Review of A. Carstairs-McCarthy, The origins of complex language.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6 (2): 339 (2000).

This book offers a superb review of recent debates on the origins of language, supported by an exhaustive and up-to-date bibliography. This in itself makes it a worthwhile buy. The scholarship is meticulous, displaying close familiarity with most central controversies in the field.

Carstairs-McCarthy not only reviews others’ work; he also presents us with an original theory of his own. The novelty of his approach is the relentlessness with which he pursues mechanistic explanations for everything. He begins his story with the evolution of hominine bipedalism.The repositioning of the head atop a now-vertical spinal column caused space constrictions in the mouth and upper vocal tract, necessitating a lowering of the larynx. One incidental by-product was a substantial increase in the variegated vocalizations which our ancestors could produce. This faced hominines with an unprecedented problem: with so many new and different sounds, how could meanings be found for them all?

Our ancestors experienced this as a problem because of the principle of ‘synonymy avoidance’. For the author, it is no mystery that humans are driven to minimize synonymy: chimpanzees, too, ‘are biologically endowed with the expectation that such principles should be observed’ (p. 218). As mechanical factors enabled them to keep producing and encountering novel sounds, synonymy-resisting hominines must surely have felt impelled to provide correspondingly distinct and varied meanings. In a nutshell, this is the author’s theory of language origins. As he succinctly puts it, ‘meanings exist in order to provide something for spoken words to express’ (p. v.)

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Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. The origins of complex language: an inquiry into the evolutionary beginnings of sentences, syllables, and truth. xii, 260 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 1999. £45.00 (cloth), £14.99 (paper)