Teaching Linguistics - Reflections on Practice - Koenraad Kuiper
Games for exploring language origins and change
Teaching Linguistics - Reflections on Practice - Koenraad Kuiper
Alison Wray
Cardiff University
Description
The author describes in this chapter four games developed as seminar activities for her final year undergraduate module ‘The Evolution of Human Communication and Language’. This module examined the social, psychological and physiological prerequisites for language in our species and the processes by which language might have arisen, including the order of appearance of the different components of language, the potential role of gesture, the immediate catalysts for its emergence, and the relative plausibility of monogenesis versus polygenesis. It also explored what would have happened to the first fully human language (if there were such a thing) after it became established, thus covering some aspects of language change.