An Old Subject's Great Escape from Recent Disciplinary Boundaries

Alan Barnard's Language in Prehistory attempts to find an accommodation between linguistic and evolutionary theory and apply insights from archeology and anthropology to the origins and purposes of language. Rudolph Botha's Language Evolution: The Windows Approach is a critique of employing evidence from other fields. Botha also critiques conclusions drawn from pidgins and creoles, homesign, motherese, grammaticalization, language acquisition, protolanguage, and comparative animal behavior. This review attempts in turn to bring into question the appropriateness of applying the framework of generative linguistics, and its style of argumentation, to prehistory

Archaeology · Argumentation theory · Discipline · Generative grammar · Germanic languages · Linguistic anthropology · Linguistics · Prehistory · Social science · Sociology · Computer Science · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation