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Many of the chapters in this book will approach human language with an eye to its unique features, such as recursive syntax, or a large learned lexicon. We propose to take a wider view, seeing human language as one among many animal communication systems, and focusing on the selective pressures affecting the origin and maintenance of such systems. The possibility that human language arose from animal communication through a process of evolutionary change demands that we attend to the conceptual problems at the heart of our current understanding of animal signaling. In doing so we may throw light upon not only the origins of human language, but also its character.

The chief theoretical problem that comes to light when we look at the evolution of communication is accounting for the amount of honesty that is apparently involved (Johnstone, 1997; Noble, 2000a). Let us specify a hypothetical …