Unravelling the Evolution of Language (review)

The author, a professor of linguistics at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, has made the evolution of language the subject of many of his publications. This book deals with what Botha believes to be ‘major obstacles to progress in unravelling the evolution of language … [and] puts forward … an argument for adopting restrictive theory as a means to overcome some of these obstacles’ (ix). According to B, a truly modern approach to the question of language evolution must reexamine three basic assumptions: ‘about what language is, about what evolution involves, and about what good science is about’ (1).

To sample B’s critical comments: one problem, according to him, is exemplified by the terminological profusion in Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom’s article ‘Natural language and natural selection’ (Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13.707–27, 765–84, 1990). The selectionist (or adaptationist) account the two authors propose is for the evolution of an entity (entities?) they refer to as the language faculty, language acquisition device, universal grammar, cognitive mechanisms underlying language, or ability to use a natural language. Are all these referents to be taken as synonyms, as near synonyms, or as standing for concepts that are fundamentally, if subtly, different? According to B, Pinker and Bloom’s account of language evolution is ‘an account … inherently opaque in its identification of the entity/entities whose evolution is at issue’ (28).

Two more examples: referring to the ‘reappropriationist scenario’ in Wendy Wilkins and Jenny Wakefield’s article ‘Brain evolution and neurolinguistic preconditions’ (Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18.161–82, 205–26, 1995), B finds it not opaque but ‘internally strikingly disconnected’. (The process of reappropriation is referred to by Charles Darwin as preadaptation.) And Noam Chomsky’s and others’ cooptationist accounts (guided by the notion that language evolved as a byproduct) have not been, according to B, ‘explicitly articulated [and] … are essentially ad hoc’ (91).

Later B summarizes: ‘Work on language evolution needs to start out from a discriminating characterization of the entities that could have been subject to evolution. For this, one has to have a linguistic ontology that is clearly articulated and that has at its core a restrictive conception of language’ (46). The restrictive theory of language, which B advocates, would provide a basis for distinguishing language in a nonarbitrary manner from all concepts distinct from it even if they happen to be related to it.

The rapidly growing literature on the origins of language has reached the stage at which B’s relentless reminder of the need to base new theories on clear and explicit assumptions should be welcome. But the necessity of drawing on indirect evidence as one moves hundreds of thousands of years into the past may leave B’s expectations never fully satisfied.

The book requires a concentrated reading; fortunately, it contains copious quotations from works referred to and is meticulously referenced. Notes (203–22), bibliography (223–37), and index follow the text.