evolution
research. The term language evolution is notoriously ambiguous as it can either
refer to the evolutionary emergence of language or to the continued development
of fully fledged human language(s) (Tamariz & Kirby 2016). Haspelmath (2016)
has criticised such a conflation of ‘origins of language’ on the one hand and
‘language change’ on the other. But as Mendívil-Giró (2019: 24) points out, such
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an apparent conflation follows naturally from an approach that conceives of

languages as social and cultural objects (as does cognitive linguistics).
According to such an approach, ‘there is every reason to suppose that the very
first grammatical constructions emerged in the same way as those observed in
more recent history’ (Bybee 2010: 202). Domain-general cognitive, social, and
interactional processes are the basis of the emergence of linguistic structure both
in language change and language evolution (also see Ibbotson 2020: 16). As such,
we argue that the scope of language evolution research encompasses both the
origins of language and the processes that lead from very early forms of language,
often captured in terms of a hypothesised protolanguage (Tallerman 2012), to
fully fledged human language. Consequently, we will cover both aspects in this
Element.
The relationship between cognitive linguistics and language evolution is
a bilateral one. On the one hand, language evolution research is highly relevant
to our understanding of language when we take the ‘cognitive commitment’
 2 Cognitive Linguistics

(Lakoff 1990) of cognitive linguistics seriously. According to the cognitive com-

mitment, analyses and theories in cognitive linguistics need to take into account
what is known about cognition from other disciplines (cf. Evans & Green 2006).
This means that cognitive linguistics also needs to be informed by what is known
about the cognitive underpinnings of language in language evolution research.
Such an approach also goes hand in hand with a ‘commitment to look for conver-
ging evidence’, that is, a commitment to actively seek out evidence from other
disciplines on the role of explanatory cognitive factors used in cognitive linguistics
(Evans & Green 2006). In his call for a ‘cognitive evolutionary linguistics’,
Verhagen (2021: 11) re-conceptualises these commitments in terms of
a ‘biological commitment’. It specifies more precisely what is already implicit in
these commitments, namely that what we say about communicative behaviour
‘should also be compatible with what we know about communication in organisms
in general and about cognition in general’.
On the other hand, cognitive linguistics also has a vital role in specifying the
cognitive and interactional factors central to human language, whose evolution
needs to be explained by any account of language evolution (Győri 2021). This
is expressed in Jackendoff’s (2010) dictum, ‘Your theory of language evolution
depends on your theory of language’. For example, a usage-based view of
language sees knowledge of language as represented in a learned network of
constructions of differing degrees of schematicity and complexity, which is
mutually shared to the degree that it enables interlocutors to co-create context-
ually scaffolded meaning in interaction. From an evolutionary perspective, the
question then becomes how the cognitive abilities, as well as the social struc-
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tures supporting them, evolved (Pleyer & Hartmann 2020).

In Section 2, we will take a closer comparative look at human language and
other animal communication systems. Much previous research comparing
human language and animal communication has claimed that there is
a ‘qualitative’ difference between the two (e.g., Bickerton 1990; Berwick &
Chomsky 2016). However, more recent work has shown that many animal
communication systems are much more complex than previously thought.
Overall, this research indicates that there is much more continuity between
human language and animal communication systems in terms of the different
structuring mechanisms giving rise to communicative structures as well as
regarding the importance of pragmatics, context, and social learning (e.g.,
Engesser & Townsend 2019; Pleyer & Hartmann 2020; Hobaiter et al. 2022).
Section 3 discusses what we can learn from decades of research on language-
trained animals (e.g., Lyn 2012). Here, we will focus again on cognitive
similarities (e.g., the ability to learn symbolic associations and basic pragmatic
and structural sensitivity) and differences. Similar to our discussion of animal
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 3

communication, these differences are seen more as a matter of degree, not of

kind (e.g., differences in the size of storage of associations, the schematicity,
and abstractness of such stored associations, and differences in pragmatic and
contextual influence on interpretation).
Section 4 will introduce the influential hypothesis that language builds on
joint attention, cooperation, and shared intentionality (e.g., Tomasello 2008,
2014). Here, we will focus on the fact that many other animals have highly
sophisticated social cognition (e.g., Seyfarth & Cheney 2015; Bettle & Rosati
2021). For instance, many non-human animals can understand others’ goals and
attention and show some degree of perspective-taking and cooperation.
However, there seem to be differences in that human communication is charac-
terised by a much higher degree of cooperativeness, perspective-taking, and the
negotiation and awareness of shared goals and the use of pragmatic inferences
(e.g., Tomasello 2017).
Section 5 gives an overview of how hypotheses about language evolution have
been tested experimentally, mainly focusing on behavioural studies with human
participants but also taking computational modelling work into account. We focus
on two influential paradigms that have been used extensively in research on
human symbolic evolution in general and on language evolution in particular:
experimental semiotics is an approach in which participants are required to
communicate without language, which often entails that they are required to
ground novel communication systems in interaction. In iterated learning (IL),
on the other hand, participants are trained on an artificial language that is then
transmitted from participant to participant, thus simulating the historical chain of
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transmission characteristic not only of language but virtually all kinds of cultural
artefacts. The two paradigms have been combined in many ways and given rise to
complex experimental set-ups that combine learning, communication, and trans-
mission, thus investigating a wide variety of system-internal as well as social and
environmental factors that influence linguistic structure.
In Section 6, we turn to the real-world dynamics of language, focusing on two
complementary domains: on the one hand, we discuss the implications of
historical language change for understanding language evolution. On the
other hand, we discuss what we can learn from developing sign languages.
The so-called ‘emergent’ sign languages such as Nicaraguan Sign Language
(NSL) and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language have often been cited as paragon
examples of the evolution of a new language. However, some of the guiding
assumptions in this line of research have recently been questioned, especially as
they tend to exoticise the languages in question as well as their users, which in
turn has implications for our understanding of these languages as ‘special’ cases
of language evolution.
 4 Cognitive Linguistics

We conclude with a brief discussion of the relationship between cognitive

linguistics and language evolution, arguing that the usage-based perspective of
cognitive linguistics and the current mainstream view of language evolution as
a process of cultural evolution are highly compatible.

2 Comparing the ‘Design Features’ of Language and Animal

Communication
This section adopts a comparative perspective on human language. We will
compare human language with animal cognition and communication and ask to
what degree there are similarities and differences in the underlying cognitive
and interactional processes and mechanisms.
Reflecting the general approach of this Element, the aims of this section are again
twofold: on the one hand, we will ask what can be learned about human language
by comparing it to other animal communication systems. Specifically, we will look
at the implications of current research on animal communication for cognitive
linguistics. That is, to what degree are cognitive-linguistic conceptualisations of
language, and its cognitive and interactional underpinnings, compatible and
convergent with research on animal communication and cognition? And to what
degree can such research contribute to theory-building in cognitive linguistics? This
reflects the cognitive commitment and the commitment to seeking converging
evidence (see Section 1).
On the other hand, the aim is to take an explicitly cognitive-linguistic perspec-
tive on animal communication and cognition as well as the implications of
research on animal communication and cognition on theories of language evolu-
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009385022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

tion. That is, what can cognitive linguistics contribute to the study of animal
communication and cognition? In some way, this also reflects another commit-
ment of cognitive linguistics, the ‘generalisation commitment’ (Lakoff 1990;
Evans & Green 2006). According to this commitment, cognitive linguistics
seeks to explain language in terms of general cognitive principles. From
a cognitive-linguistic view, we can therefore try to generalise beyond humans
and ask whether particular cognitive principles operate in human language as well
as animal communication. Here, the question then becomes whether explanatory
cognitive principles and capacities proposed in cognitive linguistics can also be
applied to analyse properties of animal communication. In turn, this also means
that if a particular cognitive ability used to explain aspects of language in
cognitive linguistics is not found to the same degree in other animals, this has
direct implications for theories of language evolution. Specifically, cognitive
linguistics might stress the importance of particular cognitive and interactional
mechanisms, which then might be found to be expressed more strongly in humans
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 5

or even to be absent in other animals. This then would represent an ‘evolutionary

target’ of processes and properties that must have evolved in the human lineage to
make linguistic interaction possible. In other words, this can give potential
insights into ‘what is special about human language’.1 Such a cognitive-
linguistic view can help elucidate which cognitive and social prerequisites had
to be in place for human language to evolve. Based on this, a comparative
perspective can shed light on how the social and communicative behaviour of
non-human animals compares to these prerequisites.
So far, detailed engagements with animal communication have been rela-
tively limited, although it is increasingly gaining more attention. For example,
in previous work, we have investigated the implications of animal communica-
tion for language evolution from a usage-based perspective (Pleyer & Hartmann
2020), reviewing how recent findings in animal communication can make
contact with usage-based and constructionist approaches. Further, we have
argued that applying concepts from usage-based and constructionist approaches
can offer new perspectives for analysing human language and animal commu-
nication in a shared framework. Christiansen and Chater (2022) also compare
human language and animal communication from a broadly usage-based
perspective. They argue that in contrast to animal communication, meaning in
linguistic interaction is co-created in interaction and instantiated online. It is
characterised by improvisation, creativity, and the cultural transmission of
previously successful bouts of the co-creating of meaning in interaction.
Amphaeris et al. (2021) argue that critical cognitive processes demonstrated
by cognitive linguistics to be foundational for language, such as social cognition
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and symbolic cognition, can be found in animal cognition to differing degrees.

In their view, this supports the theory that language evolved on the basis of
animal cognition. Lastly, Amphaeris et al. (2022) propose to capture the rela-
tionship between human language and animal communication in terms of
prototype theory. They explicitly contrast this proposal to an all-or-nothing
view of a feature of human language being present in animal communication
or not, as well as to a view that sees animal communication and human language
as lying on a continuous spectrum. Instead, they advocate a prototype-based
1
Talking about language being ‘special’ is often tied to ‘human exceptionalism’. This in turn is
often interpreted as a value judgement of ‘human superiority’. However, it is important to note
that the notion of ‘progress’ has no place in evolution. Animals are adapted to particular niches,
and should be analysed with relation to the niches they are adapted to, not with regard to
teleological value judgements of ‘more and less advanced’ species. Each species is special in
the way it is adapted to a particular niche. For example, bats are special in using echolocation, and
elephants are special in having a long prehensile trunk. In evolutionary biology, a trait that
distinguishes a particular taxon (such as species, like humans from chimpanzees, or genera,
such as ‘pan’ from ‘Homo’) is called an ‘autapomorphy’ (Suddendorf 2008). Language, on this
view, is just one particular autapomorphy that distinguishes our species.
 6 Cognitive Linguistics

view in which phenomena are categorised in terms of family resemblances,

graded typicality, as well as overlaps (see also Wacewicz et al. 2020).

2.1 Hockett’s ‘Design Features’ Approach

Animal communication and its similarities and differences with human lan-
guage have been the focus of intense debate for a long time (e.g., Radick 2007;
see also references in Krause 2017). Animal communication has been discussed
from the perspective of philosophy (e.g., Stegmann 2013), biology (e.g., Hauser
1996; Smith & Harper 2003; Bradbury & Vehrencamp 2011), primatology (e.g.,
Seyfarth & Cheney 2010), comparative psychology (e.g., Tomasello 2008), and
of course linguistics (e.g., Anderson 2004; Hurford 2007, 2012). Within lin-
guistics, the most influential approach has been Hockett’s proposal of ‘design
features’ (Hockett 1959, 1960, 1963).
In particular, Hockett proposed several ‘design features’ characterising human
language whose presence or absence in other animal communication systems can
be investigated comparatively (see Table 1). His initial list (Hockett 1959) features
seven such features, which in Hockett (1960) were extended to thirteen, and in
Hockett (1963) extended again to sixteen. These design features are still extremely
popular in linguistics, and it is the classification of communication systems most
frequently used in introductory linguistics textbooks (Wacewicz et al. 2023a).
However, the design feature approach has not been without (sometimes intense)
criticism (e.g., Oller & Griebel 2004; Wacewicz & Żywiczyński 2015), and
several researchers have adapted and updated Hockett’s proposals for their own
‘design feature’ lists (Aitchison 2008; O’Grady et al. 2017; Johansson 2021).
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On the one hand, criticisms revolve around features that should not be included
in the list. For example, Johansson (2021) rightly points out that the first five of
Hockett’s design features (vocal-auditory channel, broadcast transmission and
directional reception, rapid fading, and complete feedback) take spoken language
as the default and do not apply to other forms of human language. For instance,
sign languages do not make use of the vocal-auditory channel but instead make
use of the visual modality. Here, it can be argued that Hockett’s (1960) design
features reflect the ableist ideology of orality at the time in which sign languages
were not recognised as full languages, which only slowly began to change with
the work of Stokoe (2005) and others (see McBurney 2001 for discussion).2

2
It has to be noted that at least Hockett and Altmann (1968) sometimes are explicit in stating that
these design features are ‘shared by all human spoken languages’ (Hockett & Altmann 1968) or
refer to a property being a design feature of ‘human speech’ (Hockett & Altmann 1968).
However, Hockett also often fails to make this distinction, stating that these design features
‘are found in every language on which we have reliable information’ (Hockett 1963) and
explicitly calling them ‘design-features of language’ (Hockett 1960).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009385022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Table 1 Hockett’s design features (Hockett 1960, 1963; Hockett & Altmann 1968) with an explanation of the feature, comments, and critique
of a feature, and estimates of the potential presence of features in other animals based on current evidence.

Design feature Explanation Comment Presence in other animals

Vocal-auditory Spoken language functions via the Does not apply to all human Characteristic of all vocal-auditory
channel emission and reception of sound languages, for example, signed communication systems
waves languages or written language
Broadcast All receivers within range can Does not apply to all human Characteristic of all vocal-auditory
transmission perceive the signal and the sound languages, for example, signed communication systems
and directional source can be localised languages (which require a ‘line of
reception sight’ between signaller and
receiver) or written language.
Direct consequence of communication
in the vocal-auditory channel
Rapid fading The sound of speech fades rapidly; it Does not apply to all human Characteristic of all vocal-auditory
(transitoriness) does not hover in the air languages, for example, written communication systems
language. Although the bodily
properties of sign language
communication also do not remain
permanently available, it can be
debated whether they fall under
‘rapid fading’ to the same degree
as sound waves
Direct consequence of communica-
tion in the vocal-auditory channel
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Table 1 (cont.)

Design feature Explanation Comment Presence in other animals

Interchangeability Adult members of a speech Might not universally apply, for Present in many vocal-auditory
community can be both producers example, in written language. For communication systems.
and receivers of signals instance, it might be possible that However, in many other animals,
interchangeably someone can read Chinese specific calls are only emitted by
characters without being able to males, or only by females,
write the characters themselves by respectively, for example in
hand. Another example is monkeys (Stephan & Zuberbühler
receptive or passive bilingualism, 2016) or songbirds in northern
in which an individual can temperate climate zones (Searcy &
understand a language but does not Andersson 1986; Riebel et al.
produce it themselves (Sherkina- 2019)
Lieber 2020)
Complete/total Speakers can perceive their own Potentially present in all vocal-
feedback output, thereby receiving auditory communication systems
immediate feedback on their own
production
Specialisation Signals are ‘specialised’ for Does not consider the question of Many other animals use signals,
communication. They are not cues, intentionality in animal including bees, monkeys, apes,
that is, by-products of some other communication (Townsend et al. many other mammals, and birds
functional behaviour. The system 2017) (Bradbury & Vehrenkamp 2011;
is designed ‘to trigger’ a response Freeberg et al. 2021)
in the recipient
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Semanticity Linguistic signals have meaning and The nature of the ‘meaning’ and Functionally referential
can be used referentially cognitive representation of the communication is widespread, for
content of animal signals is example, in alarm calls (e.g.,
difficult to untangle. There might Scarantino & Clay 2015).
be different degrees of semanticity. Evidence for extraction of
Focus on semanticity underplays information from calls, for
the importance of pragmatic example, in chimpanzees
processes of contextual (Crockford et al. 2017), Diana
interpretation (see Section 2.2.1) monkeys (Zuberbühler et al.
1999), and Japanese tits (Suzuki
2018)
Arbitrariness There is no relationship between Arbitrariness as a linguistic term Present in many other animals such
form of a word and its meaning might not be easily applicable to as chimpanzees and other non-
animal communication (Watson human primates, bees, and
et al. 2022). A focus on songbirds (Townsend et al. 2022)
arbitrariness leads to an
underestimation of the role of
iconicity, systematicity, and
motivation in language
(Dingemanse et al. 2015a; Pleyer
et al. 2017)
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Table 1 (cont.)

