The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

by Christine Kenneally

  Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood examined the effect on farming, which independently arose in human communities at least nine different times between 8500 and 2500 B.C.6 The researchers demonstrate that the advantages of farming over hunter-gatherer lifestyles, including greater access to food, denser populations, and greater resistance to disease, spurred the spread of farming communities, and their culture and language with them. They propose essentially that prehistoric language and genes spread with prehistoric farming, and that tracking one will illuminate the ancient paths taken by the other.

  There are many different types of clues to the prehistory of language, and their intersecting relationships are complicated.7 Here the researcher interested in connecting the long and short arcs traced by language in time must master at least genetic, archaeological, paleoanthropological, linguistic, and geographic evidence. As more researchers engage with this multidimensional problem, we will see ever more clearly how a mental bias gave rise to a language, which became languages, and then rich and sprawling language families.

  IV. WHERE NEXT?

  15. The future of the debate

  Pinker and Bloom’s 1990 paper caused a sea change in the attitude toward language evolution, and the early years of research that followed were a time of great exhilaration and puzzlement. The 1996 Evolution of Language conference, organized by Jim Hurford and Chris Knight, was the first in what became a series of biennial meetings for scholars from various disciplines and countries to come together to address this issue. The participants brought their biases and jargon with them, and there was less shared language and understanding than had been hoped. In the end, no synthesis was reached that would get everyone on the same page. In this early period, a great deal of energy was expended in simply justifying the research. As the years went by and more data and ideas accrued in the biennial conferences, and as other conferences also started up, certain questions and methods—those reviewed in parts 2 and 3—emerged as central.

  Neither Pinker nor Chomsky said much on the topic in this period. In 2002, however, Chomsky appeared in a panel discussion at the Harvard Evolution of Language conference. Tecumseh Fitch was one of the conference organizers, and Marc Hauser sat on the stage next to Chomsky. Pinker was in the audience, although he, like Chomsky, had not attended other conference presentations. Chomsky suggested that language evolved separately from speech, because deaf children are still able to learn sign language, and he proposed that people use language more for talking to themselves than to talk with other people.

  Later that year, Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch published a paper in Science called “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” The point of the paper was to provide a framework for fruitful discussion and clear up confusion in the field. It argued that a lot of research vital to an understanding of language and linguistic evolution was typically ignored or dismissed by linguists, and it also advocated collaboration between researchers from different disciplines.

  In an accompanying editorial, titled “Noam’s Ark,” linguists Thomas Bever and Mario Montalbetti wrote: “Language is naturally viewed as a unique feature of being human. Accordingly, the study of what language is—linguistics—has been very influential, primarily in the social and behavioral sciences…Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch expand the scope of language study with their demonstration that complex behaviors in animals and non-linguistic behaviors in humans can inform our understanding of language evolution.”

  The article inspired many impassioned responses, some as enthusiastic as Bever and Montalbetti’s. Others expressed shock and even rage. “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” gave the impression, at least to some, that Chomsky had abandoned his old view of language and swapped sides in the great debate. Derek Bickerton, a longtime Chomskyan linguist, wrote:

  Into the middle of this confused and confusing situation there appeared in the journal Science a paper…aimed at setting the scientific community straight with regard to language evolution. Its magisterial tone was surprising, considering how little work any of its authors had previously produced in the field, but no more surprising than the collaborators themselves: since Hauser was known as a strong continuist and Chomsky as a strong discontinuist, it was almost as if Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat had coauthored a position paper on the Middle East. In this paper, practically every aspect of the language faculty is treated as pre-existing the emergence of language, except for “narrow syntax” (whether this is the same as, or different from, the old “core syntax,” we are nowhere told), which consists solely of recursion. Even recursion is supposed to derive from some prior computational mechanism employed by antecedent species for navigation, social cognition or some other purpose as yet undetermined, and then exapted for syntax; researchers are adjured to start searching for such mechanisms.1

  The reaction to “The Faculty of Language” served as a catalyst in the same way the Pinker and Bloom paper did twelve years earlier. The perception of an allegiance to Chomsky was a lightning rod, although it meant different things to different people. There were two main camps of disagreement. Some critics thought the paper consisted of the same Chomskyan ideas of the last four decades, dressed up as something novel with animal data attached. Taking the completely opposite view, others were angered by what they saw as a retraction of ideas that Chomsky had spent years developing. Depending on their field, researchers suspected either that Chomsky had influenced Hauser and Fitch or that Hauser and Fitch had hijacked Chomsky.

  In their Science paper, Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch proposed a two-part model of language, based on a broad faculty of language and a narrow faculty. The broad faculty comprises the narrow faculty, in combination with two other systems. The first consists of the nerves, muscles, and organs that enable us to see, hear, and touch the world around us; it also includes the physical characteristics we use to create and interpret speech, such as the agility of our tongue, the position of our larynx, and our ability to interpret stress and pitch. The second system consists of a creature’s knowledge of the world and its capacity to use that knowledge to form intentions and act upon them. The authors called them the sensory-motor and the conceptual-intentional systems.

