A series published by Oxford University Press

General Editors: James R. Hurford, University of Edinburgh (jim@ling.ed.ac.uk) and

Kathleen R. Gibson, University of Texas (kathleen.r.gibson@uth.tmc.edu)

There is a need for a forum for work on the evolution of language which can be relied upon to be worthwhile and solidly based, and which places a premium on writing that is not only of sound scholarship but comprehensible to practitioners in different fields and disciplines. The Oxford University Press series Studies in the Evolution of Language aims to meet that need by publishing volumes that address questions central to the nature of language, in a manner of structural detail which linguists would find of interest, and that are also scientifically sound with respect to current understandings in the behavioral, biological, and archaeological sciences.

The series welcomes submissions from scholars in linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology, computer science, neuroscience, animal behaviour and archaeology, subject to the condition that these are directed towards defining, refining, and proposing answers to questions about the origins and evolution of language, and based on rational argument.

The readership consists of those who share an interest in this emerging field, who need to be properly informed by advances in all relevant disciplines and seek to be fully aware of the complexities of the linguistic phenomena. It includes scholars from many disciplines as well as students at postgraduate and advanced undergraduate level.

Those works given serious consideration are subject to a rigorous multidisciplinary refereeing process, by the series editors and by at least two independent referees.

Authors are encouraged to present their ideas in ways that can be readily understood across disciplines. They are also urged to be concise (80,000 words should be the average) so that the resulting books can be affordable by the readership they address.

Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew, 1999,

The Origins of Complex Language: An Inquiry into the Evolutionary Beginnings of Sentences, Syllables, and Truth.

Kirby, Simon, 1999,

Function, Selection and Innateness: The Emergence of Language Universals.

Nettle, Daniel, 1999,

Linguistic Diversity

de Boer, Bart, 2001,

The Origins of Vowel Systems

Wray, Alison (editor), 2002,

The Transition to Language

Christiansen, Morten, and Simon Kirby (editors), 2003,

Language Evolution

Tallerman, Maggie (editor), 2005,

Language Origins: Perspectives on Evolution

Burling, Robbins, 2005,

The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved

Oudeyer, Pierre-Yves, 2006,

Self-Organization in the Evolution of Speech

Dessalles, Jean-Louis, 2007,

Why We Talk: The evolutionary origins of language

Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva, 2007,

The Genesis of Language: A Reconstruction

Hurford, James R., 2007,

The Origins of Meaning: Language in the Light of Evolution

MacNeilage, Peter, 2008,

The Origin of Speech

Sampson, Geoffrey, David Gil and Peter Trudgill (editors), 2009,

Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable

Botha, Rudolf, and Chris Knight (editors), 2009,

The Prehistory of Language

Botha, Rudolf, and Chris Knight (editors), 2009,

The Cradle of Language

Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew, 2010,

The Evolution of Morphology

Hurford, James R., in press,

The Origins of Grammar: Language in the Light of Evolution

Tallerman, Maggie, and Kathleen Gibson (editors), in press,

Handbook of Language Evolution