Language evolution and language change

With the publication of ELT 8:1, we welcome Eric Fuß as the new co-editor of the journal.We also take this as an opportunity to broaden the journal's thematic focus.Evolutionary Linguistic Theory was founded in 2019 by Ermenegildo Bidese (University of Trento) and Anne Reboul (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris) with the primary goal of contributing to the discussion on the origin and evolution of language from an explicitly linguistic perspective.Although we acknowledge this field of study as a fundamentally interdisciplinary endeavor (see Bidese 2019), we, nevertheless, emphasize from the outset the central role of linguistics in addressing questions about the origins and development of language.After the retirement of Anne Reboul in 2023, Ermenegildo Bidese initially served as the sole editor of the journal.Now we are delighted that Eric Fuß has joined the editorial team.Eric is Professor of German Linguistics and Historical Linguistics at Ruhr-University Bochum; his research spans historical and theoretical linguistics with a particular focus on the syntax and morphology of the Germanic languages and their dialects.Furthermore, his work engages with grammatical theory and with theoretical models of language changealways returning, in one way or another, to a single guiding question: how can diachronic evidence sharpen our understanding of the language faculty itself ?It is precisely this question that connects Eric's research so closely with the mission we have set for ELT, and it is this connection that we want to sharpen in future issues.Together with Benjamin L. Sluckin (Ruhr-University Bochum), Eric already guest edited a double issue of ELT (see Fuß and Sluckin 2024), dedicated to the evolution of expletives from a theoretical and diachronic perspective.Alongside our established interest in the phylogeny of the language faculty, namely, the biological evolution of the human capacity for language, ELT will from now on place greater emphasis on aspects of language change, on what Fitch (2010) usefully termed glossogeny: the historical processes through which grammatical categories, constructions, and operations come into being (see also Haider 2021).Fitch's distinction is very helpful in separating two questions that are often conflated: the phylogeny of the language capacity as such, and the historical emergence of particular linguistic structures within languages, that is,