THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE: AN OVERVIEW OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL VIEWS

For many years, language origin has been one of the disputable topics of scholarly discussions. In spite of this long discussion, there has not been a definite answer to how language was evolved and how it is acquired. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach to reviewing different perspectives to language origin and language acquisition from Darwinian psychology, evolutionary psychology, domain-specific and domain general to a more recent view of domain-relevant by Karmiloff-Smith (2015) and ends up with the emergentistic view of language origin. It also scrutinizes different debates between some scholars for this purpose. Finally, it is suggested that the emergentism provides a more effective approach to addressing language origin. It is hoped that the interdisciplinary nature of this review paper provides applied linguistics with insights into discovering new research methodologies and cross-discipline collaborations