Università Roma Tre

The course treats the origin of language from an evolutionary perspective. Starting from the study of the relationship between language and brain, two theoretical proposals are compared: on the one hand, the hypothesis that language faculty is a biological adaptation shaped by natural selection for communication purposes, on the other, the idea that language is a form of exaptation subject to the laws of cultural evolution. The aim is to present a hypothesis of convergence between these two proposals based on the notion of coevolution.