  At a minimum, wrote the authors, the narrow faculty is a computational system that “includes the capacity of recursion.” Elsewhere, they described the key component of the narrow faculty as a recursive computational system that generates linguistic structure and maps it onto the two other systems. In this sense, the narrow faculty of language is an interface between recursive computational abilities, the body, and thought.

  The authors then presented a distillation of opinion in the field in the form of three distinct hypotheses, using their terminology of a broad and a narrow faculty. In one hypothesis, all components of the broad faculty of language have homologs in other animals, so there is nothing in language that is unique to humans. In an alternate theory, the broad faculty is a uniquely human adaptation. So even if other animals have traits that appear similar to human traits used for language, such as social intelligence or toolmaking, they have been significantly refined in the human lineage and should be considered novel features, specific to humans.

  In a third hypothesis of their own, the authors proposed that most of the broad faculty of language is shared with other species, and that any differences in the human and animal traits are quantitative rather than qualitative. They cited experiments conducted by themselves and others showing that animals understand the world in complicated ways. For instance, some birds use the sky and landmarks to help them navigate complex paths; other animals, such as monkeys, recognize and can use in varying degrees abstract ideas like color, number, and geometric relationships; many different species can use mirrors to locate objects, and chimps, bonobos, and orangutans even appear to recognize their own reflections; also, chimpanzees seem to infer from a person’s or a fellow chimp’s actions what that creature is thinking.


  In contrast, the narrow faculty of language is a recent, uniquely human innovation. Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch noted that even though the recursive mechanisms that underlie syntax may be unique to humans, they are not necessarily unique to language. Instead, this system could be a spandrel, having evolved for something other than communication and still used in nonlinguistic domains. Where did this capacity come from? Perhaps, they wrote, it was initially used for navigating social relationships and only later co-opted by language. They pointed out that because chimpanzees have highly complicated social systems, they must remember (without the help of language) who among them is dominant and who is not. Pre-linguistic humans may have faced similar challenges and solved them with mental recursion.

  Certain ideas in the Science paper were familiar to anyone who followed Chomsky’s work. He was, of course, the first linguist to attach importance to the fact that human brains can take a set of entities, such as words, and create an infinitely long pattern with them, such as a sentence. As we now recognize, this makes human language limitless, and most important, this recursive mechanism allows us to express complicated thoughts. We’re not restricted to only one level of observation or knowledge; we can see (and say), “He knows,” but also, “She knows that he knows.” Each level of recursion is a step upward in complexity.

  Moreover, Chomsky had previously suggested that the mechanism of recursion extended beyond language and was vital to human cognition more broadly. As the Science article pointed out, recursion is characteristic of the number system as well as the grammatical system. Just as “Mary thinks that” could be added to any sentence, “2x” could be added to any equation, no matter how long it already is.

  In essence, the Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch hypothesis said that although other animals may indeed have a rich understanding of the world, they have no way to convey it. It was only when humans connected their internal understandings with the means to express them that they gained their unique form of language. After the article was published, Hauser remarked, “When those things got married, the world was changed.”

  Steven Pinker and Ray Jackendoff published a response to Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch, and a vehement back-and-forth ensued. (In all, four papers, including the original Science article, were published.) Pinker and Jackendoff charged Chomsky with having abandoned the last twenty-five years of his research and co-opting ideas from models he had once completely dismissed.

  “I think the thing that startled a lot of people about that Science paper,” said Jackendoff, “was that all of a sudden Chomsky seemed to be saying that language isn’t so complex after all—that all this complexity is coming from the interaction of this very simple system with the interfaces, and so to many linguists it was like Chomsky was undermining the position on which we had all grown up and many of us still believe. Pinker’s and my reply wasn’t so much about the evolution of language as the character of language. We wanted to say, ‘Look, there are all these complexities to language, and they don’t reduce out to general capacities found in other animals.’”

  Pinker and Jackendoff argued that Chomsky and his co-writers implied that Chomsky’s linguistics was the only kind of linguistics there was, which in effect predetermined their definition of language. Throughout the paper, as throughout most of Chomsky’s writing, language is described as having a “core”—a small set of very important features that lie at the heart of the phenomenon. But, Pinker and Jackendoff argued, there is no core to language. The appearance of one is just a mirage, an artifact of the way Chomskyans carve up language in the first place. Language is a complicated mass that can’t be neatly reduced to a smaller concentrated essence or set of rules.

  Pinker and Jackendoff also emphasized the idea of modifications taking place in organs and functions, in contrast to the Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch hypothesis that traits could be assigned to one bin or another—broad and shared with many animals, or only human.

