Reading 1: Linguistic theory claims that all languages are of equal complexity. This claim has often been misunderstood. What, then, is the argument made by Dalrymple in this article?
(Source: Dalrymple, T. (2006). The Gift of Language: No, Dr. Pinker, it’s not just from nature. City Journal, 16(4), 102.)
Reading 2: The relation between speech and music is discussed here: Cummins, F. (2013). Joint speech: The missing link between speech and music? Percepta: Journal of Musical Cognition. V1(1), pp. 17-32
Reading 3: Cummins, F. Language as a problem (2021), Language Sciences 88.
Video 1: Please watch this talk that discusses the dual concepts of language (code) and languaging (many different kinds of coordinative and affiliative activities that have profoundly changed the species and founded the human social world).
Additional resources (optional)
Linguistics talks: An excellent series of talks by very many linguists has been run in Summer 2020 by the Brazilian Association of Linguistics. The videos are all available from their YouTube channel, where you will find contributions from Chomsky (generative grammar), Labov (sociolinguistics), Everett (origins of language), Tomasello (anthropology/primatology) and many others.
Distributed languaging: Here is a provocative recent attempt to re-think how we think about language. Its emphasis on the voice, rather than text, is telling. Thibault, P. J. (2011). First-order languaging dynamics and second-order language: the distributed language view. Ecological Psychology, 23(3), 210-245.
Controversy: You can get a flavour of some of the discussion around Chomsky’s recent claims from this article: Pinker, S., & Jackendoff, R. (2005). The faculty of language: what’s special about it?. Cognition, 95(2), 201-236.
Joint speech: You can explore the topic of Joint Speech from this website. A pef version of a book on the topic is available at this link.