The evolution of human language: Biolinguistic perspectives (review)

Where does human language come from? The 'greatest problem in science', according to Bickerton (2009), remains a mystery. This new volume offers a partial but important map of current ideas on the problem. The book is stimulating because of the issues it raises and surprising in the issues it ignores.

The book is organized as a debate around the oft-cited paper by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002), reprinted in the first chapter. In this paper as well as in his original contribution to the current volume, 'Some simple evo-devo theses: How true might they be for language?' (Ch. 2), Noam Chomsky accepts a position restricting the part of the language faculty that is unique to humans down to the sole recursive processing ability. In other words, Chomsky would not be very surprised if everything about language were mere cultural invention, except the Merge operation, which keeps its innate nature and would have appeared by pure chance. Chomsky claims that Merge would have served as support for predicate argument structure, thus enabling a language of thought; only then would syntactic movement have been implemented, again through the Merge operation, for externalization purposes.

Some contributors, such as W. Tecumseh Fitch (Ch. 4, 'Three meanings of "recursion": Key distinctions for biolinguistics') and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (Ch. 10, 'What is language, that it might have evolved, and what is evolution that it may apply to language?'), follow Chomsky in this syntactocentric view of language origin. Others, including Ray Jackendoff (Ch. 3, 'Your theory of the evolution of language depends on your theory of language') and Derek Bick-erton (Ch. 14, 'On two incompatible theories of language evolution'), oppose it. For them, the ability to form predicates came first or in parallel. Predicates are the support of a new form of meaning, unknown to animals, that syntax merely helps connect to phonology. Syntax is not even necessary to link meaning to sound, as is demonstrated by the possibility of protolanguage, a notion invented by Bickerton (1990) that can convey reference through multi-metonymy (Dessalles 2008). Piattelli-Palmarini, however, denies this possibility, claiming that words without syntax are an empty notion, as would be color devoid of hue, saturation, and brightness.

The volume also offers a different perspective that may seem refreshing to linguists. We learn from Philip Lieberman (Ch. 11, 'The creative capacity of language, in what manner is it unique, and who had it?') that the most important brain structures devoted to language might be subcortical. Will this perhaps lead to the end of Broca's and Wernicke's primacy? Karin Stromswold (Ch. 12, 'Genetics and the evolution of language: What genetic studies reveal about the evolution of language') reminds us of the obvious: that performance, not competence, is what natural selection acts upon. And linguistic performance is far from being equally shared. Studies on twins reveal, for instance, that syntactic fluency might be in part genetically controlled, and in a gradual way.

Many readers will appreciate that some of the authors engage in functional thinking. Studying linguistic structures and linguistic devices is commendable, and asking what these structures are useful for is equally essential from a reverse-engineering perspective. Dan Sperber and Gloria Origgi (Ch. 8, 'A pragmatic perspective on the evolution of language') suggest that the ability to form predicates—to form thoughts with variables such as 'x-drink-y'—opens the way to inferential communication. Animals are stuck with using precoded meanings, whereas human beings go through an interpreting phase in which they have to assign logical roles to concepts. Predicates, thanks to the necessity of interpretation, open up communication to an infinity of meanings. Syntax also is given a functional role by Bickerton and Jackendoff: it is a tool for expressing predicative thought. I would like more functional analyses like this. For most of the...