Josh Armstrong (University of California, Los Angeles)
Contemporary linguistic theory takes the generative features of language use as a central focus of study. Noam Chomsky has maintained that explaining these generative features requires an appeal to a human language faculty. In this talk, I argue that the evolution of the human language faculty depends upon social facts. In particular, I argue that there are a variety of social preconditions for the biological emergence of the human capacity for language. I argue that this social conception of the evolution of language does a better job explaining the generative features of language use than Chomsky's own favored proposal.