  In an interview, Pinker later said:

  I don’t think a theory of language evolution based on a theory of language that is idiosyncratic to one person’s vision is productive. I don’t think divorcing language from communication is a step forward, and I don’t think writing off everything but syntax, indeed everything but recursion, and giving it to the animals, is a step forward. I think Chomsky so badly wanted to save something as unique to humans, namely the core of syntax, that he was willing to sacrifice everything else, in particular, the parts of language he is less interested in, like speech and words. It reminds me of the lizard that lets its tail break off when a predator is about to attack.

  Philip Lieberman took the opposite view of the paper. “It’s the same old Chomsky claim—a unique neural system or device specific to language exists in humans and humans alone, allowing infinite ‘recursion.’ It is a sea of words covering up Chomsky’s unchanged view concerning the essence of language—it is a capacity shared by no other animal and distinct from any other aspect of human behavior.”

  For scholars like Lieberman, the authors’ proposal to use comparative data to explore the question of language evolution was disingenuous. As he explained, “The comparative method has been used for many years to explore the evolution of language—my first published paper comparing monkeys to humans was published in 1968.” Thus, rather than illuminate a way forward, the paper—for some of its critics—obscured the intellectual history of many of the studies it mentioned. Lieberman said, “The aspects of language that Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch believe can be revealed through comparative behavioral and neurophysiologic studies are the ones that Chomsky and his disciples have always considered trivial and irrelevant.”2

  Similarly, William D. Hopkins, whose work with chimpanzees revealed Brodmann’s area 44, observed that even though Chomsky was finally incorporating animal data, he was using it to designate commonalities between humans and other animals as somehow not important to language. “I’m not sure what that is,” he said, “but it’s not the comparative method.”

  As for recursion, Lieberman argued that it was adequately accounted for in the brain’s control of the motor system. Pinker and Jackendoff pointed out that recursion occurs not only in language but also in vision, thus providing little motivation to restrict it to a narrow faculty of language. Irene Pepperberg noted that as far as comprehension was concerned, recursion isn’t necessarily unique to humans. Still others raised the possibility that even humans don’t do recursion either very much or very effectively.

  Controversy over the paper has continued, and typical of the intense debates that Chomsky ignites, there is sometimes more emotion than accuracy about what is at stake. In one presentation at the Evolution of Language conference in Leipzig in 2004, the speaker, generative linguist Frederick Newmeyer, mentioned the article in an aside, remarking that he was bewildered by it. In response, an upwelling of muttering quickly turned into a shouting match. One researcher stood and shouted: “Chomsky says ‘a miracle occurred.’ Read it! He says ‘a miracle occurred.’” Fitch was also in that audience. When he was able to get a word in edgewise, he said, “I’m a coauthor on that paper, and that word did not appear in it.”

  Today, the questions that remain most controversial in language evolution are the following:

  Was there one crucial gateway to language through which only humans have passed?

  Is there anything in the way language is processed by the brain that is unique to language, rather than a more general form of cognition?

  At what points in the trajectory of language evolution has natural selection come into play? Can any elements of the language suite be clearly identified as spandrels?

  The first of the remaining questions reveals an odd, almost vestigial, way of thinking about the subject. We are aware by now that approximately twenty years ago language as a whole was seen as a single gateway through which humanity and no other extant animal has passed. In the face of the many arguments and experiments presented in this book, that idea has fallen apart.
Language is not a single thing, and getting from no language to modern human language takes many steps. We are the only species alive today to have taken all of these steps—nevertheless, many other living animals have taken a considerable number of them (though not necessarily along the same path). Thus researchers like Irene Pepperberg talk more in terms of a rough continuum between modern animals and modern humans, describing the linguistic differences between them and us as more quantitative than qualitative. Such a continuum doesn’t necessarily reveal genetic relatedness or trace evolutionary history, but rather is based on the existence of similarities and differences of features important to language.

  Still, the idea of a single, categorical shift in the language evolution trajectory haunts the new field. In its latest incarnation, the debate is about whether we acquired recursion in a single move, and in doing so, language became what it is today and we became human, unique among all other living animals.3 As discussed earlier, this notion has been objected to on several grounds, and many issues remain about how human-specific or language-specific recursion is, and indeed how often humans actually use it.

  It’s highly unlikely that a discrete feature could comprise the one, big difference between our language ability and that of modern-day chimpanzees, because their status as our closest living cousins is an entirely arbitrary one. We once had many closer relatives, and they have presumably gone extinct for a variety of reasons. Had the chimpanzee, bonobo, and gorilla gone extinct in the last century, our closest comparison would be with the orangutan, which would move the gap to an arbitrarily greater distance. Certainly no scientist has ever suggested that there is a single biological or logical reason for our current degree of uniqueness (or loneliness). Nor is there is anything significant about the human-chimpanzee split that led us to where we are now. Indeed, since our lineage split away from the chimpanzee line, it’s overwhelmingly likely that our australopithecine and then hominid ancestors took yet more steps, moving through a number of forms of linguistic communication before arriving at the most recent stage of language—ours.