Evolutionary Explanations for Natural Language - Criteria from Evolutionary Biology
Willem Zuidema, Bart de Boer

Abstract:
Theories of the evolutionary origins of language must be informed by
empirical and theoretical results from a variety of different fields.
Complementing recent surveys of relevant work from linguistics, animal
behaviour and genetics, this paper surveys the requirements on
evolutionary scenarios that derive from mathematical evolutionary
biology.  It presents a number of simple but fundamental models from
population genetics, evolutionary game-theory and social evolution
theory, and evaluates their applicability to natural language.  This
review yields a list of required elements of evolutionary explanations
in general, and of explanations for language and communication in
particular.