Benítez-Burraco Antonio
Department of Spanish, Linguistics and Theory of Literature (Linguistics), Faculty of Philology, University of Seville, Seville, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2025 Jan 17;15:1499994. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1499994. eCollection 2024.
This paper aims to re-examine the problem of the emergence of present-day languages from the specific perspective of the self-domestication account of human evolution. According to this view, our species went through an evolutionary process that parallels the changes experienced by domesticated mammals. Relying on evidence of diverse kind (from paleogenetic to clinical), the paper argues that our self-domestication might have potentiated the cognitive and behavioral features of the human phenotype with an impact on language acquisition and use. Specifically, it might have facilitated the creation of the cultural niche that favors the complexification of languages via a cultural mechanism. The paper further proposes a model of language complexification in the past under the effects of human self-domestication, including the complexification of the structural aspects of language (grammar, prosody, and semantics) and the potentiation of its functional properties (pragmatics). The paper concludes with some suggestions for any future research aimed to test and improve this view.
本文旨在从人类进化的自我驯化理论这一特定视角，重新审视当今语言的出现问题。根据这一观点，我们人类经历了一个与家养哺乳动物所经历的变化相平行的进化过程。依靠各种证据（从古遗传学证据到临床证据），本文认为我们的自我驯化可能增强了人类表型的认知和行为特征，从而对语言习得和使用产生影响。具体而言，它可能通过一种文化机制促进了有利于语言复杂化的文化生态位的形成。本文进一步提出了一个在人类自我驯化影响下过去语言复杂化的模型，包括语言结构方面（语法、韵律和语义）的复杂化及其功能特性（语用学）的增强。本文最后对未来旨在检验和完善这一观点的研究提出了一些建议。
