Origins of language Ed. by Jürgen Trabant (review)

BOOK NOTICES 433 ence to rules of turn-taking or to formal models of dialogue of any kind. The linguistics of this book is decidedly humane. The common theme is that language used to express culture is not determined by an idealized speakerhearer saying just what he or she wants but rather in situations where no one participant is totally privileged . This contrasts with the presumed objective authority of the coding rules for a translation, the text ofa dictated narrative, the ex post facto synthesis by a linguist or ethnographer making sense of what has been observed. Instead, the authors emphasize quite the opposite extreme as the ideal. So, as among Quechua speakers, formal mythical narratives come up only in the context of conversation, and in that culture they may never be abstracted from it [Alton Becker and Bruce Mannheim]; and so, although apparently effaced by many famous ethnographers, the transaction situation ('dialogue') between an ethnographer and his or her subjects may be essential for third parties to understand what the ethnographer has to say [Dennis Tedlock]. The real strength of this collection is that it looks beyond dialogue form and retains its focus on the fresh things that can be learned from real dialogues. On the way, we learn that it may be easier for an old Mexican to find the words in Náhuatl to speak of the murder of his son than of business ethics [Jane H. Hill], and that it is often dialogue that triggers a change in our life-path (and as much, it seems, in linguistic fieldwork as in conversations among good friends) [John Attinasi & Paul Friedrich], [Nicholas Ostler, Lmguacubun Ltd, Bath.] Origins oflanguage. Ed. by Jürgen Trabant . (Collegium Budapest workshop series no. 2.) Budapest: Collegium Budapest , 1996. Pp. 219. This volume contains seven papers plus an 'Introduction to a most unlikely dialogue about an impossible question'. Whether or not the question is impossible, this is certainly an unlikely collection. Viewpoints range from the most scientific and positive to the most literary and sceptical. At the scientific end, Maria Ujhelyi discusses the relevance to language evolution of territorial song and duetting among gibbons, suggesting that preconditions for language may have included notjust complex social networks, as emphasized by Robin Dunbar, but also territorial marking and pair-bond maintenance. Eors Szathmáry offers an adaptationist view similar in spirit to Steven Pinker's; his piece covers ground similar to the final chapter of his and John Maynard Smith's book The major transitions in evolution (Oxford: W. H. Freeman, 1995). That chapter is criticized as reductionist and determimst by a literary contributor, Patrick Quillier, who emphasizes the emotive and poetic aspects of language. Bizarrely misreading the authors' summary of Bickerton's opinions, Quillier attributes to them the view that double negation, as in French and Hungarian, belongs to a primitive linguistic stage, antecedent to 'le langage dûment constitué'. Not surprisingly , he is offended. Henri Meschonnic, too, is indignant at the scientists; he complains that asking how language originated is the same as asking how time originated because there is a contradiction in using language to talk about a time when there was no language. Is one meant to take this argument seriously ? To ask that question is, I suspect, to reveal oneself a phihstine in Meschonnic's eyes. Thomas Sebeok is perhaps trying to bridge the literary-scientific gap when he says that 'semiosis' is 'coterminous with the emergence oflife'. Connoisseurs of withering sarcasm will relish what he says about the linguistic achievements of Kanzi the bonobo , but this denunciation contributes nothing to the issue of what the ape language experiments really show. The bridging job is done better in T' s account of how, as a historian of ideas, he has come to terms with biological approaches to language. He reaches the reassuring conclusion that, even if language is innate, 'we should not consider this a blow against the domain of the humanities or the social sciences'. Finally, Eva Jablonka and Geva Rechav invite us to take part in a thought-experiment involving a time 5,000 years hence when children are brought up to learn to read, even without formal instruction, by...