Design feature Explanation Comment Presence in other animals

Discreteness Linguistic signals constitute The cognitive foundations of A number of animals seem to
a discrete repertoire, not discreteness need to be taken into represent signals as discrete
a continuous one. They consist of account, for example categorical categories and possess repertoires
basic signalling units such as perception, whereby even of discrete signals, including zebra
phonemes and words continuous signals are interpreted finches and other songbirds (Wiley
categorically (Zhang et al. 2023a) 2018; Zhang et al. 2023b)
Displacement We can talk about things that aren’t Displacement is a matter of degree, Limited displacement in bees (von Frisch
present in the communicative not an absolute term. 1967) and Cambell’s monkeys
situation but are remote in time Displacement in human language (Zuberbühler 2002). Great apes are
and/or place is a result of semanticity and capable of pointing communicatively
to absent and displaced objects (Lyn
openness/productivity
et al. 2014; Bohn et al. 2015)
Openness/ Human language can express new Seems to depend on duality of Bees can potentially refer to locations
productivity messages that have never been patterning and semanticity (Wiley that have never been referred to
produced before 2018). Existing constructions can before, but they cannot assign new
be assigned new meanings, as in meanings to existing signals
polysemy, metonymy, metaphor, (Hockett 1963). Other than that,
idioms, and so on (Hockett 1963) other animals seem to be limited in
the meanings they can express
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Cultural Linguistic conventions are Cultural transmission in humans is Bees show evidence of cultural
transmission/ transmitted and change from not limited to language. Culturally transmission (Jiang et al. 2018), as
tradition generation to generation transmitted behaviours of all kinds does bird song (Catchpole & Slater
are characteristic of cumulative 2008). In chimpanzees, different forms
of the ‘grooming handclasp’ seem to
culture (Tomasello 1999;
be culturally transmitted (Leeuwen &
Tomasello et al. 2005)
Hoppitt 2023). Cultural transmission
of non-communicative behaviours is
widespread in animals (Whiten 2019)
(see Section 2.2.2)
Duality of Meaningless units (phonemes, /p/, Phonological combinatoriality and The calls of chestnut-crowned
patterning /e/, /n/) can be combined into meaning-based grammatical babblers are composed of
meaningful units (words, pen), compositionality should be meaningless shared building
which in turn can be combined to distinguished, also in terms of the blocks (Engesser et al. 2019).
form bigger meaningful units cognitive processes employed and Limited compositionality can be
(phrases and utterances) the evolutionary challenges in found in a number of species, such
evolving these features (Zuidema as chimpanzees (Leroux et al.
& De Boer 2018) 2023), Campbell’s monkeys and
southern pied babblers (Townsend
et al. 2018), and Japanese tits
(Suzuki et al. 2016)
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Table 1 (cont.)

Design feature Explanation Comment Presence in other animals

Prevarication We can lie or say things that are Based on the design features of Probably not, but several animals
meaningless semanticity, displacement, and show deception in communication
openness/productivity (Flower 2022)
Reflexiveness Using language, we can Based on the design features of Probably not
communicate about the system of semanticity and openness/
language on a meta-level productivity
Learnability Languages are learned Based on the design feature of Evidence of usage learning in
cultural transmission/tradition a number of animals, but more
limited evidence of production
learning. At least some great ape
gestures are probably learned
(Cartmill & Hobaiter 2019). Social
learning of behaviour can be found
in numerous species (Whiten
2019) (see Section 2.2.2)
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 13

On the other hand, criticisms focus on missing features that should be added to
the list or replace an existing feature. For example, Johansson (2021) proposes
intentional production as an additional feature, which is also echoed in
Aitchison’s (2008) proposal to add spontaneous usage. Aitchison (2008) also
adds other elements to her design feature list: turn-taking, structure-dependence,
and the ability to read intentions. Watson et al. (2022) argue that the notion of
‘arbitrariness’ is such an intrinsically linguistic concept that it is difficult to apply
it to animal communication. They therefore propose to replace it with ‘optional-
ity’ as the central underpinning of linguistic arbitrariness. Optionality refers to the
ability to associate one signal form with different communicative functions, or
different communicative functions being expressed by the same signal form. As
they show, a concept such as optionality can be readily demonstrated in a number
of animal communication systems. For example, in great ape gestures, the same
gesture can be used for multiple communicative functions (Byrne et al. 2017;
Hobaiter et al. 2022; see Section 2.2.1). The concept of optionality, in turn, can be
decomposed into sub-aspects, which allows for an even more fine-grained com-
parison of human language and other animal communication systems.
These additions and replacements, which relate to cognitive and social aspects
of language, point to a different problem with the ‘design feature’ list, namely that
Hockett’s original formulation does not address the cognitive and interactional
dimension of language and does not characterise appropriately more foundational
and defining properties of language as a system, instead focusing on superficial
and at times epiphenomenal aspects (Oller 2004; Johansson 2021). In fact,
Wacewicz and Żywiczyński (2015) have gone so far as to argue that Hockett’s
design feature approach is a ‘non-starter’ and not a helpful framework for
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comparing human language and animal communication and investigating the

evolution of language. The problem in their view is that Hockett’s design features
approach does not treat language as ‘a suite of sensorimotor, cognitive and social
abilities that enable the use but also acquisition of language by biological
creatures’ (Wacewicz & Żywiczyński 2015; see also Pleyer & Zhang 2022).
This critique is especially relevant from a cognitive-linguistic point of view.
Another problem, which again is particularly salient from a cognitive-
linguistic perspective (see also Amphaeris et al. 2022), was, in fact, already
formulated by Hockett himself (Hockett & Altmann 1968): ‘[E]ach feature
seems to be set forth in an all-or-none manner, although upon closer scrutiny
some of them are surely matters of degree’.
Lastly, Hockett’s design feature list has been criticised for being precisely
that, a list. That is, it didn’t account for how features might be related to each
other and how they can be integrated into a broader context (Oller & Griebel
2004; see also Wacewicz & Żywiczyński 2015).
 14 Cognitive Linguistics

In fact, Hockett & Altmann (1968) propose that the different design features
of Hockett (1963) can be generalised into four frameworks of inquiry regard-
ing communicative behaviour, which relate to: (a) the channel(s) of commu-
nication, (b) the social setting, (c) ‘Features related to the behavioural
antecedents and consequences of communicative acts’, and (d) the interplay
of environment, social settings, and biology in the change and continuity of
communication systems. These four frameworks are then further specified in
terms of sub-aspects and questions about the framework leading to a total of
twenty-four questions to guide inquiries about animal communicative behav-
iour. However, this revision of the ‘design features’ seems to have largely been
ignored and has not fuelled descriptions of communication systems in
a meaningful way.
While still acknowledging the importance of Hockett’s pioneering work,
Oller & Griebel (2004: 4) summarise: ‘Ultimately, it has become clear that
many of the features formulated by Hockett were simply ill-defined, yielding
unnecessary and confusing overlap among features, lack of clarity regarding
boundaries implied by the definitions, and a failure to account for hierarchical
relationships among features’.
This contrasts with the noted continuing popularity of Hockett’s design
feature approach in linguistics and linguistics textbooks. However, both text-
books and researchers referring to Hockett’s design features mostly only list
selected properties from Hockett’s list, sometimes with direct reference to
Hockett and sometimes without (Wacewicz et al. 2023a). The most frequently
mentioned features characterising human language are displacement, arbitrari-
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ness, cultural transmission, and productivity/openness/creativity. Here we also

see the problematic interconnection of design features, as displacement is
a natural consequence of open-ended semantics. Surely, these properties, as
well as properties such as learnability, semanticity, and duality of patterning, are
essential aspects of human language. They are also potentially useful for
comparison with animal communication systems if it is acknowledged that we
should treat them not as boxes to be ticked or not. Instead, they should be seen as
properties that we need to analyse in their ecological, cognitive, behavioural,
social, and structural dimensions with an additional view towards their relations
among each other (Wacewicz & Żywiczyński 2015; Pleyer & Zhang 2022). But
as we have seen, other properties also need to be added.

2.2 Animal Communication Systems and Human Language

In the following, we will illustrate this perspective by looking at two ‘design
features’ in more detail: semanticity and learnability. These discussions will not
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 15

be exhaustive; as we have seen, many more properties need to be discussed.3

But in line with Amphaeris et al. (2022), this discussion should be seen more as
establishing some core prototypical features of language with graded properties.
However, they will illustrate possible ways to compare human language and
animal communication from a cognitive perspective. That is, we will adopt an
explicitly cognitive-linguistic view of human language and its relation to
cognition and interaction. As we will discuss these properties in contact and
in an active dialogue with recent research on animal communication, it is also
possible that it needs to be revised depending on the evidence and its analysis.
Overall, what should become clear from this is that we should not look for
dichotomous ‘all-or-nothing’ differences but instead ask to what degree mech-
anisms found in human language are similar or different to those found in other
animal communication systems (Engesser & Townsend 2019; Pleyer &
Hartmann 2020; Amphaeris et al. 2022; Pleyer et al. 2022).

2.2.1 Semanticity

When discussing semanticity in animal communication and human language

from a cognitive-linguistic perspective, we have to note that cognitive lin-
guistics does not see semantics as an isolated domain. Cognitive linguistics
generally rejects the strict distinction between semantics and pragmatics.
Linguistic meaning is intricately tied not only to encyclopaedic world know-
ledge and contextual factors (see, e.g., Langacker 2008: 39). It is also inter-
actional (see, e.g., Langacker 2008: 42). That means it is actively constructed
and co-created in interactive contexts. Linguistic utterances are seen as
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prompts for the dynamic construction of meaning in interaction, making use

of various cognitive, sociocognitive, contextual, and interactive dimensions
(e.g., Fauconnier 2004; Evans & Green 2006). Constructions and utterances,
therefore, also do not have fixed meanings but have ‘meaning potentials’ tied
to contexts of use that are always interpreted and influenced by the pragmatics
of the interaction (Geeraerts 2006; see also Sperber & Wilson 1995).
Consequently, cognitive linguistics also emphasises the dynamicity of lin-
guistic meaning: concepts like metaphor and metonymy (Lakoff & Johnson
1980) as well as conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner 2002) have been
used to systematise the flexible ways in which language users exploit the
meaning potential of linguistic expressions. For example, metaphor select-
ively seizes aspects of an expression’s meaning and maps them to another,

3
For instance, we do not discuss one of the most hotly contested topics in animal communication
here, that of ‘animal syntax’ and whether compositionality can be found in non-human commu-
nication. A usage-based perspective on this topic is presented by Pleyer et al. (2022).
 16 Cognitive Linguistics

usually abstract domain (e.g., TIME IS SPACE: We moved the meeting forward).
Conceptual blending refers to a hypothesised domain-general process that
allows us to ‘blend’ aspects of various mental spaces in complex integration
networks – for example, individuals at various stages of their lives in
a sentence like When I was your age, Taylor Swift wasn’t even born. Cognitive
linguists have also emphasised the role of domain-general capacities like categor-
isation (see, e.g., Lakoff 1987) underlying the construction of meaning. Cognitive
approaches to semantics are strongly influenced by prototype theory, according to
which membership to a category is not an all-or-nothing affair but a graded
phenomenon (see, e.g., Rosch 1978; Taylor 2003). For instance, a concept like
bachelor can clearly be applied to a twenty-year-old man who is not in
a relationship, while it is at least debatable whether it applies to the pope
(Lakoff 1987: 70). The dynamicity of linguistic meaning is also captured by the
concept of construal that plays a key role in many cognitive-linguistic approaches,
with Hoffmann (2022: 286) defining it as a ‘mental perspective on a scene that
finds its expression in linguistic utterances’. Language, on this view, then, is
fundamentally perspectival. Language users possess a repertoire of constructions
that enables them to construe situations and events in different ways and organise
conceptual content from different points of view (e.g., Verhagen 2007; Langacker
2008). This holds both for instances of grammatical and lexical construal. For
example, the same situation can be described by different utterances such as I gave
her my favourite book, I gave my favourite book away, She received a book,
A person received something, and so on, thereby distributing attention and salience
to different aspects of the situation and construing it from different perspectives.
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Lexical choices also present different construals, reflecting and prompting con-
ceptualisations that highlight different aspects of an entity or situation. For
example, a speaker of English can choose which elements to bring into focus
through the use of verbs such as cost, charge, spend, pay, sell, and buy (such as She
bought a PS5, The vendor charged her £ 539 for the PS5, She paid £ 539 for the
PS5, etc.). They all call upon the ‘commercial event’ frame, but they focus
attention and make salient different elements and relations of the frame.
Similarly, in the domain of lexical choice, the same entity can be called, for
example, an animal, a mammal, a dog, a border collie, Rico, or our little genius.
This means that the same event can be described differently, highlighting different
elements and participants (Radden & Dirven 2007). This, then, is the particular
perspective that cognitive linguistics and usage-based approaches bring to ques-
tions about the semanticity of animal communication.
There are two famous examples in discussions of communicative signals
providing information about a referent: the ‘dance language’ of honeybees (von
Frisch 1967) and the alarm calls of vervet monkeys (Cheney & Seyfarth 1990).
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 17

Honeybees perform a complex geometrical ‘dance’ that communicates

a flower’s location and quality (Hurford 2012). Vervet monkeys were shown
to emit three different alarm calls for ‘snakes’, ‘leopards’, and ‘eagles’.
The honeybee dance also clearly seems to indicate the design feature of
‘displacement’ because bees provide information about an absent referent.
But here, we also see a problem with the term displacement because bees
provide information about an absent entity. However, what they can communi-
cate about the referent is extremely limited, namely its location and quality. This
means this system does not exhibit the design features of openness or product-
ivity (Hockett 1963). Therefore, one proposal to make the notion of displace-
ment in human language more productive is that, first, it should be specified
what kind of displacement we are talking about and also try to tie it to possible
cognitive correlates. For example, the capacity to conceptualise absent entities,
as well as situations in the past and future, is linked to capacities for episodic
memory (Tulving 2001) and mental time travel (Suddendorf & Corballis 2007;
cf. Pleyer & Zhang 2022).
This also brings us to the problem of assessing mental representations in other
animals. This is, of course especially prevalent for a species whose brain
measures about 0.4–0.6 mm3 and has about 1 million neurons (compared to
~1400cc and 86 billion neurons in humans; Azevedo et al. 2009; Menzel 2012).
But it is just as much a problem for other animals, as we do not have access to
their mental representations (we cannot ask them) but have to make inferences
from various sources, such as their behaviour.
This problem has also been the topic of intense discussion when investigating
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vervet monkey alarm calls (Price et al. 2015; Vonk 2020) and many other
species that produce such calls (see Townsend & Manser 2013; Gill &
Bierema 2013 for reviews). As vervet monkeys show appropriate behavioural
responses specific to the call (e.g., by standing up and looking around on hearing
the ‘snake’ alarm call), one proposal has been that this can be captured in terms
of ‘functional reference’ (see Macedonia & Evans 1993; Wheeler & Fischer
2012; Scarantino & Clay 2015 for discussion). As such, there has been the
proposal that in this context, these calls can be seen as ‘word-like’ as they
couple arbitrary sounds with external phenomena and potentially offer a link
between animal communication and linguistic semantics (Bickerton 2009).
From a cognitive-linguistic perspective, we could, therefore, ask whether they
are some kind of ‘protoconstructions’ representing form–meaning pairings.
However, several studies have started to concentrate instead on the perspective
of the receiver and their interpretation of these calls, often from a cognitive
perspective (e.g., Hurford 2007). Specifically, these questions revolve around
topics such as asking (a) whether other animals form any kind of (conceptual)
 18 Cognitive Linguistics

representations upon hearing a call and (b) how contextual information is used
by recipients to interpret the call. Regarding the first question, a snake-specific
alarm call seems to evoke a visual search image for snake-like objects in
Japanese tits (Suzuki 2018). Diana monkeys seem to retain an expectation of
seeing predators after hearing alarm calls (Zuberbühler et al. 1999). So, there is
some evidence that animals form at least some kind of stored association
between a call and a referent. However, the role of context in call interpretation
has received increasing attention because many call types seem not to be limited
to one context but instead are produced in multiple contexts (Price et al. 2015).
In a recent study on vervet monkeys, Deshpande et al. (2023) have shown that
the famous vervet monkeys, for example, seem to take context into account
when hearing alarm calls. Specifically, the vervet monkey male alarm bark,
which is often described as a ‘leopard’ or ‘terrestrial predator’ alarm call, is also
emitted in aggressive intergroup encounters. In playback experiments,
Deshpande et al. (2023) showed that vervets looked at the location of the
speaker for less time, didn’t show a startle response, and were less vigilant
compared to when they heard the same call in a non-group encounter situation.
The longer-looking time in non-group encounter situations was interpreted as
indicating an attempt to gather additional information. As summarised by
Seyfarth and Cheney (2010), ‘animals’ comprehension of vocalisations, as
measured by their responses, are highly flexible, modifiable as a result of
experience, and show the most parallels with human language’.
The importance of pragmatics and contextual factors is also evident in the
gestural domain, particularly in great ape gestures. Great apes show intentional
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use of gestures, with many repertoires being about seventy to eighty gestures
(Byrne et al. 2017). However, just as with the examples of alarm calls just
discussed, these gestures can, in a sense, be described as ‘polysemous’ (Moore
2014; cf. Pleyer 2017), as they ‘are all characterized by the use of several
different gestures in a single context and the use of a single gesture in multiple
contexts’ (Liebal et al. 2014: 155). Great ape gestural communication, then, is
hugely reliant on pragmatics (Genty & Zuberbühler 2015).
Interestingly, and especially relevant from a usage-based and cognitive-
linguistic perspective, this flexible and polysemous meaning of gestures and
its dependence on the pragmatics of usage contexts bring this kind of commu-
nication much closer to the way that linguistic constructions work in interaction
(Pleyer & Hartmann 2020): both linguistic constructions and great ape gestures
are used intentionally, are used flexibly in multiple contexts, have their mean-
ings affected by contexts, and are also used in interactive back-and-forth
exchanges between individuals (Hobaiter et al. 2022). This also suggests that
these properties characterise the evolutionary platform on which human
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 19

language is built, although human linguistic interaction is made much more

powerful by human complex social cognition and the presence of complex
ostension and inference in communication (Heintz & Scott-Phillips 2023; see
also Section 4).

