The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Social Function and the Origins of Linguistic Form
Chris Knight, James R. Hurford and Michael Studdert-Kennedy (eds), 2000. The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Social function and the origins of linguistic form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Let me just ask a question which everyone else who has been faithfully attending these sessions is surely burning to ask. If some rules you have described constitute universal constraints on all languages, yet they are not learned, nor are they somehow logically necessary a priori, how did language get that way? Stevan Harnad, in a conference question to Noam Chomsky (Harnad, Steklis and Lancaster 1976: 57)
As a feature of life on earth, language is one of science’s great remaining mysteries. A central difficulty is that it appears so radically incommensurate with nonhuman systems of communication as to cast doubt on standard neo-Darwinian accounts of its evolution by natural selection. Yet scientific (as opposed to religious or philosophical) arguments for a discontinuity between human and animal communication have come into prominence only over the past 40 years. As long as behaviourism dominated anglophone psychology and linguistics, the transition from animal calls to human speech seemed to offer no particular difficulty (see, for example, Mowrer 1960; Skinner 1957). But the generative revolution in linguistics, begun with the publication of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in 1957 and developed in many subsequent works (e.g. Chomsky 1965, 1966, 1972, 1975, 1986; Chomsky and Halle 1968) radically altered our conception of language, and posed a challenge to evolutionary theory that we are still striving to meet.
The central goal of Chomsky’s work has been to formalise, with mathematical rigour and precision, the properties of a successful grammar, that is, of a device for producing all possible sentences, and no impossible sentences, of a particular language. Such a grammar, or syntax, is autonomous with respect to both the meaning of a sentence and the physical structures (sounds, script, manual signs) that convey it; it is a purely formal system for arranging words (or morphemes) into a pattern that a native speaker would judge to be grammatically correct, or at least acceptable. Chomsky has demonstrated that the logical structure of such a grammar is very much more complex and difficult to formulate than we might suppose, and that its descriptive predicates (syntactic categories, phonological classes) are not commensurate with those of any other known system in the world, or in the mind. Moreover, the underlying principle, or logic, of a syntactic rule system is not immediately given on the surface of the utterances that it determines (Lightfoot, this volume), but must somehow be inferred from that surface – a task that may defeat even professional linguists and logicians. Yet every normal child learns its native language, without special guidance or reinforcement from adult companions, over the first few years of life, when other seemingly simpler analytic tasks are well beyond its reach.
Read full Editor’s Introduction: Language: A Darwinian Adaptation? [PDF 76KB]