Humans are storytelling beings. As far as we know, no other species has the capacity for language and ability to use it in endlessly creative ways. From our earliest days, we name and describe things.

The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost ...

Recently, Chomsky and colleagues (Bolhuis, Tattersal, Chomsky, & Berwick, 2014) published an article entitled How Could Language Have Evolved? The chief irony of the title is that its authors ...

Chomsky’s first version of his theory, put forward in the mid-20th century, meshed with two emerging trends in Western intellectual life. First, he posited that the languages people use to communicate ...