2.2.2 Learnability

Human language is learned. Usage-based approaches argue that through social

interaction throughout the course of language acquisition, children learn
a structured network of form–meaning pairings – constructions – of increasing
schematicity and abstractness (Tomasello 2003; Ibbotson 2020). In contrast,
non-human primate calls seem to be largely innate, and they seem to have very
limited vocal production learning capacities (Fischer 2017). For example,
cross-fostered monkeys growing up among other monkey species still produce
vocalisations of their own species (Owren et al. 1993). However, non-human
primates show evidence of ‘usage learning’. They still have to learn when
exactly to produce a particular call. Young vervet monkeys, for example,
initially produce the ‘eagle’ alarm call for all birds they see but then incremen-
tally ‘zoom in’ on the correct usage context of aerial predators (Seyfarth &
Cheney 1986). Some limited modification of call structure also seems to be
possible. For example, male baboon calls are more similar to calls of males they
interacted frequently with when compared to males they interacted with less
frequently (Fischer et al. 2020). This also opens up the exciting possibility that
processes of entrenchment and precursors of conventionalisation (Schmid
2020; Pleyer 2023) operate in animal communication.
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Overall, as is the case for semanticity, the evidence that learning plays a role
in comprehending calls is much stronger. For example, monkeys can learn the
function of the alarm calls of other species (Zuberbühler 2000). But there is also
evidence that the meaning of alarm calls is influenced by context and environ-
ment. For example, Campbell’s monkeys in two different populations seem to
have different associated responses to the same call (Schlenker et al. 2014). In
one population in the Tai forest (Ivory Coast), their krak call often functions as
a leopard alarm call. In contrast, in the other population on Tiwai island (Sierra
Leone), it acts as a general alarm call (see also Schlenker et al. 2016). This might
be explained by the fact that the populations differ in terms of the predators they
are exposed to. Whereas the Tai monkeys are exposed to both ground and aerial
predators, the Tiwai monkeys are only exposed to aerial predators. A similar
situation is observed in the differences in call meaning between two populations
of two closely related species, Verreaux’s and Coquerel’s sifakas (Fichtel &
Kappeler 2011). The two populations live in environments that differ in
 20 Cognitive Linguistics

predation threat. The captive Coquerel’s sifaka habitat is dominated by aerial

predators, whereas the wild-living Coquerel’s sifaka population have a high
threat of terrestrial predation.
Interestingly, this is reflected in call meaning. ‘Growl’ calls in the Coquerel’s
sifaka population seem to be associated with aerial predators. In the Verreaux’s
sifaka population, it was associated with terrestrial predator responses. In
contrast, the call was instead associated with mild disturbances in two popula-
tions of each species without a dominant particular predation threat. Overall,
then, there is evidence of social learning of call meanings in non-human
primates. This again suggests a shared evolutionary platform for this aspect of
the dynamic acquisition of contextually modulated form–meaning pairings in
human language.
Social learning also has been shown to be relevant in birds and many other
species. A recent study has shown that social signal learning even plays a role in
honeybees. The waggle dances of bees without the opportunity to observe other
dances before their first own dance were significantly disordered. They showed
errors in encoding the flight path angle and distance to get to a location (Dong
et al. 2023). This indicates that even in cases where there is significant genetic
channelling of communication systems, social learning represents a vital pro-
cess in making the system ‘usage-ready’.

3 Signing Apes and Talking Birds: Language-Trained Animals

We have seen that animals exhibit complex communicative behaviour in the
wild. However, certain features found in human language seem not to be
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present, such as complex compositional constructions and the use of an open-

ended inventory of form–meaning pairings to collaboratively co-create mean-
ing in interaction. However, it is possible that animals have more complex
cognitive capabilities than those evident in their communicative behaviour in
the wild. Given the complex cognition of some animals (e.g., De Waal 2016),
especially other primates (e.g., Seed & Tomasello 2010), is it possible that they
might be able to grasp (aspects of) human language? This has been one of the
most popular as well as controversial questions in animal communication (e.g.,
Seidenberg & Petitto 1979; Sebeok & Umiker-Sebeok 1980; Anderson 2004).
This is also reflected in the popularity of popular press books and media
attention that this kind of research received in the past. In addition, it is also
evident in the fact that many introductory linguistics textbooks (cf. Wacewicz
et al. 2023a) and introductions to language acquisition discuss this research
extensively (cf. Pleyer & Hartmann 2020). Interest and active research in ‘ape
language’ research have declined significantly over the years, especially
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 21

following some highly critical evaluations of these experiments (e.g., Terrace

et al. 1979) as well as increasing ethical concerns (e.g., Hu 2014).
Nevertheless, the existing research is still of great interest for language
evolution research as a way of probing deeper into animals’ communicative
and cognitive capacities and comparing the human capacity for language with
the abilities of other animals. Yet even after over seventy years of research, the
controversy about the analysis and implications of ‘animal language studies’ is
unabated. As Tomasello (2017) summarises, ‘The “ape language” studies have
come and gone, with wildly divergent claims about what they have shown’.
However, at least in some respects, there is relative consensus, which we will
discuss in the following. Overall, there are two key questions regarding lan-
guage-training experiments with great apes: (a) are they able to learn symbols,
and (b) are they able to learn aspects of the combinatorial structure of language,
that is, syntax? Regarding the first question, many researchers argue that great
apes do indeed show evidence of this, whereas the second question is much
more contested.
The first systematic attempt at teaching an ape language was by Hayes and
Hayes (1951). They tried to raise a female chimpanzee, Viki, as much as
a human child as possible with the addition of explicit language teaching,
including shaping Viki’s lips for sound production. After three years, according
to Hayes and Hayes (1951), Viki was able to produce three words: ‘cup’, ‘papa’,
and ‘mama’. However, although Viki produced specific sounds intentionally or
at least in response to prompts, it requires interpretation to categorise them as
English words. ‘Papa’ sounded like two consecutive lip smacks, and at least in
existing videos, ‘cup’ was produced with Viki putting her hand in front of her
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mouth and touching her lips to make the sound.4 In addition, they note that Viki
sometimes confused her three words with each other.
One takeaway researchers took from this study was that chimpanzees are
probably not able to produce spoken language due to their vocal tract anatomy.
However, recent research has shown the high flexibility of mammalian vocal
tracts, and simulations have demonstrated that a non-human primate vocal tract,
in principle, can produce speech sounds or, in other words, is ‘speech-ready’
(Fitch et al. 2016).5 This means that their inability to produce speech is not due
to vocal tract anatomy but instead due to the lack of human-like neural control
systems for fine-grained vocal motor control.

4
A short clip of Viki producing these ‘words’ can be found here: www.youtube.com/watch?
v=V7QM97fnypw (Accessed 18 May 2023)
5
For a – somewhat creepy-sounding – synthesized rendition of what a macaque monkey would
sound like saying ‘Will you marry me?’, see here: www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/
sciadv.1600723/suppl_file/audio_s2_monkeywymm.wav (Accessed 18 May 2023)
 22 Cognitive Linguistics

Nevertheless, these considerations led several researchers to try to teach

language to great apes using a different modality. These experiments were
much more successful, but how much more successful is a matter of debate
(see Lyn 2012 for a review). Premack (1971) tried to teach a chimpanzee, Sarah,
a ‘visual language’. This ‘language’ was based on pieces of plastic with differ-
ent colours, shapes, and sizes, which had different meanings and specific
ordering rules. He reported the productive use and comprehension of more
than ninety-eight signs after intensive training. Rumbaugh and colleagues
(Rumbaugh 1977) tried to teach another chimpanzee, Lana, an artificial visual
language called ‘Yerkish’, whose vocabulary consisted of graphical symbols on
a lexigram keyboard, reporting a productive and comprehension vocabulary of
more than 123 symbols. Using a similar design but a more complex lexigram
keyboard and a different teaching regime, including English language immer-
sion, Savage-Rumbaugh et al. (1983) taught two chimpanzees, Austin and
Sherman. They reported a productive use of more than sixty-eight symbols
and comprehension of more than sixteen symbols.
Given that great apes show evidence of flexible control of their hands, several
studies in the 1960s and 1970s tried to teach several great apes a natural language
in the visual modality: American Sign Language (ASL). For chimpanzees
Washoe (Gardner & Gardner 1969) as well as Moja, Tatu, and Dar (Fouts &
Mills 1998), the productive vocabulary reported in peer-reviewed studies ranged
from 119 to 160 signs. Chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky was said to produce around
125 signs (Terrace et al. 1979). Gorilla Koko was reported to produce 85–150
signs. In non-peer-reviewed publications, the orangutan Chantek was reported to
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produce around 150 signs (Miles 1999). For gorilla Koko, the claim has been
made that she could produce over 1,000 signs, although these claims were not
reported in peer-reviewed publications (Lyn 2012).
However, here, we have to make a significant caveat that, unfortunately, is
often misrepresented in the literature. Very often, we find the statement in the
literature that these chimpanzees were taught, or use ‘sign language’ or
‘American Sign Language’. However, ASL is a complex natural human lan-
guage. But most of the teachers in these experiments were not native signers,
and many, if not most of them, were not even fluent signers (Anderson 2004:
276). This means that ‘in practice the apes were taught signs borrowed from
ASL with English word order, not true ASL’ (Kaplan 2016). This is somewhat
acknowledged by Patterson, who stated that Koko was taught a modified
version of ASL called ‘gorilla sign language’ (Newman 2013), but to what
degree this system should be called a ‘sign language’ is not clear. However, the
fact remains that, as Anderson (2004: 280) puts it, the great apes in these
experiments had ‘virtually no evidence for the grammatical mechanisms of
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 23

true ASL’. One Deaf assistant in the Nim Chimpsky study also recollects that
the other (hearing) trainers were overly generous in what they recognised as
a sign even if they only partially resembled ASL signs (Neisser 1983; cf. Kaplan
2016; though see Stokoe 1978 for a more charitable interpretation). Moreover,
Kaplan (2016) points out that for the chimpanzees that were studied, many of
the gestures interpreted by the researchers as ASL signs were actually naturally
occurring gestures in the wild, such as COME/GIMME and HURRY. The latter
is particularly significant as in at least one study (Fouts & Fouts 1989); HURRY
comprised 65 per cent of the 206 produced signs interpreted as ASL signs.
These considerations are also of fundamental importance when considering
the second question, ‘Can an ape create a sentence?’ (Terrace et al. 1979), that
is, if there are ordering principles in great ape ‘sign language’ production. At
least some research indicates incipient tendencies towards broad semantic
ordering principles (serial order) in some subjects. The best evidence for this
comes from bonobo Kanzi, ‘the star pupil’ of ape language research. It is
generally agreed upon that Kanzi showed the most sophisticated skills of any
language-trained primate (Tomasello 2017). He was not only reported to use
more than 256 lexigram signs productively and understand ±179 symbols, but
he was also tested on English comprehension, in which he was immersed. Over
a six-month period, Savage-Rumbaugh et al. (1993) tested both Kanzi and Alia,
a human child aged eighteen to twenty-four months during testing, on their
comprehension of requests such as Can you put some toothpaste on your ball?
and Carry the rock to the bedroom. They reported his overall accuracy across
different types of requests with different construction properties at
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71.5 per cent, compared with Alia’s 66.6 per cent of accurate responses. This
led them to the conclusion that Kanzi’s spoken English comprehension is
similar to that of a 2.5-year-old child (cf. Hurford 2012; Lyn 2012). However,
as Truswell (2017) points out, Kanzi’s performance is not the same across the
board. In fact, Truswell shows that ‘Kanzi doesn’t get NP coordinations’
(Hurford 2012: 495). For noun phrase-coordination constructions such as
Give the water and the doggie to Rose or Give the lighter and the shoe to
Rose, his accuracy falls to 22.2 per cent. For example, in both cases, Kanzi only
gave Rose one of the two items. In contrast, Alia’s performance was the same as
her baseline (68.4 per cent). Truswell (2017: 410) states this ‘suggests a species-
specific, construction-specific deficit’. Most researchers, therefore, agree that
none of the language-trained apes shows evidence of grammatical structuring or
hierarchical structure in production or comprehension (e.g., Hurford 2012; Lyn
2012; Truswell 2017). In Construction Grammar terms, there seems to be
a difference in the schematicity and abstractness of stored constructions when
comparing humans and language-trained animals (Pleyer & Hartmann 2020).
 24 Cognitive Linguistics

