Language Evolution

Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language

by Morten H. Christiansen (Editor), Simon Kirby (Editor)

The leading scholars in the rapidly growing field of language evolution give readable accounts of their theories on the origins of language and reflect on the most important current issues and debates. As well as providing a guide to their own published research in this area they highlight what they see as the most relevant research of others. The authors come from a wide range of disciplines involved in language evolution including linguistics, cognitive science, computational science, primatology, and archaeology.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction

416 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

Morten H. Christiansen is the William R. Kenan, Jr. professor of psychology at Cornell University as well as a senior scientist at the Haskins Labs and professor in cognitive science of language at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and has edited four books. He lives near Ithaca, New York.

Reviews

[Katja · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very accessible collection of 16 articles written by well-known people, very balanced too. My impression was even that it is too balanced: most contributions have a counterpart which makes an opposite claim. For example, is animal and primate communication relevant for studying the evolution of human language? Did speech originate from gesture? Is there a universal grammar, hard-wired in the genes and the brain? Is language the result of natural selection? For each of these questions there are articles expressing strong support for a definite yes as well as a definite no. Given that the contributors had read the whole collection before they made final revisions, I wish they would spend some time addressing each other's claims in cases where there is an apparent contradiction.

There is also a funny disagreement on term interpretation. For example, take Universal Grammar (UG). Pinker finds that the game-theoretic approach to UG by Nowak and his co-authors provide support for the hypothesis he and Bloom articulated in 1990. At the same time, Bickerton, anorther generativist, says: "Nowak et al. (2002) illustrates the problems that may arise when a high level of non-linguistic sophistication (in this case, in computer science) mixes with a lower level of linguistic sophistication; linguists (and some biologists too) may boggle at the assertion that 'during primate evolution there was a succession of UGs that finally led to the UGs of human beings'."

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

My view is that language is a human invention, made possible because the human capabilities of homo sapiens 70,000 years ago—brains, throats, vocal cords, et al.—had sufficiently evolved that they could be serendipitously fitted together. Homo sapiens’ predisposition to create language from the protolanguage (simplistically conceived of as grunts and mime) of their predecessors (Denosovian, Neanderthal, et al.) was universal, so that while homo sapiens spread across the earth over the next 20,000 years, each branch created its own language, each with a unique grammar/syntax.

There are no physical records of language’s formation in the fossil records. The research into the origins of language is speculative and depends on a convergence of at least a half-dozen different disciplines, including linguists, anthropologists, and biologists. Christiansen and Kirby are the editors of this far-ranging collection of essays, Language Evolution, that explores aspects of the genesis of language. Not insignificantly, there is a dominant strain in the study/research around language development that maintains there is an inherent, genetic component. Noam Chomsky proposed fifty years ago that there was embodied in humans a Universal Grammar that enabled language acquisition. Many of the essays in Language Evolution assume or contend with the question of a language “gene”.

My view is that language use is akin to a human’s ability to swim. Humans weren’t designed to swim, but we have features that can be adapted to the task. A minority of the essayists take a stance similar to my own. The best essay about the unnecessary postulation of a Universal Grammar (or any genetic proclivity) for language acquisition is the essay by Terrence Deacon, “Universal Grammar and Semiotic Constraints”. The title aptly suggests Deacon’s contention, that the use of symbols (sounds/words) to construct a syntactic/grammatical language can only happen in so many finite ways, all of which share common features.

The second chief concern that Deacon’s and other essays address is the gradual conversion of a protolanguage into a grammatical/syntactic one, where the component parts can be used in an almost limitless fashion to form new/different utterances. I found that this was satisfactorily explained by allusion to Adam Smith’s invisible hand, the personal, selfish attribute in communities that streamlines and makes more practicable social interactions. The decomposition and smoothing of protolanguage into an easily assimilable grammatical language over millennia would be akin to the random but purposeful forging of footpaths by students and teachers across a new quad on a college campus.

There are many allusions and references to computer simulations that are meant to show how over generations the indecomposable protolanguage can/will arrive at a modular, flexible, grammatical language. None of the explicit citations of simulations adequately explained (in a way that I could understand) how their simulations accounted for a specific number of generations, nor cited what other various longitudinal parameters they’d used. We’re all fairly familiar with Sim City and game-like simulations of its ilk, so it should be understood that a reader would like to understand just how the “invisible hand” smoothed protolanguage into language. Worse in my view were the accounts of simulations that took as their basis the constraints of a Universal Grammar, a presumption that denies the possibility language could be wholly a human invention.

One interesting observation had a pleasing “truthiness” that could, of course, be erroneous: the fossil/archaeological record shows that approximately 50,000 years ago, there appeared to be an explosion of art. This was the same time that we believe humans had begun to speak languages that were structurally little different from today.