The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

by Christine Kenneally

  IV. Where Next?

  Chapter 15. The future of the debate

  1. D. Bickerton, “Language Evolution: A Brief Guide for Linguists.”

  2. Researchers such as Irene Pepperberg, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, and Phil Lieberman had long proposed that behaviors in other animals, whether they are learned or whether they arise naturally, expand our understanding of language evolution. Moreover, Chomskyan linguistics, if not Chomsky himself, with its emphasis on the innate and uniquely human language capacity, had for many years discouraged researchers from looking to animals for information about human language.

  3. Instigated by the Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch Science paper, but not necessarily about the specific hypotheses they proposed.

  4. G. Origgi, D. Sperber, “A Pragmatic Perspective on the Evolution of Language and Languages.”

  5. In a presentation at the 2005 Evolution of Language Symposium at Stony Brook, Sperber talked about the human ability to construct representations of representations—that is, metarepresentations. “A metarepresentational ability,” he said, “need not have communication as a primary function, but it makes inferential communication possible.” He elaborated on this by describing the way the briefest moment of nonlinguistic communication can be built from a complicated layering of inference and shared understanding. For example, when Mary and her son Peter take a walk through the forest they pass a shrub with a kind of berry unknown to Peter, Mary establishes eye contact with him, bites a berry and spits it out, and from this Peter understands that she means that he should not eat these berries. Such communication involves the following layers of representation and intention: “

  1. Mary picks a berry, knowing that they are inedible, and spits it out;

  2. Peter looks at her and infers from what she is doing that she thinks that these berries are inedible, and concludes that they are inedible;

  3. Mary intended that Peter would draw this conclusion (it was her intention to inform Peter);

  4. Peter infers from the fact that Mary had established eye contact with him that it was her intention that he would draw this conclusion;

  5. Mary intended that Peter would infer from her having established eye contact with him that it was her intention that he should draw this conclusion (it was her intention not just to inform Peter but to communicate with him—that is, to establish mutual understanding).”

  6. Chris Knight proposes that a revolutionary cultural shift was marked by the use of ocher for body adornment between 130,000 and 70,000 years before the present. He argues that ocher, the color of blood, was used by coalitions of females to disguise evidence of fertility. From these symbolic beginnings, culture emerged. Knight talks about the human revolution, but he doesn’t define it as a sudden event that explains all of language. Rather, he says, the defining feature of a revolution is that it turns the world upside down.

  7. N. Chomsky et al., On Nature and Language.

  8. Q. Wen, D. B. Chklovskii, “Segregation of the Brain into Gray and White Matter.”

  9. A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita, W. O’Neil, Image, Language, Brain, 23.

  10. http://www.derekbickerton.com/.

  11. In the words of Pinker and Jackendoff, after E. O. Wilson.

  12. C. Yang, “Dig-Dig, Think-Thunk.”

  13. E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, R. Lewin, Kanzi, chapter 7.

  Chapter 16. The future of language and evolution

  1. D.-E. Nilsson, S. Pelger, “A Pessimistic Estimate of the Time Required for an Eye to Evolve.”

  2. Dan Dediu, Simon Kirby’s Ph.D. student, and the phonologist Bob Ladd have found a significant correlation between these two genes and the presence or absence of tone in a language, such as Chinese. They argue that the recent variant of the genes, which most Europeans possess, makes tone languages less likely. It’s possible that possessing one of these genes means that learning or producing a tone is more difficult. Said Kirby, “If correct, this will be the first time that genetic difference has been shown to make a difference in the language faculty such that it changes the structure of the world’s languages.”

  3. H. Stefansson et al., “A Common Inversion Under Selection in Europeans.”

  4. Nicholas Wade, New York Times, Tuesday, March 7, 2006.

  5. Does this mean that language is a mechanism of evolution in the same way that sexual and asexual reproduction are—that is, a device that changes the status of evolutionary process? If this were true, it would mean that there is something very important about language (and saying this would not be simply a case of anthropocentrism in the same way that, to continue an analogy by Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, if we were all elephants, this book would be exploring “trunkitude” as the accomplishment of evolution. Trunks are unique features but they are not evolutionary mechanisms).

  6. F. Dyson, “Make Me a Hipparoo.”

  7. In “Language Evolution: A Brief Guide for Linguists,” Derek Bickerton argues that language and human evolution have stopped. He writes, “Of course it [language evolution] has stopped, because the biological development of humans (saving the odd minor development like the spread of lactose tolerance or proneness to sickle-cell anemia) has, to all intents and purposes, stopped also. What is happening (and has been happening for perhaps as many as a hundred thousand years) is cultural change (sometimes misleadingly described as ‘cultural evolution’); within the envelope of the language faculty, languages are recycling the limited alternatives that this biological envelope makes available…language evolution and changes in languages operate on different time-scales, involve different factors, and follow different courses to different ends (or rather, to the end of a complete language faculty in the first case and to no particular end in the second). To muddle them merely confuses an already sufficiently confused field.”

  8. W. J. Sutherland, “Parallel Extinction Risk and Global Distribution of Languages and Species.”

  9. See T.W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species, for a discussion of this topic.

  10. Ibid., chapter 14.

  11. Ibid.

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