The question of animal grammatical abilities has also been tested in the
paradigm of ‘artificial grammar learning’, especially with primates and birds
(see, e.g., ten Cate 2017; ten Cate & Petkov 2019 for reviews). These studies
showed evidence of a basic continuity between animal cognition and human
language learning capacities, especially in the domain of statistical learning,
and some limited ability to detect regularities and dependencies in structured
sequences of stimuli (Petkov & ten Cate 2020). However, the current evidence
is seen to be ‘insufficient to arrive at firm conclusions concerning the limitations
of animal grammatical abilities’ (ten Cate 2017). One of the most impressive
results so far comes from a study of two rhesus monkeys trained to indicate
correct sequences of flashing coloured dots on a hexagonal spatial grid that
followed a complex ‘mirror grammar’ (Jiang et al. 2018). This grammar had the
supra-regular pattern of AB|BA and ABC|CBA. Monkeys saw the first half of
the grammar on a screen and were trained to complete the sequence following
the mirror grammar. For example, a flashing dot would first appear in location 1,
then location 2, and then location 5. If they then completed the sequence using
the correct grammar, in this case, by first touching location 5, then 2, and 1, they
were rewarded with water or juice. They were even able to transfer this
grammar to longer sequences with a length of 4 (ABCD|DCBA) and 5
(ABCDE|EDCBA) and to novel geometrical layouts, such as a pyramid,
a horizontal line, or two hexagons. These results indicate cognitive capacities
in animals that approach the hierarchical cognitive complexity of human lan-
guage. However, one crucial difference to humans is that these monkeys needed
literally tens of thousands of trials to learn this grammar (Fitch 2018; Jiang et al.
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2018). To put this into perspective, Jiang et al. (2018) also taught this grammar
to human five to six year olds. Not only were they vastly more accurate than the
monkeys, they also learned it after five trials. Interestingly, Jiang et al. (2018)
suggest that this is due to preschoolers using a different strategy, namely
chunking, which in usage-based and cognitive-linguistic approaches has been
shown to be central to how language is learned (e.g., Tomasello 2003; Bybee
2010; Ibbotson 2020).
Symbol comprehension and production have also been tested in other sym-
bol-trained animals. For example, border collie Rico was shown to understand
about 200 sound-item mappings (Kaminski et al. 2004), and could successfully
retrieve toys from another room upon hearing the appropriate label. Border
collie Chaser even retrieved 1,022 toys with different labels (Pilley & Reid
2011). Interestingly, both dogs showed evidence of ‘fast-mapping’ – learning
a label after a single exposure – and learning through inferential reasoning by
exclusion. This means that upon hearing a novel label, they retrieved the correct
toy if it was the only one in the set they hadn’t learned a label for, and retained
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 25

knowledge of that label afterwards. A grey parrot, Alex, learned and produced
correct labels for ‘>50 objects, seven colors, five shapes, quantities to eight,
three categories (color, shape, material) and used “no,” “come here,” “wanna go
X,” and “want Y” (X,Y being appropriate location or item labels). He combined
labels to identify, request, comment on, or refuse>150 items and to alter his
environment’ (Pepperberg 2012: 297). There are also studies of dolphins
indicating that they can learn the referential function of novel symbols and
gestures, and even some evidence for comprehension of semantic ordering
(Pack 2015).
So what does this research tell us about the human ability to learn and use
language, and its evolution? In other words, what can we learn from this about the
potential ‘evolutionary baseline’ that human cognition evolved on top of? Basic
symbol learning seems to be relatively widespread in different animals. What is
more, animals also seem to be able to learn more abstract relations such as ‘same’
and ‘different’ (e.g., Hurford 2007), something that has even been demonstrated in
bees (Giurfa 2021; cf. Pleyer et al. 2023). They also have been shown to understand
relations between symbols, which according to Deacon (1998) is the key feature of
truly symbolic cognition. For example, Chaser was able to learn hypernymic
common nouns with one-to-many and many-to-one relations (‘frisbee’, ‘ball’,
and ‘toy’). Specifically, she knew each tested item by its proper-noun name, and
also was able to categorise all these items under the category ‘toy’ and a subset of
them (e.g., balls of different sizes and colours) under ‘balls’. Overall, the evidence
suggests that animals, and especially apes, possess many of the cognitive skills
requisite for language, such as statistical and sequential learning, categorisation,
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some semantic ordering principles, and basic symbol learning (Tomasello 2017).
However, then the question becomes what differences explain humans’ cap-
acity for language. For one, as we have seen, there seems to be a difference in
humans’ ability for hierarchical processing. However, there is also a range of
other differences that animal language studies demonstrate. One concerns the size
of the repertoire these animals learn. The peer-reviewed reported range of
productive vocabularies for language-trained apes was between 68 and more
than 256 (Lyn 2012). However, this pales in comparison to the number of
constructions that humans know. For example, Brysbaert et al. (2016) estimate
that ‘an average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000
lemmas and 4,200 non-transparent multiword expressions’ with around 6,000
lemmas added from twenty to sixty years of age. From a constructionist perspec-
tive, which would also count semi-filled, unfilled, and more abstract construc-
tions, this estimate would even be much higher (cf. Pleyer 2017). By twenty-four
months, the number of words children know already ranges from 100 to 600
(Fenson et al. 1994), clearly beginning to outnumber even the highest scores
 26 Cognitive Linguistics

claimed for language-trained animals. This point is definitely reached when

children enter school, a time by which they know about 14,000 words (Templin
1957). Even the non-peer-reviewed claims of Koko knowing 1,000 signs and
Kanzi being able to understand 3,000 words, as well as Chaser’s documented
1,002 items, pale in comparison. Humans are therefore exceptional in their ability
to learn a network of constructions. The capacity for ‘massive storage’ of
constructions in memory seems to be an important evolutionary development in
humans (Hurford 2012; Pleyer & Hartmann 2020). This is of particular interest
from a usage-based perspective, in which aspects of human memory play
a crucial role in explaining the organisation and acquisition of linguistic know-
ledge (e.g., Divjak 2019; Schmid 2016).
However, one other significant difference shown by these studies lies in the
social domain. More specifically, many differences between the acquisition of
symbols in great apes and humans might stem from the fact that humans have
special prosocial motivations and sociocognitive and pragmatic abilities. For
example, human linguistic interactions are characterised by their
‘Mitteilungsbedürfnis’ (Fitch 2010), their desire and motivation to share per-
spectives and experiences and co-create meaning in interaction. So whereas
humans use declarative gestures and declarative utterances from very early on,
the vast majority of the utterances produced by language-trained apes are
requests (Tomasello 2008). In addition, the apes did not show much interest
in the perspectives and contributions of their communicative partners. This is
evidenced in their lack of turn-taking, a feature of communication central to
human interaction (Levinson 2016). For example, more than half of Nim
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Chimpsky’s utterances interrupted his teacher, and he would also frequently

sign at the same time as the teacher, indicating no awareness of interlocutor
turns (Kaplan 2016). We will turn to this special role of cooperation and social
cognition in language and language evolution next.

4 Cooperation and Communication: The Joint Attention

Hypothesis
Language acquisition in humans is fundamentally social. It rests on infants’
and young children’s sociocognitive abilities as well as their interactional and
social motivations. Humans communicate triadically. Much face-to-face com-
munication involves the producer and the recipient attending jointly to a third
entity (Tomasello 1999). This capacity for joint attention is foundational for
language acquisition. For example, from as early as twelve months onwards,
infants use gaze following to learn about objects and events (Flom & Johnson
2011). By eighteen months, infants learn to associate a new word not with the
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 27

object they are currently interested in but with the object the adult is looking at
(Baldwin 1993; Baldwin & Moses 2001). Indeed, the role of joint attention is
already evident before the emergence of language in children. For example,
twelve-month-olds already point declaratively to share attention and interest,
and to ‘share their perspective’. Importantly, when an interesting event occurs
that infants point to, they are only satisfied if it leads to triadic joint attention,
that is, if the experimenter exchanges looks between them and the event, not
when the experimenter only attends to the event without acknowledgement
(Liszkowski et al. 2004). As we have seen, this declarative communicative
behaviour seems fundamentally different from how language-trained great
apes communicate.
However, children’s use of social cognition in language acquisition goes
much further than that. They also start to take interlocutors’ intentions and
knowledge states into account. For example, twenty-four-month-old children
learn a new word for the adult’s intended action, not the failed one they actually
performed (Tomasello & Barton 1994). At the same age, they also learn that
a new word refers to something that is new to the adult but not to them (Akhtar
et al. 1996). Again, these foundations are already evident in pre-linguistic
infants. By fourteen months, infants understand declarative–cooperative
pointing gestures (Behne et al. 2005), and exhibit knowledge of what ‘we’
have experienced together. For example, if being asked to hand the experi-
menter a toy the experimenter seems to be excited about, infants at this age hand
them the toy that is new to the experimenter but not to the infant (Tomasello &
Haberl 2003; Moll et al. 2007). At fourteen to eighteen months, they also show
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more complex evidence of using context and shared experience to interpret

gestures. For example, Liebal et al. (2009) had children play a ‘cleaning up’
game, in which an adult points at an object and an infant puts it into a box. They
then had another adult enter the room and point at an object. Infants did not
interpret this pointing gesture egocentrically. They did not put the object into the
box but instead handed it to the adult. These kinds of experiments offer evidence
for a sociocognitive foundation of language acquisition in humans. As
Tomasello et al. (2005: 690) put it:

Saying that only humans have language is like saying that only humans build
skyscrapers, when the fact is that only humans (among primates) build
freestanding shelters at all. Language is not basic; it is derived. It rests on
the same underlying cognitive and social skills that lead infants to point to
things and show things to other people declaratively and informatively, in
a way that other primates do not do, and that lead them to engage in
collaborative and joint attentional activities with others of a kind that are
also unique among primates.
 28 Cognitive Linguistics

Tomasello and colleagues describe this infrastructure as ‘shared intentionality’:

motivations and abilities to engage with others in cooperative, collaborative
activities with shared goals, plans, and intentions, and to share attention,
experiences, and other psychological states with others (Tomasello et al.
2005). It is this shared intentionality infrastructure that non-human primates
lack, and which explains the difference between human language acquisition
and the performance of language-trained apes and animal communication
systems in the wild: ‘What they lack are the skills and motivations of shared
intentionality – such things as joint attention, perspective-taking and coopera-
tive motives – for adjusting their communicative acts for others pragmatically,
or for learning symbols whose main function is pragmatic’ (Tomasello 2017:
95).
In more recent work, Tomasello and colleagues further elaborate their system for
capturing the sociocognitive differences between humans and other apes and the
development of shared intentionality in human children. Specifically, they distin-
guish between joint intentionality on the one hand and collective intentionality on
the other. Joint intentionality is a second-personal, interactive mode in which
infants and young children base their communication especially on their interlocu-
tor’s attentional, intentional, and knowledge states. This is children’s mode of
engagement before age three. Starting around age three, children develop an
understanding of ‘collective intentionality’. They begin to understand that conven-
tions are based on collective agreements that guide and normatively coordinate
social behaviour. This understanding of collective conventions is evident in chil-
dren’s complex sociocognitive behaviours, such as emerging concerns for social
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evaluation, impression management, and the enforcement of social norms

(Engelmann et al. 2012; Tomasello 2014). It also scaffolds children’s understanding
of other linguistic behaviours based on the creation of interactional conventions,
such as conceptual pacts (Matthews et al. 2010), pretend play (Pleyer 2020), and
politeness and impoliteness norms (Pleyer & Pleyer 2016, 2022).
Animals, especially non-human primates, also exhibit complex social cogni-
tion (Seyfarth & Cheney 2015). For example, chimpanzees understand seeing,
knowledge, and ignorance. They also know that others make inferences and
understand others’ goals, perceptions, and intentions (see, e.g., Call &
Tomasello 2008; Bettle & Rosati 2021 for reviews). Current research even
indicates that the controversial question ‘Does the chimpanzee have a theory
of mind?’ (Premack & Woodruff 1978), that is, whether they can attribute
mental states to others, can be answered with a yes.
Research with eighteen-month-old human infants has shown that they can
generalise their own perceptual experience to the experience of others. In
a study by Meltzoff and Brooks (2008), two groups of infants had experience
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 29

with two different kinds of blindfolds. In one group, it was an opaque

blindfold. But in the other group, it was a trick blindfold that looked opaque
from the outside but was actually see-through. Infants in the opaque blindfold
condition expected a person not to see an object when wearing it, whereas
children in the see-through condition expected a person to be able to see the
object. Follow-up research showed that children also used this experience to
calculate what a person knew. In an experiment by Senju et al. (2011),
eighteen-month-olds saw a typical ‘false belief’ test in which an object was
first placed into a box by a teddy bear but then was taken out of the box again.
Crucially, an adult shown watching the scene put on a blindfold after the
object was put into the box. Eye-tracking showed that infants having experi-
ence with the opaque blindfold expected the adult to reach for the toy where
they had seen the teddy bear put it. But infants having experience with the trick
blindfold had no such expectation, as generalising from their own experience
indicated that the adult had seen the toy being removed. Interestingly, Kano
et al. (2019) replicated this study with chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans,
who had experienced either an opaque barrier or a trick, see-through barrier.
Eye-tracking data showed that most of the apes expected the adult to reach for
the item in the box only in the opaque barrier condition but not in the trick
barrier condition.
This question of theory of mind is of particular relevance because theory of
mind and other related aspects of social cognition are intricately connected to
specifically human communication making use of ostension, inference, and
the recognition and expression of intentions. These capacities, then, are also
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argued to be crucial for the evolution of language (e.g., Tomasello 2008;

Heintz & Scott-Phillips 2023). However, mastery of a more complex theory
of mind seems to rely to some degree on children acquiring language and their
enculturation in linguistic interactions (e.g., Astington & Baird 2005), sug-
gesting a more complex co-evolutionary picture (Rubio-Fernandez 2023).
Overall, great apes show sophisticated sociocognitive skills, and the recog-
nition and expression of intentions seem to be part of the evolutionary platform
for the evolution of human language (Moore 2017). However, there still seem to
be crucial differences between great ape social cognition and motivations and
those of humans. Specifically, non-human primates show evidence of complex
social cognition mostly in competitive contexts. For example, their understand-
ing (and production) of declarative pointing seems to be extremely limited
(though see Leavens et al. 2009). As mentioned, fourteen-month-olds under-
stand a pointing gesture as informative for the question of which of two
locations hides a toy. Chimpanzees, on the other hand, ‘follow the point to the
bucket and say, in effect, “A bucket. So what? Now where’s the food?” They do
 30 Cognitive Linguistics

not understand that the pointing is intended to be ‘relevant’ to the searching as

a shared activity’ (Tomasello & Carpenter 2007: 122).
Interestingly, in a similar context, when an experimenter makes a prohibitive
gesture towards a bucket and then leaves the room, chimpanzees are able to
infer a competitive motive and become interested in this bucket, and not the
other (Herrmann & Tomasello 2006). They also become interested in a location
if they see a chimpanzee try to reach towards it, as opposed to when a human
experimenter points at it (Hare & Tomasello 2004). Bettle and Rosati (2021),
along similar lines as Tomasello and colleagues, propose that other primates
possess complex social cognition for competition. They argue that humans
share this sociocognitive platform with other primates, but that humans have
evolved additional social cognition for cooperation, which includes joint atten-
tion, sustained attention to others, attributing cooperative and shared intentions,
and complex cooperative perspective-taking. This sociocognitive infrastructure
for cooperation has been argued to represent a foundational, ‘species-unique
contribution to the language acquisition process’ (Ibbotson 2020: 116). Another
important aspect of this sociocognitive infrastructure for cooperation is that it
includes a propensity for cultural learning and cumulative cultural evolution
(Tomasello 1999), of which language evolution and change are prime examples
(Pleyer 2023). Cumulative cultural evolution, based on the cooperative infra-
structure for cooperation, therefore seems to be a foundational process in how
language evolved.
However, it has to be noted here that a focus on shared intentionality and its
relation to cultural evolution is ‘not the only game in town’. The question of
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which (socio)cognitive abilities are the foundation of cultural evolution is very

much an active field of research (see, e.g., Heyes & Moore 2023). The same
holds for the question of how cultural evolution in turn transforms our cognitive
processes, and leads to the emergence of new cognitive mechanisms which in
turn influence cultural evolution in a dynamic feedback loop. For example, one
such feedback loop that has been investigated concerns the way that language
and social cognition co-develop and co-evolve (Rubio-Fernandez 2023).
One way to investigate how cultural evolution can lead to the emergence of
structure, and the factors influencing this process, is experimentally. Indeed, the
cultural evolution of language has increasingly been tested in laboratory set-
tings. We will discuss this research in the next section.

5 Language Evolution in the Lab

While studies comparing humans and non-human animals as reviewed in
Sections 2–4 can give valuable clues to the evolutionary scaffolding of
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 31

language, it does not answer the question of how linguistic structure comes
about over the course of cultural evolution. Although the diachronic develop-
ment of existing languages (see Section 6) can prove informative here, it is
hardly sufficient as we are dealing with fully fledged human languages that have
developed over generations. In the absence of any records of the earliest stages
of language, laboratory experiments are used to approximate situations in
which, in one way or another, communicative systems are created from scratch.
In this section, we give an overview over two of the most influential paradigms
that investigate the evolution of human symbolic communication systems in
laboratory settings: experimental semiotics on the one hand, and artificial
language learning studies on the other. These two approaches overlap to some
extent and have been combined in many ways, especially in recent research.
Section 5.1 introduces experimental semiotics; Section 5.2 discusses Iterated
Learning (IL) as arguably the most influential artificial language learning
paradigm; Section 5.3 reviews more recent developments in experimental
approaches investigating the different factors that shape the evolution of com-
munication systems.

