Language Evolution (review)

A great many discussions of the evolution of human language enjoy pointing out the celebrated clause in the 1866 constitution of the Société de linguistique de Paris (SLP) to the effect that ‘[l]a Société n’admet aucune communication concernant … l’origine du langage’.¹ This is usually presented simply as a quaint eccentricity on the part of those silly French, but there is more to it than that. In fact, the sentence in question goes on to prohibit with equal force any discussion of ‘la création d’une langue universelle’² such as Esperanto or Volapük, and we may well ask what these two topics have in common. Unfortunately, the original discussion by the charter members of the SLP is not preserved.³ It is not hard, though, to see a commonality in the fact that both topics conduce to discussion that tends to proceed on the basis of aesthetics and personal opinion alone, unconstrained by the inconvenience of external facts; and the SLP proposed to devote its attention to the science of language.

Whether we judge that the French were all that silly after all depends on the extent to which we feel we can conduct discussions about the evolution of language on a genuinely scientific basis. We certainly know a great deal more in a great many relevant areas than in 1866: biological anthropology, neurophysiology, animal communication and cognition, and linguistics itself, including sign language studies, to name only a few. The topic has been enthusiastically taken up by a great many card-carrying scientists, and books about it (such as this one) are reviewed in Science (and by a linguist, no less: Carstairs-McCarthy 2004). One might presume, then, that the onus has shifted to those who would mock the discussion of language origins as the mere spinning of ‘just-so’ stories.

The editors of this collection certainly believe this is the case, and their goal here is to provide ‘the foundation for courses on the evolution of language’ (vii) by establishing the basis of the subject in the science of a number of neighboring disciplines. To some extent, they surely succeed. It is fair to ask, however (with Frederick Newmeyer and Derek Bickerton in this collection), whether the resulting discussion is equally well grounded in the science of language itself.

Surely a prerequisite for any treatment of the evolution of human language is an understanding of just what has evolved and from what origins (if any). We know, that is, that in the absence of severe pathology, every normal human acquires and uses language naturally, along a path that at least resembles other aspects of maturation (Anderson & Lightfoot 2002). By contrast, no nonhuman animal can be brought to control more than the most elementary aspects of such a system, even with extensive training (Anderson 2004). It seems apparent that some combination of factors that are part of our species-specific biology underlies this difference. The task, then, is to determine what those factors are, what antecedents (if any) they may have had in species ancestral to our own, and how evolutionary pressures have shaped these antecedents so as to yield the ‘language organ’ with which we are endowed.

Anyone who thinks that the research agenda in the study of language evolution should be clear from these considerations need only consult Hauser et al. 2002, Pinker and Jackendoff’s (2005) reply to that article, and Fitch and colleagues’ (2005) rejoinder, to be disabused of that notion. Here, as elsewhere in the literature, some confusion results from the fact that in understanding the explicanda of language evolution research, some scholars see the delineation of aspects of the language faculty that have risen completely de novo in human evolution as the central problem, while others focus equally on factors that have evolved in a distinctive way related to language, whether or not they have homologues in other species...