Language evolution and self-domestication
This tutorial will not run this year due to the strike action in week 2.
For the final tutorial you will read and discuss Thomas & Kirby (2018). This article (which is essentially a précis of James Thomas’s PhD thesis) provides a nice summary of a couple of ideas that have been central to this course, namely that a bunch of interesting features of language are a product of cultural evolution, and that understanding the evolution of the capacities underpinning cultural transmission is therefore a central question in language evolution. The paper also presents the argument that the precursor traits they identify can be understood as products of self-domestication. I have suggested some issues you could consider when you are reading it and discussing it in your groups, but don’t feel constrained by these - this is a nice paper to finish up on because it touches on nearly all the topics we have covered on the course, so you can make the discussion as wide-ranging as you like.
Thinking about the following questions might help you as you read the papers and discuss with your tutorial group:
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