5.1 Experimental Semiotics and the Evolution of Language

One of the central questions in the evolution of language is the ‘symbol
grounding’ problem (Harnad 1990; cf. Nölle & Galantucci 2022). That is,
how did the first symbols emerge, and how were they connected to their
referents? One experimental design that has been used to shed light on this
question is experimental semiotics. Experimental semiotics is an influential
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paradigm to investigate how interactants can bootstrap a communication system

and interactively co-create novel, structured symbol systems (see, e.g.,
Galantucci et al. 2012; Galantucci 2017; Nölle & Galantucci 2022). In this
design, participants are not allowed to use language but instead have to solve
a communicative problem without a pre-established communication system.
Tasks usually fall into two domains: referential communication games and
coordination games. In referential communication games, participants have to
communicate about a set of referents. In coordination games, participants have
to coordinate movements in an artificial environment. Overall, in both tasks,
over repeated interactions, participants successfully negotiate meaningful sym-
bols to communicate about referents, coordinate their actions, and converge on
a shared communication system. Researchers then systematically change the
design properties of these tasks along various dimensions in order to tease apart
the different variables influencing the emergence of communication systems
(see Delliponti et al. 2023 for a review). For example, they had participants use
 32 Cognitive Linguistics

different channels and modalities of communication, for example, by using

graphical symbols, drawing, gesture, or pantomime.
For instance, in a Pictionary-like task, participants had to draw referents, which
then needed to be guessed by the other participant (Garrod et al. 2007). Here,
drawings of referents such as ‘Clint Eastwood’ were first drawn in much detail
based on iconic characteristics (e.g., by drawing a cowboy). But over repeated
iterations of these games, once the referent had been successfully identified, the
drawing would become more structured, as well as more abstract, and easier to
guess (e.g., by just drawing a hat shape and a cigarette shape). These studies have
shown that humans develop systematic communication systems in which they first
create signs (form/meaning mappings), which become more systematic and con-
ventionalised over time. However, ‘it is unclear where this human propensity for
systematicity comes from and how specific features are selected and become
expressed in systematic categories’ (Nölle et al. 2018). The emergence of novel
communication systems in experimental semiotics is thought to be influenced by:
(a) contextual factors (i.e., the potential associative connections between different
sets of referents that are inherent in the environment), (b) cognitive factors (i.e., the
ability to form associative links between sets of referents based on factors such as
metaphoric mapping, analogy, indexicality, metonymic links, and so forth), and (c)
semiotic resources assumed to be shared between interlocutors. For example, in
Garrod et al. (2007), one final graphical symbol for Clint Eastwood was an arrow
pointing right in a circle, which had emerged from an earlier strategy mixing iconic
properties with a rebus-like method. Specifically, a participant drew not only the
face of a cowboy but also four arrows arranged in the cardinal directions, with the
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eastern direction being circled. This property then became systematised and
conventionalised as the novel graphical symbol for Clint Eastwood.
Interestingly, this reliance on shared semiotic and cultural resources indicates
that enculturation and shared knowledge are important in these kinds of ground-
ing processes. Indeed, Lister et al. (2020, 2021) showed that younger children
(six years), who are less enculturated and had a smaller shared pool of concep-
tual and cultural knowledge, were less successful in comprehending and creat-
ing novel signs in the gestural and vocal modality than older children (twelve
years) and adults. From the perspective of the evolution of language, this means
that we have to be careful in interpreting results from experimental semiotics as
they are done with human participants who know language, and share a rich
pool of cultural knowledge. The same would not be the case for the initial
emergence of symbolic communication in the hominin lineage.6

6
The term hominin is used to refer to members ‘of the group that includes humans and our extinct
relatives’ in the human lineage (Langdon 2022: 6).
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 33

Lister et al. (2020, 2021) – as well as other studies (e.g., Fay et al. 2014) – also
found that participants generally are more successful in creating a communication
system from scratch using gestures when compared to using vocalisations. These
results are of particular interest regarding the question of whether the origins of
language lie primarily in the gestural or vocal modality (e.g., Wacewicz &
Żywiczyński 2017). However, we should see this in the context that both animal
and human communication are fundamentally multimodal in character, which
means that the origins of language very likely were also multimodal (e.g.,
Levinson & Holler 2014). The question then becomes what the specific contribu-
tions are of the gestural and vocal modalities, as well as their interactions. Indeed,
Macuch Silva et al. (2020) found that participants only using the gestural modal-
ity in a referential communication task were as accurate as those who could use
multimodal signals. However, they found that multimodality conferred an effi-
ciency advantage, meaning that they were faster at conveying a stimulus to
a partner.
Overall, experimental semiotics shows that humans can create systematic and
structured novel symbol systems without language. However, the cognitive
mechanisms involved in this still need to be better understood. In addition,
they mainly concern a relatively small shared symbolic storage of associations.
Interactions also happen over a comparatively short time frame, which therefore
does not adequately capture the multigenerational dynamics of the emergence
of structure in historical language change (Nölle & Galantucci 2022). This is
what we are going to turn to next.

5.2 Iterated Learning: Computational Approaches and Behavioural

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Experiments
As a cultural artefact, language is transmitted from generation to generation. This is
what the term iterated learning refers to: each generation of learners acquires
language by experiencing linguistic input from other people who have learned the
language before. But the term iterated learning has also come to refer to an
approach that operationalizes this fundamental process of generational transmis-
sion via computer simulations or in the laboratory. Iterated learning is an approach
that has proven particularly successful in language evolution research – in fact,
scientometric analyses of abstracts from the pertinent conferences in the field have
shown that it is among the most central topics in the field (e.g., Bergmann & Dale
2016; Wacewicz et al. 2023b). The IL model was pioneered in Kirby’s (2001)
seminal computational simulation. But the most well-known and most widely cited
IL study is probably that of Kirby et al. (2008), which pioneered the use of the IL
framework in laboratory studies with human participants. As the authors
 34 Cognitive Linguistics

themselves acknowledge, their study was not without precedent, though: Bartlett
(1932) and Bavelas (1952) had already used laboratory communication experi-
ments for their studies of human memory, and as Nölle and Galantucci (2022: 66)
point out, early attempts to study language change using miniature artificial
languages can already be found in the 1920s and 1930s (Esper 1925; Wolfle
1933; see also Christiansen & Chater 2022 for discussion). Also, a number of
communication game studies had already used repeated interactions between pairs
of participants (Garrod & Doherty 1994; Galantucci 2005; Garrod et al. 2007;
Selten & Warglien 2007; see Section 5.1). The main innovation of Kirby et al.’s
approach was that they explicitly addressed the question of whether a structured
language can emerge from unstructured stimuli without intentional design in an
experimental setting.
Kirby et al.’s study consisted of two experiments using largely the same
design, with the second one introducing a minor modification. In the first
experiment, participants learned an ‘alien’ language that consisted of written
labels (the signal space) and pictures of coloured objects in motion (the meaning
space7). Importantly, they were only trained on a subset of the stimuli set that
constituted the miniature language (the SEEN set). In the subsequent testing
phase, in which participants were presented with pictures and asked to produce
the correct label in the ‘alien’ language, they were tested on the SEEN and
UNSEEN sets in their entirety. The results of this experiment showed a decrease
in transmission error over the different generations, as well as an increase in
compositionality. Transmission error was assessed using a measure of string
similarity (edit distances), while compositionality was assessed by measuring
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the correlation between pairs of edit distances on the one hand and the Hamming
distance between pairs of meanings on the other, the latter quantifying the
number of features in which the meanings differed (i.e., meanings differing in
one feature had a distance of 1, meanings differing in two features a distance of 2,
etc.). Taken together, these results suggest that the miniature languages evolved to
become more structured. More specifically, the languages develop systematic
underspecification: as there is a ‘bottleneck on transmission’ (Kirby et al. 2008:
10685) because some of the items were held back from the participants during the
training phase, there is no way for them to rote-learn all meanings. Instead, they
have to make systematic generalisations. For example, in one of the miniature
languages in their data, the string tuge comes to refer to all objects that move
horizontally, regardless of whether they are circles, squares, or triangles.

7
The terms signal space and meaning space are not used in Kirby et al. (2008) but are common in
other IL studies (e.g., Verhoef et al. 2016; Little et al. 2017).
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 35

The second experiment made a minor modification in order to test the role of the
pressure for expressivity: before each participant’s training, the SEEN set was
filtered in such a way that if any strings were assigned to more than one meaning,
all but one of those meanings were removed from the training data. This ‘effect-
ively removes the possibility of the language adapting to be learnable by introdu-
cing underspecification: filtering ensures that underspecification is an evolutionary
dead-end’ (Kirby et al. 2008: 10684). The results again showed a clear and
significant decrease in transmission error. And even though the evolution of
underspecification was blocked by the experimental set-up, the measure of com-
positionality indicated that the languages became increasingly structured over time.
A more qualitative analysis of the data leads the authors to the conclusion that what
we see here is the evolution of structure within the signals. For instance, one of the
miniature languages evolves three distinct morphemes expressing colour, shape,
and movement, respectively.
In their discussion of the results, Kirby et al. (2008) particularly focus on the
role of compositionality, which, they argue, optimises the competing constraints
for learnability/efficiency and expressivity. The evolution of compositionality
over the course of IL can be seen as an adaptive response to the pressures
imposed by the ‘transmission bottleneck’ that exists between the producer and
the learner (Kirby et al. 2008: 10685).
Kirby et al.’s (2008) seminal study has inspired a large number of follow-up
experiments.

5.3 Recent Developments in Artificial Language Learning

Experiments
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The IL paradigm has been used extensively in studies on the cultural evolution
of language (for reviews, see, e.g., Tamariz 2014, 2017). Instead of giving a full
overview, we focus on a few selected studies that arguably illustrate key
developments in the application of the paradigm. For one thing, the IL paradigm
has been extended to more modalities. For example, Verhoef (2012) trained
participants on artificial languages that were produced with slide whistles, thus
introducing a ‘speech’ apparatus that involves less interference from previous
experience with spoken language. Just like the written-language stimuli in
Kirby et al.’s (2008) experiment, the whistle systems became more learnable
and more structured over the generations. Motamedi et al. (2021) combine
a silent gesture paradigm with IL to examine the emergence of systematic
argument marking beyond word order, showing that participants converge on
different strategies to disambiguate clause arguments, which become more
consistent over the course of transmission.
 36 Cognitive Linguistics

Kempe et al. (2015, 2019) as well as Raviv and Arnon (2018) compared the
performance of adults and children in IL studies. Kempe et al. (2015) show that
in the iterated transmission of random dot patterns, transmission accuracy
increased to a similar extent in five- to eight-year-old children and in adults;
also, structure emerged more readily in the children, which may have to do with
the fact that the children tended to introduce more radical innovations that
reduced complexity in earlier generations, which led to structures that were
more easily transmissible (Kempe et al. 2015: 251). Kempe et al. (2019), using
auditory stimuli, showed that in a dyadic referential communication game, only
adults but not children were able to converge on an iconic and structured
system, which leads them to the conclusion that the emergence and transmission
of linguistic systems are unlikely to be driven by child learners. This also has
implications for theories of language change (see Section 6.1), as some accounts
of linguistic change assign a key role to children. Raviv and Arnon (2018),
working with written stimuli like the ones used by Kirby et al. (2008), showed
that both adults and seven- to twelve-year-old children introduced structured
ambiguities, but only adults showed evidence of introducing compositional
structure. Also, they showed that the adults significantly outperformed the
children in learning the artificial languages despite having the same or less
exposure. They hypothesise that children may have weaker biases for structure,
and/or ‘children’s difficulty in learning the artificial language may have affected
their ability to regularize and introduce structure’ (Raviv & Arnon 2018: 171).
But apart from extending the paradigm to new modalities or groups of
participants, follow-up studies have tested more complex hypotheses, often
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combining IL and experimental semiotics (Tamariz 2017: 392).

Kirby et al. (2015: 85), reviewing a number of previous IL studies, summarise
their results as follows: a pressure for compressibility arising from transmission to
new learners results in degenerate languages (if it is not counterbalanced by
a pressure for expressivity); a pressure for expressivity arising from communica-
tion leads to holistic systems; a pressure from both communication and transmis-
sion leads to structure – but the same effect can be achieved via generational
transmission and an artificial pressure against degeneracy. The term ‘degeneracy’
in this context means that different meanings are associated with the same signal
that is therefore maximally ambiguous (note that the term is used differently in
other contexts; according to Van de Velde 2014, degeneracy refers to the phe-
nomenon that different elements can fulfil the same function). But especially in
the last ten years or so, many more factors that go beyond such more or less
system-internal pressures have been taken into account.
In particular, several studies have focused on the role of context in the
evolution of artificial miniature languages. Silvey et al. (2015) used
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 37

a modified version of Kirby et al.’s (2008) original paradigm, systematically

backgrounding one meaning dimension (e.g., colour, shape, or movement
pattern). They trained participants on an artificial language, but with each
label, they showed the participants two images instead of one, with one image
being a distractor. Importantly, the two pictures shared one consistent dimen-
sion, that is, attending to this dimension would never help participants to
discriminate between the two meanings. Their main result is that the patterns
of underspecification that emerged in the transmission process reflected the
salience of the different dimensions in learning and production contexts. The
languages lost distinctions earlier and faster in the dimension that was consist-
ently backgrounded (Silvey et al. 2015: 222).
Tinits et al. (2017) used a similar experimental set-up but focused on the
emergence of overspecification instead of underspecification. The meaning
space in this experiment consisted of four different objects (pen, book, ball,
and cup) in two different colours (yellow and blue). Participants were trained on
a minimally specified language, which means that, for example, the colour
dimension was only specified when it was necessary to disambiguate the target
object from the distractor object. In the test phase, participants were assigned to
one of two conditions: in the simple-context condition, only one single object
was displayed in each test trial. In the complex-context condition, two different
objects were shown in each test trial. The results show that the two contexts lead
to considerably different developments: in the complex-context condition, in
which the relevant meaning dimensions are harder to discern, the trend towards
overspecification (i.e., specifying a meaning dimension that is not relevant in
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the current context) is stronger.

The studies by Silvey et al. (2015) and Tinits et al. (2017) illustrate a broader
trend in the development of artificial language learning studies. While earlier
studies had mainly focused on transmission – sometimes taking communication
into account by integrating elements of communication games as pioneered in
experimental semiotics – several studies have focused on the role of the
communicative contexts. Following up on Silvey et al. (2015), Winters et al.
(2015) contrasted various configurations of referential contexts. They found the
resulting language to mark idiosyncratic elements of the figures, just one
systematic dimension, or both the idiosyncratic and the systematic dimensions
based on the configuration used in IL. Another follow-up study manipulated the
predictability of the referential context and found that systematic and compos-
itional marking was most likely to emerge when the content of the referential
context was most unpredictable (Winters et al. 2018). The authors interpret this
in terms of signal autonomy: as a result of the lack of information in context,
linguistic signals adapt to become usable in any context.
 38 Cognitive Linguistics

Raviv et al. (2019) argue that pressures for expressivity and compressibility
are already present during real-world communication, and that compositionality
can emerge without the need for generational transmission. To test this hypoth-
esis, they tested six ‘micro-societies’, each consisting of four participants, who
communicated in alternating pairs using an artificial language to refer to an
expanding meaning space. The results showed that the languages became
significantly more structured over several rounds of interaction, and that they
developed compositionality even in the absence of generational transmission.
Also, the languages became more consistent and more communicatively suc-
cessful over the different rounds of interaction. In discussing their results, Raviv
et al. (2019: 162) point out that the finding that compositionality can emerge
within the first generation is in line with observations made in the development
of real-world languages, such as emerging sign languages (see Section 6.2).
In general, it seems fair to say that the focus has slightly shifted from IL
experiments that mainly focus on transmission to communication-game designs
that take other, for example, environmental, factors into account. Nölle et al.
(2018), for example, use a silent-gesture paradigm to investigate how environ-
mental factors influence the development of structure in emerging communica-
tion systems, showing that ‘systematic structure emerges in response to broader
environmental and contextual affordances’ (Nölle et al. 2018: 103). One
domain in which environmental affordances play a crucial role is spatial
language, as has been shown in research on real-world languages (Levinson
2003). In a series of experiments in which natural language data were elicited,
Nölle et al. (2020a, 2020b) have investigated the role of environmental affor-
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dances in the development of spatial language using different strategies: on the

one hand, Nölle et al. (2020a) use a variant of the maze game pioneered by
Garrod and Anderson (1987), in which participants have to collaboratively
coordinate in a maze. In Nölle et al.’s adaptation of the experiment, the mazes
differed in their shape. Analysing the written chat that the participants used to
coordinate, Nölle et al. (2020a) show that the participants were highly sensitive
to the affordances of the particular environment. More specifically, they used
different communicative strategies, for example, a ‘figural’ one when con-
fronted with a maze that had a highly irregular shape, drawing on expressions
like an indent or the branch, while they conceptualised the maze as consisting of
rows and columns when it was presented in a ‘stratified’ way, using expressions
like the third row from the bottom. Nölle et al. (2020b) used a virtual reality
(VR) set-up to compare the communicative strategies that players of a VR game
would use when coordinating their positions in different kinds of environments,
showing that depending on the structure of the VR landscape, participants preferred
egocentric (left; right) or allocentric (across the river; behind the mountain)
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 39

frames of reference. While these experiments work with natural language,

they show that the contexts in which we use language strongly influence how
exactly we use it, which can potentially entail differences in linguistic
structure.
These experimental approaches can also shed light on the phenomena that have
been discussed in cognitive linguistics and beyond under the label of ‘linguistic
relativity’. In the broadest terms, linguistic relativity refers to the idea that the
language(s) we use have an impact on the way we think (see, e.g., Gumperz &
Levinson 1996; Everett 2013). For example, different languages have different
ways of conceptualising the spatial relation between objects (e.g., egocentric vs.
allocentric: the tree is in front of the house vs. the tree is to the south of the house;
see Levinson 2003: 28). This kind of variability in how different languages
construe the world has also been shown to lead to behavioural differences in
experimental set-ups, which indicates that different linguistic construals may
shape our conceptualisation of the world (see Everett 2013 and Lucy 2016 for
reviews). That is, by learning a particular language, the cognitive system becomes
trained to pay attention to conceptual categories ‘that have evolved over historical
time in the community’ (Verhagen 2021: 55). From the perspective of evolution-
ary cognitive linguistics, the adaptation of linguistic conventions to their envir-
onment and linguistic relativity can be seen as two sides of the same coin. The
perspectival construal patterns that constitute the linguistic repertoire of language
users emerge as ‘socio-cultural conventions stabilised through processes of
cultural evolution’ (Nölle et al. 2020) and are the result of recurring coordination
and perspectivation efforts of previous generations of interactants within particu-
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lar communities (Tomasello 1999; see also Steels & Belpaeme 2005). Once they
have been established, they necessarily influence individual cognition and behav-
iour. This holds especially when construing conceptual content for purposes of
expression in a way that is congruent with what previous generations of language
users have found relevant (cf. Slobin’s 1996 idea of ‘Thinking for Speaking’).
This is the case because memorising situations and events with respect to the
conceptual categories encoded within a particular language facilitates talking
about these situations and events in ways that are relevant to a particular linguistic
community (Verhagen 2021: 55).
In recent work, the IL paradigm, as well as artificial language learning
paradigms more generally, have also been used to address typological questions
(Levshina 2018) or, using computational modelling (Ito & Feldman 2022) or
communication game experiments (Ventura et al. 2022), for investigating
historical language change. In addition, some communication game studies
have significantly increased the pool of participants by drawing on online
interfaces or even on smartphone apps (Morin et al. 2018, 2022).
 40 Cognitive Linguistics

Recent work has also adopted a sociolinguistic perspective. For instance,

Fedzechkina et al. (2023) combine artificial language learning by addressing
how social biases can influence language structure. They trained participants on
a miniature language with two ‘dialects’, one employing case, the other not. In
one condition, the participants were socially biased towards users of one of the
two dialects: they were told that ‘We are especially keen to trade with the blue
aliens. They seem to be on our side, and they have important resources. We
should try to impress these blue aliens in particular’ (Fedzechkina et al. 2023: 6).
Interestingly, learners biased towards users of the no-case dialect tended to drop
case even if case was informative, thus creating a linguistic system with high
message uncertainty. This suggests that biases such as the pressures for expres-
sivity and efficiency interact with social biases, and that in some cases the latter
can even override the former. While this overview is by no means exhaustive, the
examples discussed in this section show that experimental approaches using
artificial miniature languages have managed to capture a large set of factors that
influence linguistic structure. This has led Roberts (2017) to call experiments in
language change ‘the linguist’s drosophila’, referring to the fly species that has
been used widely in genetic research, that is, a way to observe change in the
laboratory that can then be used to make generalisations about dynamics of
change in modern languages.
While some questions regarding the ecological validity of laboratory experi-
ments (as well as computational modelling approaches, which we have largely
neglected here) remain open, many of the results obtained in such controlled
settings are highly compatible with the dynamics that can be observed in natural
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languages.

6 Real-World Language Dynamics: What Language Emergence

and Change Reveal about Evolution
As mentioned in Section 1, to what extent the dynamics observed in present-day
languages can be subsumed under the umbrella term ‘language evolution’ is an
open question. But especially if we take a usage-based perspective on language
evolution (see Section 7), the cultural evolution of language is at least as
important as the evolutionary developments that led to the emergence of the
cognitive mechanisms underlying the human capacity for language, especially
given the assumption that both are closely intertwined, and that at least some of
the cognitive principles that underlie language use and language dynamics in
the present must have played a role in the biological evolution of the human
capacity for language. As such, analysing variation and change in present-day
languages can prove insightful for understanding processes of cultural
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 41

evolution. In the subsequent sections, we will mostly focus on research that has
been conducted in the framework of Construction Grammar, which in turn has
been singled out as a highly promising approach for studying language evolu-
tion by multiple authors (e.g., Arbib 2012; Hurford 2012; Johansson 2016;
Hartmann & Pleyer 2021). But this focus on Construction Grammar does not
mean that other cognitive-linguistic approaches could not offer equally relevant
insights. To mention just one recent example, Schmid’s (2020) entrenchment-
and-conventionalisation model, which synthesises elements from multiple
influential cognitive-linguistic approaches, can be considered a promising over-
arching framework for studies on language evolution as well.

6.1 Evolutionary Perspectives on Language Variation and Change

While questions from the domain of historical linguistics have long been seen as
outside the scope of language evolution research, recent developments in the
field suggest that their importance for understanding cultural evolution is
acknowledged to an increasing extent. This is shown, for example, by the
growing number of presentations for this domain at the most important confer-
ences in the field (see, e.g., Gong et al. 2014: 508; Wacewicz et al. 2023b).
Importantly, the relationship between language evolution research and histor-
ical linguistics can be seen as a bilateral one: on the one hand, insights from
historical linguistics can prove relevant for language evolution research in that
they reveal general processes of cultural evolution; on the other hand, accounts
of language change make use of evolutionary concepts to account for historical
processes (e.g., Croft 2000; see also Harder 2010). In this section, we discuss
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selected examples of approaches to language variation and change that apply

evolutionary ideas – in particular, the generalised theory of evolution as devel-
oped by Hull (1988) – to the study of language change. Firstly, we take a closer
look at Croft’s (2000) framework, which borrows many ideas from evolutionary
biology. Secondly, we briefly introduce Ritt’s (2004) framework, which is
rooted in a generalised theory of evolution. Thirdly, we take a closer look at
one specific phenomenon of crucial importance for understanding language
change from an evolutionary point of view, namely competition.
While Croft (2000) is perhaps the monograph that makes the connection
between language change and evolutionary theory most explicit, it is not
without its precursors. Evolutionary theories of language change have a long
history that can be traced back at least to Schleicher (1863), who argued that his
own theory of language change, which views languages as ‘natural organisms’,
is an instance of Darwinian evolution. Also, various linguists working on
language change in the second half of the twentieth century have explicitly
 42 Cognitive Linguistics

drawn on evolutionary concepts, after evolutionary metaphors or analogy had

fallen out of fashion for a fairly long time (McMahon 1994: 314). Keller (1994:
191–215), for instance, explicitly frames language change as an evolutionary
process, drawing on Dawkins’ (2006) notion of cultural replicators (memes).
Lass (1990) famously adapted the evolutionary concept of exaptation to lin-
guistics, which has become an important explanatory device in explaining how
existing linguistic units can take on new functions.
What distinguishes Croft’s approach from previous ones is that he develops
a fairly comprehensive evolutionary account of language change. Adopting
Hull’s (1988) generalised theory of evolution, he develops a ‘Theory of
Utterance Selection’ in which selection processes in biology and language are
conceived of as different instantiations of more general selection processes.
‘Linguemes’ are conceived of as replicators, in analogy to genes in biology,
while utterances are seen as structured sets of replicators, analogous to strings of
DNA in biology. In this view, language evolution is seen as a process of
variation and selection, in which innovations are introduced through a variety
of mechanisms (as it is introduced by recombination or mutation of genes in
biological evolution), which leads to the emergence of variants (analogous to
alleles in biology), and ultimately to the selection of variants via entrenchment
of conventions by speakers and its propagation in communication (Croft 2000:
38). However, Croft (2000: 39–40) also points out important disanalogies
between linguistic and biological evolution. For one thing, while altered repli-
cation of genes through recombination of DNA or, more rarely, mutation is
a more or less random process, external functional motivation seems to be the
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much more common causal factor for altered replication. Secondly, the rela-
tionship between replicator and interactor is different: in biology, the replicator,
as the genotype, ‘produces’ the interactor, that is, the phenotype (the organism);
in language, it is the interactor who ‘produces’ the utterance, that is, the
replicator. He argues, however, that this has no bearing on the mechanisms
involved in replication, interaction, and evolution (Croft 2000: 40).
Ritt (2004) takes a similar approach in that he also draws on a generalised
theory of evolution, or ‘universal Darwinism’ (Ritt 2004: 116). While Croft’s
approach is strongly based on Hull (1988), Ritt’s concept relies more on
Dawkins (2006), as the title of his monograph (‘Selfish Sounds and Linguistic
Evolution’) already reveals. He explicitly embraces the idea of conceptualising
languages as a complex adaptive system, rather than conceiving of a language
as an essentially static and passive system of knowledge (Ritt 2004: 17). Similar
to Croft, he points out a number of analogies and disanalogies between bio-
logical and linguistic evolution (Ritt 2004: 89–91). As for the former, he argues,
for example, that languages, like organisms, are complex and functional; as for
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 43

disanalogies, one of the main points he mentions is that language users are
conscious, while biological evolution is ‘blind’. Focusing on sound change, Ritt
(2004: 120) argues that evolutionary changes in language can be predicted in
replicator systems, which entails that the most adequate way of approaching
language change involves three questions: ‘(a) what the replicating units that
constitute competences actually are, (b) by what mechanics they replicate, and
(c) what (environmental) factors influence their success at replicating’ (Ritt
2004: 121). In one case study, he applies this theoretical approach to Middle
English vowel quantity. According to this approach, for example, short /a/ and
long /a:/ can be thought of as replicators that compete for association to morphs,
with /a/ initially being associated with morphological forms like have, make,
and grase, which gradually became more strongly associated with /a:/ instead
(Ritt 2004: 257–259). Eventually, /a:/ ousted /a/ in open syllables (open syllable
lengthening), while /a/ ended up prevailing in the case of have (Ritt 2004: 258).
Zehentner (2019) extends this approach to other phenomena of language
change and combines it with a Construction Grammar perspective. In particular,
she develops an evolutionary account of competition in language, partly draw-
ing on Steels’ (2011) evolutionary Construction Grammar approach. As the
concepts of variation and selection are key to evolutionary approaches to
language change, competition plays a crucial role in any such account, as the
emergence of new variants necessarily leads to competition between different
alternatives. Note that this is also one domain in which cognitive linguistics and
particularly Construction Grammar can prove insightful for an understanding of
linguistic evolution, as especially the latter has always been concerned with the
study of ‘alternations’ (see Pijpops 2020 for some critical reflections on this
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term), for example, the so-called dative alternation (I gave her the book – I gave
the book to her, see, e.g., Goldberg 1995). But while many individual alterna-
tions have been studied in much detail, an evolutionary perspective – as pointed
out in Ritt’s (2004) quote cited earlier in this section – entails the crucial
question of what the general mechanisms behind such competition phenomena
are, and what actually counts as competition.
Like Croft and Ritt, Zehentner (2019) uses the concept of replicators. But
while Croft views utterances as the main unit of replication in language,
Zehentner sees constructions, that is, form–meaning pairings at various levels
of abstraction, as units of replication (replicators). Constructions change on
a micro-level as language users introduce variation, which can lead to competi-
tion. Bauer et al. (2013: 33), focusing on processes of morphological rivalry,
define competition as follows: ‘Two processes compete when they both have the
potential to be used in the coining of new synonymous forms from the same
base’. Generalising this definition to other domains of grammar, we can speak
 44 Cognitive Linguistics

of competition when different patterns that fulfil the same functions can be used
(partly) interchangeably. Importantly, whether any two processes compete or
not cannot always be answered categorically. In many cases, there may be
partial rivalry between different constructions showing functional overlap in
some domains but not others (Guzmán Naranjo & Bonami 2023). Also, newly
emerged constructions can compete with previously unrelated patterns, espe-
cially if two constructions overlap in meaning (Zehentner 2019: 301).
In a Construction Grammar framework, functionally similar patterns can be
conceived of as being connected via ‘synonymy links’ (Goldberg 1995: 91), and
they can be seen as ‘allostructions’ (Cappelle 2006). Once a new competitor
enters the network, the links to other constructions can gradually become
stronger or weaker, depending on various factors like the contexts in which
they occur, their usage frequency, and potentially also the degree to which they
‘stand out’ in comparison to other constructions, for example, via the use of
‘extravagant’ formal means such as repetition, unusual phoneme combinations,
or (apparent) violation of grammatical rules (see, e.g., Haspelmath 1999;
Ungerer & Hartmann 2020).
Recent work in diachronic Construction Grammar has focused on the question
of how overarching patterns of competition between constructions can be mod-
elled. De Smet et al. (2018) distinguish a number of ways in which competing
forms change their functions: in the case of substitution, only one form survives –
for instance, they argue that -ing clauses may currently be in the process of
substituting to-infinitives after begin in American English (begin to work > begin
working; De Smet et al. 2018: 207). Differentiation, by contrast, refers to the
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phenomenon of competing constructions coming to occupy different functional

niches. For instance, they show that [start + -ing-clause] and [start + to-infinitive]
rarely combined with non-agentive subjects until the 1990s in American English.
Recent data show, however, that both constructions opened up for non-agentive
subjects, but this trend is much more pronounced for [start + to-infinitive].
Finally, attraction refers to the phenomenon of two constructions becoming
functionally more, rather than less, alike. Again, [begin + -ing-clause] and
[begin + to-infinitive] can be seen as an example of this, according to De Smet
et al. (2018: 211): while a purely frequency-based comparison suggests a relation
of substitution, a closer inspection of how each form is used also suggests that the
two constructions grow more similar – while [become + -ing-clause] becomes
more permissive of non-agentive subjects, [begin + to-infinitive] starts to com-
bine with agentive subjects more frequently.
Using evolutionary linguistics as an explanatory framework, Zehentner (2019)
emphasises that in her approach, evolutionary concepts are not just used meta-
phorically but instead ‘competition between linguistic variants is thought to be
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 45

fundamentally subject to the same general evolutionary mechanisms as biological

ones’ (Zehentner 2019: 277). This is very much in line with the generalised theory
of evolution adopted, in slightly different ways, by Croft and Ritt, and that has
become increasingly popular not only in linguistics but also in many other areas
of scientific inquiry, culminating in the rise of cultural evolution as an academic
field in its own right (Creanza et al. 2017; Lewens & Buskell 2023). The question
to what degree evolutionary concepts are used in a metaphorical or analogical
way, and to what degree biological and cultural evolution are actually seen as
instances of the same processes is answered differently in different approaches.
As mentioned earlier in this section, Croft (2000), for example, points out
a number of disanalogies between linguistic and biological evolution but argues
that such differences do not weaken the generalised theory of evolution – instead,
he argues that a generalised theory of evolution only specifies certain causal
relationships between replicator, interactor, and environment but otherwise
affords many variations in the specific causal relationships that hold between
these entities in different manifestations of evolution in different domains.
While most of the approaches summarised in the present section so far focus on
the question of how evolutionary concepts can be applied to explaining changes in
the traceable history of human languages, the assumption that language evolution is
a special case of cultural evolution also allows for extending the findings that have
been obtained in the traceable history to the more distant past. To some extent, this
is, of course, a tool that has been used fruitfully in historical linguistics for a long
time for mostly descriptive purposes: the so-called comparative method has been
used to reconstruct earlier stages of existing languages and hypothesised protolan-
guages (used in the sense of ‘precursor languages’ here, e.g., Proto-Indo-European
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as a precursor to the, e.g., Romance or Germanic language families, not in the sense
in which is it used in language evolution research; see, e.g., Campbell 2013). But the
reconstruction of prehistoric languages has been taken beyond the merely descrip-
tive level in more recent research, and more explanatory research questions have
taken centre stage (see, e.g., Benítez-Burraco & Progovac 2021). One research field
that seems particularly promising for informing language evolution research is the
study of grammaticalisation, that is, the emergence of (more) grammatical forms
from (more) lexical ones (Hopper & Traugott 2003; Heine & Kuteva 2007). In line
with Bybee’s (2010) assumption (already cited in Section 1) that the first grammat-
ical constructions must have emerged in the same ways as those observed in more
recent history, the general mechanisms observed in grammaticalisation processes
may have played a role in the emergence of fully fledged languages as well. Indeed,
some of the processes observed in artificial language learning experiments actually
resemble grammaticalisation processes. Lehmann (2015) has famously proposed
six parameters of grammaticalisation, three of them pertaining to the paradigmatic
 46 Cognitive Linguistics

organisation of a language system, the others to syntagmatic aspects: (a) integrity –

grammaticalised signs often show phonological attrition, cf. going to > gonna, (b)
paradigmaticity – the existence of clear-cut paradigmatic relations; for instance,
tense or aspect categories form relatively small, coherent classes, while less strongly
grammaticalised classes, for example, so-called secondary prepositions tend to be
larger and less coherent, (c) paradigmatic variability, that is, the freedom that
language users have in choosing a sign. Strongly grammaticalised categories are
highly obligatory, that is, language users have to choose between, for example,
present or past tense; the future tense, by contrast, is less strongly grammaticalised
in many languages (if they even have one), which is why language users can often
choose between future tense and futurate present in many languages. As for the
syntagmatic parameters, Lehmann proposes (d) structural scope – for example,
auxiliary have has a broader syntactic scope than the full verb have (I have stolen
a bike vs. I have a bike, the former having scope over an entire proposition); (e)
bondedness, that is, the degree to which a sign is connected to another sign, to the
extent that they coalesce (cf. again gonna); (f) syntagmatic variability, that is, the
ease with which a sign can be shifted in its context – for instance, definite articles
have a fixed position (in English, at the beginning of an NP), while the position of
other words is more flexible (see, e.g., Szczepaniak 2011: 20).
While only few experimental studies have explicitly addressed questions of
grammaticalisation, some of the developments along the parameters proposed
by Lehmann can be observed in the miniature languages that develop in artifi-
cial language learning studies. For example, the phenomenon that the use of
specific signals becomes more obligatory over time, and the freedom of lan-
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guage users to choose between variants becomes more limited, can be observed
in some IL studies (see, e.g., Tinits et al. 2017).
Taken together, experimental studies and the study of historical language
change can complement each other in developing and testing hypotheses about
the mechanisms underlying the emergence of linguistic structure (also see
Hartmann & Pleyer 2020). Another complementary line of research is the
investigation of developing sign languages, where we can also observe many
of the processes that are typical for grammaticalisation. The next section gives
a brief overview of this line of research.

