The Origins of Language: What Nonhuman Primates Can Tell Us (review)

This book is the result of a weeklong advanced seminar hosted by the School of American Research in October 1996. Eleven scholars participated, ten of whom contributed papers while one acted as a discussant.

The first two chapters are by the editor. In her ‘Introduction: Primatological perspectives on language’ (3–19), King briefly surveys the contemporary approaches to the question of language origins and considers a major flaw in some of them to be their failure to incorporate recent findings concerning nonhuman primates. She believes that the book is especially significant because its chapters ‘make a powerful case against the fashionable position that language is an innate biological system unique to humans’ (18). In Ch. 2, ‘Viewed from up close: Monkeys, apes, and language-origins theories’ (21–54), King makes the point that the continuity/discontinuity dichotomy in the studies of language origins unduly simplifies matters. More productive would be the pursuit of such questions as: To what extent do the rudimentary syntax, use of symbols, and protogrammatic behavior exhibited by primates in the wild differ from human language? What evidence would be sufficient to conclude that communicative behavior of nonhuman primates possesses some features or units comparable to those of human language?

The topics of the remaining eight chapters range from the behavior of three species of macaques to the presumed development of language during the hominid stage. The latter topic is covered by Sherman Wilcox in Ch. 10, ‘The invention and ritualization of language’ (351–84). Wilcox proposes that there were three crucial components of language evolution: cognitive abilities(he lists thirteen), the process of ritualization (effected by the repetition of a behavior or activity), and visible gestures (after all, language is articulatory gesturing).

Another paper focusing on the hominid stage is Robbins Burling’s ‘Motivation, conventionalization, and arbitrariness in the origin of language’ (Ch. 9, 307–50). He argues that motivated signs must have played an important role in the earlier stages of language. In his conclusion, Burling offers some speculations as to how language may have originated. The stages he considers plausible are (here very briefly summarized): a gesture-call system among the hominoids; conventionalization of gestures, making them more easily comprehensible and producible; production of iconic signs for specific communicative purposes; learning of communicative signals by imitation; increasing flexibility of visual communication enhancing flexibility in audible communication; development of arbitrariness; use of contrast; the growth of capacity for storing and retrieving ‘words’; development of a protophonological system; and the beginnings of syntax.

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh contributes the longest chapter, ‘Ape language: Between a rock and a hard place’ (115–88). A large portion of this interesting paper is a dialogue between the author and Wally, a fictitious critic of animal language research (127–59). The informal exchange between the two is then followed by a discussion of ten fallacies in Wally’s questions and comments(159–70). Kathleen R. Gibson and Stephen Jessee discuss the relationship between language evolution and the expansion of multiple neurological processing areas (189–227). In the last paper, Lorraine McCune asks whether children’s transition to language may serve as a model for the development of the vocal repertoire in extant and ancestral primate species (269–306).

This is a readable and stimulating collection of contributions by anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, grammatologists, and related specialists concerning questions dealing with language origins.