Exaptation

William S.-Y. Wang

Exaptation, tinkering, recycling are terms introduced by biologists, but are also fertile concepts for language evolution.  An obvious case is the exaptation of respiration and mastication for the production of speech, which Edward Sapir referred to as an ‘overlaid’ function.  In addition to such peripheral processes, we should search for instances of exaptation of neuro-cognitive processes involved in the storage, organization, retrieval, and manipulation of words.  It is also of great interest to compare language with music within an exaptation perspective, since they appear to share much in their cognitive structures.