6.2 From Gestures to Signs? The Case of ‘Emerging’ Sign

Languages
Language evolution research has been informed in various ways by signed lan-
guages (e.g., Armstrong & Wilcox 2007). In recent years, one area that has received
particular attention is that of ‘emerging sign languages’ (Brentari & Coppola 2013).
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 47

These are sign languages with a relatively short time depth of only a few gener-
ations since their emergence. One of the most well-publicised cases is that of
Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), which emerged in Nicaragua in the 1980s
when many deaf children were brought together in a school where they were
supposed to learn lip-reading (Senghas et al. 2004). Signers brought their individual
structured communicative practices with them (often referred to as ‘homesign’, but
see Hou 2022 and references therein for a critical discussion of the term and the
ideologies tied to it). But in the context of children interacting with each other in this
school, a shared, conventionalised, and structured sign language emerged. It was
subsequently transmitted to later generations of children as they entered school,
developing further conventionalised grammatical structures in the process trans-
mission and continuing daily use in everyday life (Meir et al. 2010; cf. Tomasello
2008). NSL is classified as an emerging urban sign language, but most emerging
sign languages are rural or village sign languages, which often emerge in the
context of a high incidence of deafness in the community (De Vos & Pfau 2015).
Emerging sign languages have been met with strong interest in language
evolution research as a potential ‘window into language evolution’ (Mineiro
et al. 2021). However, it has to be made clear that ‘the sign languages of the
world are used by human individuals living in human societies’ (Pleyer et al.
2022). This is of special importance when taking a species-comparative and
evolutionary perspective because emerging sign languages are just as much
‘true’ human languages as any others (cf. Zeshan & de Vos 2012). They
represent the dynamic human activity of ‘languaging’ (Henner & Robinson
2023) and interactive, collaborative co-creation of meaning. Work on emerging
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languages in the past has been in danger of exoticising signing communities

(Braithwaite 2020; Pleyer et al. 2022). Especially from an evolutionary per-
spective, it is therefore paramount not to characterise emerging sign languages
as ‘immature languages’ closer to the emergence of language than more
‘mature’ languages. This view rests on problematic assumptions similar to the
ones reflected in the notion of ‘creole exceptionalism’ (DeGraff 2003), which
are partly based on colonialist and dehumanising ideologies of ‘primitive’
languages being used by ‘primitive’ people, in contrast to ‘evolved’ languages
being used by ‘evolved’ people (DeGraff 2005). We have to be aware of the
ideological dimensions of categories, such as ‘emerging sign language’, as they
might be tied to ideological assumptions about what is and isn’t language (Hou
& de Vos 2022).
With this in mind, the study of emerging sign languages can be useful for
studying the evolutionary dynamics involved in conventionalisation and trans-
mission, as they possess highly relevant sociolinguistic and historical profiles
for this question. As for a number of these languages, we can identify their point
 48 Cognitive Linguistics

of origin in time, they offer a specific window into the pressures and dynamics
that shape all living languages over time (see also Hou 2020; Pleyer et al. 2022).
They can also elucidate the role in which these dynamics, community structure,
and communicative practices interact with the unique specific sociohistorical
contexts of each language.
One case to illustrate this is São Tomé and Príncipe Sign Language (LGSTP,
Mineiro et al. 2017, 2021). São Tomé and Príncipe is a group of West African
islands with about 220,000 inhabitants. The country has a high incidence of
deafness (about 3%), many due to the effects of prophylactic Malaria medication
during pregnancy. In 2012–2013, the humanitarian project ‘Without Barriers’
brought 100 deaf participants from ages four to twenty-five together to help them
create their own sign language. They did so by providing them with the oppor-
tunity to interact with each other on a daily basis over the period of two years.
These daily interactions, as well as structured sessions in which picture cards
were used to elicit signs, led to the emergence, stabilisation, and conventionalisa-
tion of linguistic forms. Initial signs were mostly pantomimic, iconic, and holistic
in character. But over time, signs have become more time efficient, and exhibited
greater articulatory economy, a more clearly defined signing space, word order
preferences, emerging compounding patterns, as well as a pronominal system
based on pointing (as also found in other sign languages) (Mineiro et al. 2017,
2021). As any other living language, LGSTP is still in continuous development.
While iconic signs currently dominate the lexicon, there is a clear drive towards
arbitrariness, reduction of articulatory elements, and developing internal structure
of signs. From the perspective of language evolution, LGSTP provides evidence
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for the potential of pantomime (Żywiczyński et al. 2018; Zlatev et al. 2020) and
iconicity (Pleyer et al. 2017) in grounding communication systems (see
Sections 5.2 and 5.3). However, it also shows how based on these foundations,
cognitive, interactional, and community dynamics lead to the emergence of
a mutually shared, symbolic, and structured communication system.
From a sociolinguistic perspective, possibly the most important aspect of the
emergence of LGSTP is that it helped create a sense of community and belonging:

Deaf people now meet outside the classroom, and one can often observe
children, adolescents, and adults on the street communicating with each other
with their hands. The fluidity of the communicative exchanges using LGSTP
between them is remarkable. Deaf people in Sao Tome and Principe have
become a community with a common characteristic: a language that unites
them and through which they can communicate. (Mineiro et al. 2017: 12)

In sum, then, the development of these sign languages shows not only that many
of the mechanisms that can be observed in other contexts, for example, in
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 49

grammaticalisation as well as in the grounding of new communication systems

in laboratory situations, seem to apply here as well, but it also lends further
support to the key role of interaction and joint intentionality in the development
of language.

7 A Usage-Based Perspective on the Evolution of Language

In this Element, we have discussed a number of key topics central to integrating
cognitive linguistics and language evolution research. Through this, we have
illustrated how both fields can enter into a productive dialogue. On the one
hand, this concerns how cognitive linguistics can be informed by – and correl-
ates with – research on language evolution, especially when it comes to research
on (a) the cognitive and social foundations of language and interaction
(Sections 2, 3, and 4), and (b) the evolutionary dynamics of the emergence of
structure in language (Sections 5 and 6). On the other hand, it concerns how
cognitive linguistics can inform the study of language evolution with regard to
the key topics discussed here. Minimally, we have shown that these topics, as
well as others, need to be integrated if we want to arrive at a cognitive-linguistic
account of language evolution. The massively interdisciplinary nature of lan-
guage evolution research of course makes this a highly complex undertaking.
So while we have given a comprehensive overview of central topics from
a perspective integrating cognitive linguistics and language evolution research,
we have in essence still only scratched the surface of relevant topics where both
fields can cross-fertilise each other.
Here, in conclusion, we want to adopt a broader perspective and show two
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principal ways in which cognitive linguistics and language evolution research

can be integrated: one concerns the utility of cognitive linguistics in spelling out
the foundations of language evolution. The other concerns the broader contri-
bution of cognitive linguistics, usage-based approaches, and evolutionary lin-
guistics to understanding language as a complex adaptive system.
The first principal way of integrating cognitive linguistics and language evolution
research entails a kind of ‘shopping list’ approach where cognitive linguistics helps
in outlining the cognitive and interactional mechanisms and processes that have to
be present in a ‘language-, interaction-, and construction-ready brain’ (Arbib 2012;
Pleyer 2023) in order to make the evolution of language possible. This includes, for
example, the human ability for symbolic cognition, a capacity for massive storage
of a network of constructions in memory, statistical learning and pattern-finding,
processes of entrenchment of constructions in memory related to frequency and
usage effects, capacities for abstraction and schematisation, and sociocognitive
capacities such as perspective-taking, ostensive–inferential communication, shared
 50 Cognitive Linguistics

and collective intentionality, the ability to converge on shared conventions, the

dynamic, interactive co-creation of meaning in interaction, as well as others. On the
other hand, this relates to specifying the processes that lead to the emergence of
structure over repeated interactions in communities of practice and over the course
of cultural transmission. It is here that cognitive linguistics and usage-based
approaches can make significant contributions to language evolution research, as
they show how language and structure emerge from interaction and usage. As
discussed before, it is especially work on historical language change that can yield
insights into processes that have not only led to the emergence of structure in living
languages but can also explain the emergence of the first (protolinguistic) construc-
tions both in interactional face-to-face encounters and their increasing conventio-
nalisation and transmission within communities.
Cognitive-linguistic, usage-based approaches on the one hand, and evolu-
tionary linguistics on the other, are highly compatible in their overall conceptu-
alisation of language. Specifically, usage-based approaches (e.g., Beckner et al.
2009) and evolutionary linguistics (e.g., Steels 2011; Kirby 2012) see language
as a complex adaptive system. In a complex adaptive system, the global
characteristics of the system emerge out of the complex local interactions of
different factors in different dimensions and on different timescales. Four
timescales are of particular importance in language evolution (cf. Kirby 2012;
Hartmann & Pleyer 2021; Pleyer 2023; Enfield 2014, 2022; Sinha 2015):8

• The enchronic timescale of language use in context and social interaction

• The ontogenetic timescale of individual language development across the
lifespan
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• The diachronic (or glossogenetic) timescale of social/cultural historical

change
• The phylogenetic timescale of bio-cultural language evolution.

For all timescales, cognitive linguistics and usage-based approaches can make
important theoretical contributions. For example, regarding the ontogenetic
timescale, usage-based accounts of language acquisition have amassed
a wealth of relevant research on the cognitive and social-interactive processes
8
Note that there have been slightly different proposals for distinguishing the relevant timescales –
for instance, Sinha (2015) distinguishes between phylogenesis, sociogenesis, ontogenesis, and
microgenesis, the latter referring to ‘collaborative situated learning and development’; Enfield
(2014: 7–9) proposed what he calls the MOPEDS model (‘Microgenetic-Ontogenetic-
Phylogenetic-Enchronic-Diachronic-Synchronic’). Also, the individual timescales can be broken
down further – for instance, Larsen-Freeman & Cameron (2008: 169) have proposed a set of
‘timescales relevant to face-to-face conversation between two people’, e.g., a mental processing
timescale, an online talk timescale, and a discourse event timescale (also see Enfield 2014: 12; see
Uryu et al. 2014 for discussion). For expository purposes, we will stick with the four timescales
mentioned here.
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 51

and mechanisms children use to ‘construct a language’ and acquire a network of

constructions (e.g., Tomasello 2003; Ibbotson 2020; see also Section 4).
Concerning the ‘to-and-fro of social interaction’ (Enfield 2022) that makes
up the enchronic timescale, one interesting proposal of how structure emerges in
interaction is that of ‘ad hoc constructionalization’ (Brône & Zima 2014). In ad
hoc constructionalisation, local patterns and temporary constructions emerge
and can be used as a shared linguistic resource for the duration of the encounter.
Du Bois (2014), Pleyer (2017, 2023), and Verhagen (2021) argue that the
emergence of such patterns in interaction can serve as the starting point for
their increasing recurrence in subsequent interactions, leading to their increas-
ing conventionalisation in a community of practice. This, in turn, as briefly
outlined in the model sketch that we will discuss later in this section, then can
serve as the foundation for the cumulative cultural evolution of language. As
this shows, and as we have seen throughout this Element, a usage-based
approach to the diachronic timescale can uncover many of the evolutionary
dynamics in language change, as well as shed light on the cognitive and social
factors that influence it. One particularly promising model that combines the
enchronic, ontogenetic, and diachronic timescales is Schmid’s (2020) entrench-
ment-and-conventionalisation model. This approach models the interaction of
the cognitive (entrenchment) and the social (conventionalisation) dimension
of language, which are connected in a feedback loop through the driving force
of usage. On the cognitive and individual dimension, repeated encounters with
a particular structure strengthen its storage and representation in memory. On
the community dimension, frequently occurring structures diffuse and become
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established and socially shared within a community of practice. The interaction

and mutual reinforcement of these processes leads to language change. As these
processes take domain-general cognitive processes as well as social interaction
and usage as its starting points, this approach also has the potential to help
explain the emergence of the first entrenched and conventionalised protolin-
guistic structures. In other words, it can be used as a model for the emergence of
language through interaction, entrenchment on the cognitive side, and conven-
tionalisation on the community side (Pleyer 2023). Such an approach takes
seriously the fact that language is both a cognitive and a social phenomenon
(Dąbrowska 2020), and sees their interaction in usage as a key driving force in
language evolution. In doing so, it also takes the interaction between individual
and population into account more thoroughly, which has been another focus of
recent cognitive-linguistic research (e.g., Petré & Van de Velde 2018; Petré &
Anthonissen 2020). As Verhagen (forthcoming) points out, population thinking
plays a crucial role in evolution but has arguably often been neglected in
linguistic theorising. In particular, he argues that even some recent approaches
 52 Cognitive Linguistics

do not adequately take into account the key insight of population thinking,
namely ‘that the emergence of conventionality is a community level causal
process distinct from the emergence of cognitive units and routines for speaking
and understanding’ (Verhagen forthcoming). However, some approaches,
including the entrenchment-and-conventionalisation model, but also Baxter
and Croft’s (2016) account of language change across the lifespan or
Dąbrowska’s (2020) adaptation of Keller’s invisible-hand approach, have
started to make explicit proposals as to how the relationship between individual
and population can be modelled. Also, first attempts have been made to distin-
guish the levels of individual and population in empirical research. In their
analysis of the grammaticalisation of going to, for example, Petré & Van de
Velde (2018) try to tease apart essentially non-social mechanisms of innovation
from inherently social mechanisms of propagation.
Overall, this means that cognitive-linguistic and usage-based approaches can
contribute to possible scenarios of language emergence by specifying critical
processes and dynamics on the enchronic, ontogenetic, and diachronic time-
scale. To illustrate this potential, we briefly outline a model of how a cognitive-
linguistic, usage-based view of language evolution can capture fundamental
processes that have the potential to kick-start language evolution: one founda-
tion for this is the aforementioned ‘language-, interaction-, and construction-
ready brain’. That is, we take as our starting point basic cognitive and inter-
actional capacities enabling the co-creation of meaning in interactions, and
enabling interactants to converge on shared symbolic practices that they could
add to open-endedly in repeated interactions. Hominins who first started to
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develop basic communicative solutions to recurring communication problems

would retain those that proved successful. Successful solutions to previous
communicative challenges would shape how these challenges were solved in
the future (Christiansen & Chater 2022). They would also make it more likely
that these communicative strategies were used with different and more and
more communicative partners, leading to their social diffusion across
a community. Repeated use of these communicative solutions would then lead
to these solutions becoming entrenched (on the cognitive side) and convention-
alised (on the community side). Over time, usage-based factors would then lead
to a repertoire of cognitively entrenched and socially conventionalised (proto)
constructions. That is, the first protolinguistic constructions would emerge on
the interactional timescale. Through repeated use, they would then become part
of a shared community-wide system, becoming entrenched in individuals on the
ontogenetic timescale, and be transmitted through the community, and change
through the transmission process, on the diachronic timescale. As research on
experimental semiotics, IL, and the evolutionary dynamics of language has
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 53

shown, over time such systems become increasingly more structured and
systematic. They also become more abstract and schematic in nature. This
process, then, offers a mechanism that can lead to the gradual transition towards
the language pole on the protolanguage–language continuum (Hartmann &
Pleyer 2021; Pleyer 2023).
Here, cognitive-linguistic models have much to offer for fleshing out such
a scenario.
Regarding the phylogenetic timescale, one further interesting contribution of
usage-based approaches is a focus on memory processes, and how entrench-
ment influences linguistic structure. Divjak (2019), for example, outlines three
types of entrenchment that influence the mental storage of constructions:

• repeatedly activated structures are processed more rapidly and in a more

automated fashion (‘What You Do Often, You Do Faster and with Fewer
Errors’);
• frequently co-occurring structures achieve unit status, and can be retrieved
and accessed simultaneously (‘Units that Occur Together, Refer Together’);
• co-occurring structures fuse together and become chunks (‘Units that Occur
Together, Blur Together’).

