“One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
The major problem is simply one of grammar.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
This is an attempt to synthesize my personal take on language evolution in the form of a reading list. It’s best thought of as the recommended reading I’d send to myself 10 years ago if that was literally the only advice I was allowed to give my stupid idiot of a past self.
The books and papers linked below are thematically organised in a way that makes sense to me: this is more or less how I currently frame the way I think about the evolution of language. In particular, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to give an explanation — and especially a functional explanation informed by evolutionary theory — for something so vast and difficult. I don’t think, on the other hand, that it would make much sense to tackle the whole list in this specific order. I sure didn’t.
This is not the kind of thing you’d expect from a typical course reading list, for several reasons. For one, it is far too long: it would take well over a year to work through in detail, and it would absolutely ruin that year. At the same time, it is far too superficial: language evolution connects with so many topics, over so many disciplinary areas: this is the view from 50,000 feet. Finally, it is not exhaustive or definitive: **at the end of the day, this is a cherry-picked selection of the kind of literature which has informed my views, for better or worse. It’s also very light on, um, linguistics: feel free to draw your own conclusions.