This means that structural aspects of language are influenced by the nature of
entrenchment in memory. To what degree could these processes also help
explain the emergence of structure in protolinguistic hominin communication?
This is a question to be further investigated. However, just as an illustration, it
can already be brought into dialogue with a specific proposal by Planer and
Sterelny (2021) on the emergence of the first composite signs. Planer and
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Sterelny argue that Homo erectus populations (who lived around 1.9 mya to
100 kya9) had a basic mixed-modality protolanguage. In this protolanguage,
they argue, repair signals would become increasingly frequent. Communicative
repair is a pervasive feature in human interaction (e.g., Dingemanse et al.
2015b) and can also be found in the communication of other animals, such as
great ape gestural communication (Heesen et al. 2022). As the degree of
collaboration and cooperation increased in erectines, for example in the domain
of tool-making, this would lead to more repair sequences. In addition, Planer
and Sterelny argue that with increased social cognition and ‘smartness’, inter-
locutors would anticipate the necessities for repair and integrated repair signals
into their initial message. For example, a pointing gesture might at first have
been a repair mechanism (‘No, this stone’), before becoming part of a composite
sign (‘Pick up stone’ + ‘Pointing at stone/This stone’). Although Planer and

9
mya = million years ago; kya = thousand years ago.
 54 Cognitive Linguistics

Sterelny do not make explicit reference to processes of entrenchment, the

process that is described here is captured quite well by the results of entrench-
ment explicated by Divjak (2019): repeatedly co-occurring items are stored as
units, enabling their simultaneous access and retrieval, and repeatedly co-
occurring structures become fused and chunked together, becoming
a ‘referential unit’.
A cognitive-linguistic approach also has the advantage that it can help bridge
the gap between questions of language origins and language development. As
mentioned at the beginning of this Element, it has sometimes been criticised that
the term language evolution conflates both aspects. And indeed, it is largely
research on the cultural evolution of language that immediately seems highly
compatible with the usage-based approach pursued in cognitive linguistics.
However, we have also argued that research on the communication systems of
non-human animals can partly be understood using concepts from cognitive
linguistics. This seems straightforward as cognitive linguistics is interested in
the interconnection between language, cognition, and the social and cultural
environments in which language use takes place. In addition, it makes sense not
to draw a categorical distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic signs but
to conceive of language as one semiotic resource among others. This follows
out of the gradualist approach of cognitive linguistics, evident in its embrace-
ment of prototype theory (e.g., Lakoff 1987) and in concepts like the lexicon-
syntax continuum that plays a crucial role in Construction Grammar (Ungerer &
Hartmann 2023). This gradualist approach, then, also offers a heuristic frame-
work for modelling the emergence of linguistic signs out of pre-linguistic
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precursors.
In our discussion of the ‘shopping list’ approach, we have listed some of the
cognitive capacities that needed to evolve for a ‘language-, interaction-, and
construction-ready brain’, but these of course also need to be complemented
with references to physiological and anatomical changes supporting the evolu-
tion of language (cf. Győri 2021). There have been major biological changes
during hominin evolution, which served as the platform to make the evolution-
ary emergence of language via processes of cumulative cultural evolution
possible. One of the most obvious ones is the evolution of human brain size,
which began significantly increasing around 2 mya. In absolute terms, with an
average weight of about 1,400 g, the human brain is roughly three times bigger
than the brains of other great apes. In relative terms, the human brain is also
significantly bigger than expected for a primate our size (Verendeev &
Sherwood 2018). The human brain also differs in terms of its neuroanatomical
architecture and brain organisation, with an expanded prefrontal cortex (Deacon
1998) as well as other parts of the cerebral cortex and significant rewiring of
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 55

fibre tract connections involved in capacities such as tool-making, social cogni-

tion, and language (Sherwood 2019; Ponce De León et al. 2021; Langdon 2022:
336–343). Other changes relevant to language include, for example, the evolu-
tion of neuroanatomical structures supporting increased fine-grained sensori-
motor coordination, motor control, and sequential learning abilities, which are
foundational for both spoken and signed language. There were also changes
specifically related to the evolution of speech, such as changes in vocal anatomy
(see, e.g., Fitch 2010: 297–337 for a review), as well as increased vocal and
breath control (e.g., MacLarnon 2012; Fuchs & Rochet-Capellan 2021) and
vocal learning abilities (e.g., Zhang 2017). Some of these would have served as
pre-adaptations or enabling conditions that were exapted in the evolution of
protolanguage. Others would represent adaptations once protolinguistic com-
munication got off the ground (Fitch 2010; MacLarnon 2012), kick-starting
a co-evolutionary feedback loop between (proto)language and the capacities
supporting it (cf. Johansson 2021). All these changes likely had a gradual and
long evolutionary trajectory in the 1.5 million years since Homo erectus
(Levinson & Holler 2014; Dediu & Levinson 2018) with important foundations
of speech present at least since the last common ancestor between Neanderthals
and modern humans 500 kya (Dediu & Levinson 2013). Of course, these
changes were not restricted to speech. For example, they also include changes
influencing the multimodal nature of human communication, such as anatom-
ical and physiological changes related to the biomechanic foundations and
muscle systems involved in co-speech gesture (Pouw & Fuchs 2022). Many
changes likely had complex and wide-ranging effects, such as the evolution of
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the globular braincase characteristic of Homo sapiens. This development likely

was related to significant changes in developmental programmes, neural organ-
isation, and the genetic regulation underlying them (Boeckx & Benítez-Burraco
2014; Meneganzin et al. 2022).
For any scenario of language evolution and the evolution of human cognition,
it is a central question which evolutionary forces drove the biological changes
and changes in social organisation supporting these capacities. Many different
forces and adaptive scenarios have been proposed as driving factors, with
different proposals for changes in the evolutionary niche of hominins which
acted as selection pressures for the evolution of the capacities underlying
language. Many of them are framed in terms of adaptive solutions to ecological,
technological, and social challenges faced by hominins in the course of
evolution.
For example, some approaches have pointed to ecological challenges that
required novel subsistence strategies. These include, for example, coordinated
‘power scavenging’, in which the predator responsible for the kill was chased
 56 Cognitive Linguistics

away in a coordinated group effort (Bickerton 2009), or complex coordinated

hunting (Tomasello 2014), which necessitated more complex communication.
Others in turn have highlighted challenges related to the transmission of
technological information, with complex communication as a prerequisite for
(teaching the skills involved in) the creation of complex tools (e.g., Morgan
et al. 2015; Lombao et al. 2017; though see Shilton 2019).
Regarding sociality as a driver of human evolution, an influential line of
reasoning has connected the evolution of language and cognition to selection
pressures associated with the increasing demands of navigating complex pri-
mate social groups, especially managing the complexities of bigger group sizes
(e.g., Dunbar & Shultz 2007) as well as the growing importance of culturally
acquired knowledge and skills (e.g., Sterelny 2012; Sinha 2015). Proposals
have been made for competitive scenarios – as in the ‘Machiaviellian
Intelligence Hypothesis’, which posits that bigger brains and increased social
intelligence evolved in order to manipulate and use others in contexts of social
competition (Byrne & Whiten 1988) or scenarios focusing on the role of
persuasion in communication in such contexts (e.g., Ferretti & Adornetti
2021). Others have stressed the importance of cooperation in human evolution
(e.g., Tomasello 2008; see also Section 4), with conflict management and
coordination of cooperation as primary drivers of the evolution of human
behaviour (e.g., Lee 2018; Newson & Richerson 2021). Language, in these
models, has evolved for the management of interactions in social groups. For
example, Dunbar (1996) has proposed that language arose out of a form of vocal
social grooming required to maintain bigger group sizes. In a similar vein,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009385022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Benítez-Burraco and Progovac (2020) have argued that humans have undergone
a process of self-domestication in which language evolved for social coordin-
ation and the management of aggression. Relatedly, Wacewicz and
Żywiczyński (2018) have argued that the evolution of a cooperative, commu-
nity-wide ‘platform of trust’ was a fundamental prerequisite for the develop-
ment of language-like systems in hominins.
Many of these approaches see social complexity, cooperative subsistence
activities, and the transmission of changing cultural information as responses to
ecological challenges that led to the evolution of specifically hominin ways of
living and communicating (Sterelny 2012; Newson & Richerson 2021; Planer
& Sterelny 2021). A number of approaches have specifically highlighted the
role of climate variation as a driver in the evolution of culture. On this view, the
heightened instability of hominin habitats acted as a selective pressure for
the evolution of a ‘cultural niche’ scaffolding the development and acquisition
of complex cultural behaviours and skills (cf. Potts 2013). Given the importance
of acquiring cultural behaviours and knowledge to adaptively respond to
 Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution 57

a variable and insecure environment, this placed a special demand on children

being able to acquire this knowledge in ontogeny and the reallocation of resources
to create a developmental niche representing a suitable learning environment.
These ideas are linked to the framework of ‘niche construction’, which stresses
that organisms can modify their environments in a way that has consequences for
their own evolutionary trajectories (and those of other species). This includes not
only changes in the physical environment (as, for example, in the case of beavers
building dams) but also the social and ‘epistemic’ environment. Humans, on this
view, have created a particular niche enabling high-bandwidth transmission of
cultural information and the development of complex skills as well as cumulative
cultural evolution (e.g., Sterelny 2012). This resulted in the evolution of an
extended period of childhood dependency and longer lifespans, coupled with
highly plastic brain development influenced by culture, as well as a change
towards ‘cooperative breeding’, in which children were cared for by multiple
caregivers. The coordination of such ‘allocare’ and the importance of acquiring
knowledge during childhood necessitated more complex communication, and
generally higher cooperativeness, which then ‘unlocked’ the cooperative infor-
mation sharing characteristic of language (e.g., Hrdy 2009; Burkart et al. 2018;
Isler & van Schaik 2012). These changes would likely also bring with them
adaptations for teaching and heightened sensitivity to ostensive–inferential refer-
ential communication (Csibra & Gergeley 2009; Heintz & Scott-Phillips 2023).
One aspect of this niche was that it also served as a ‘language-ready niche of
development’, which favoured the development of language in hominins with
a ‘language-ready brain’ (Odling-Smee & Laland 2009; Sinha 2015). Cumulative
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009385022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

cultural evolution and the niches supporting it would also co-evolve, with more
complex cultural behaviours influencing the social structures in which they
developed and vice versa, in a feedback loop (Sterelny 2012; Sinha 2015; see
also Section 4). This means that (proto)language itself likely acted as a further
selection pressure for the evolution of the cognitive, anatomical, and social
structures supporting language.
The proliferation of adaptive scenarios has been criticised in the past for
being too unconstrained, giving rise to a high volume of potential ‘just-so
stories’, which sound plausible but do not have enough actual evidence and
theoretical motivation to back them up (e.g., Bickerton 2009; Fitch, 2010;
Johansson 2021). However, recent scenarios have increasingly made progress
in integrating a wealth of evidence and theoretical considerations from different
disciplines to strengthen their proposals, and as this Element has shown,
cognitive linguistics can make significant contributions to such enterprises.
A promising project that must be mentioned here is the Causal Hypotheses in
Evolutionary Linguistics Database (CHIELD; pronounced like ‘shield’) by
 58 Cognitive Linguistics

Roberts et al. (2020). They have collected a large set of causal hypotheses
proposed in theoretical models of language evolution that have been tested in
the literature, especially, but not exclusively, in experimental studies (see
Section 5). What makes this resource so valuable is that it allows for making
connections between different studies, and exploring various hypotheses and
the degree to which they have been substantiated in the literature. Importantly,
the causal graph set-up of CHIELD forces researchers to make explicit the
assumed causal links between different factors (Roberts 2018).
One thing that should be kept in mind when discussing scenarios of language
evolution is that, as noted by Parravicini and Pievani (2019), language con-
sidered as a trait is ‘a complex mosaic of sub-traits with different phylogenetic
stories’ (see also Boeckx & Benítez-Burraco 2014). This means that the traits
supporting language likely evolved following different trajectories and have
different evolutionary histories. Similarly, the evolution of human language and
cognition likely also was a process of mosaic evolution instead of a single
‘cognitive revolution’ (e.g., Berwick & Chomsky 2016) representing a sudden
‘crossing of the Rubicon’ towards behavioural modernity (cf. Meneganzin &
Currie 2022). Neither is it simply captured by a steady and gradual cumulative
change towards behavioural modernity (McBrearty & Brooks 2000). Instead,
the mosaic evolution of behavioural modernity, including language, likely
represents a long, protracted, historically contingent process with fits and starts,
and interchanging periods of stasis and innovation. It was highly reliant on
cultural, contextual, and demographic conditions, which likely took a long time
to stabilise and lead to the social environments required to support high-fidelity
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009385022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

cumulative cultural evolution of cognitively modern behaviours, including

language (Meneganzin & Currie 2022; Scerri & Will 2023).
As this Element has shown, cognitive linguistics as a framework is ideally
suited to help in understanding both the mosaic nature of the structures supporting
language as well as their mosaic evolution.
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 Acknowledgements
We would like to thank one anonymous and one not-so-anonymous reviewer, as
well as Monika Pleyer, for their helpful suggestions and comments.
This research is part of project No. 2021/43/P/HS2/02729 co-funded by the
National Science Centre and the European Union Framework Programme for
Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie
grant agreement No. 945339.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009385022 Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Cognitive Linguistics

Sarah Duffy
Northumbria University
Sarah Duffy is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at Northumbria
University. She has published primarily on metaphor interpretation and understanding, and
her forthcoming monograph for Cambridge University Press (co-authored with Michele
Feist) explores Time, Metaphor, and Language from a cognitive science perspective. Sarah is
Review Editor of the journal, Language and Cognition, and Vice President of the UK
Cognitive Linguistics Association.

Nick Riches
Newcastle University
Nick Riches is Senior Lecturer in Speech and Language Pathology at Newcastle University.
His work has investigated language and cognitive processes in children and adolescents
with autism and developmental language disorders, and he is particularly interested in
usage-based accounts of these populations.

Editorial Board
Heng Li, Southwest University
John Newman, University of Alberta (Edmonton)
Kimberley Pager-McClymont, University of Huddersfield
Katie J. Patterson, Universidad de Granada
Maria Angeles Ruiz-Moneva, University of Zaragoza
Lexi Webster, Manchester Metropolitan University
Xu Wen, Southwest University
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009385022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

About the Series

Cambridge Elements in Cognitive Linguistics aims to extend the theoretical and
methodological boundaries of cognitive linguistics. It will advance and develop
established areas of research in the discipline, as well as address areas where it has not
traditionally been explored and areas where it has yet to become well-established.
 Cognitive Linguistics

Elements in the Series

Language Change and Cognitive Linguistics: Case Studies from the History
of Russian
Tore Nesset
Navigating the Realities of Metaphor and Psychotherapy Research
Dennis Tay
The Many Faces of Creativity: Exploring Synaesthesia through a Metaphorical Lens
Sarah Turner and Jeannette Littlemore
Metaphor, Metonymy, the Body and the Environment: An Exploration of the Factors
That Shape Emotion-Colour Associations and Their Variation across Cultures
Jeannette Littlemore, Marianna Bolognesi, Nina Julich-Warpakowski,
Chung-hong Danny Leung and Paula Pérez Sobrino
Applied Cognitive Linguistics and L2 Instruction
Reyes Llopis-García
Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution
Michael Pleyer and Stefan Hartmann

A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/ECOG

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