IV. Where Next?
Chapter 15. The future of the debate
1. D. Bickerton, “Language Evolution: A Brief Guide for Linguists.”
2. Researchers such as Irene Pepperberg, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, and Phil Lieberman had long proposed that behaviors in other animals, whether they are learned or whether they arise naturally, expand our understanding of language evolution. Moreover, Chomskyan linguistics, if not Chomsky himself, with its emphasis on the innate and uniquely human language capacity, had for many years discouraged researchers from looking to animals for information about human language.
3. Instigated by the Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch Science paper, but not necessarily about the specific hypotheses they proposed.
4. G. Origgi, D. Sperber, “A Pragmatic Perspective on the Evolution of Language and Languages.”
5. In a presentation at the 2005 Evolution of Language Symposium at Stony Brook, Sperber talked about the human ability to construct representations of representations—that is, metarepresentations. “A metarepresentational ability,” he said, “need not have communication as a primary function, but it makes inferential communication possible.” He elaborated on this by describing the way the briefest moment of nonlinguistic communication can be built from a complicated layering of inference and shared understanding. For example, when Mary and her son Peter take a walk through the forest they pass a shrub with a kind of berry unknown to Peter, Mary establishes eye contact with him, bites a berry and spits it out, and from this Peter understands that she means that he should not eat these berries. Such communication involves the following layers of representation and intention: “
1. Mary picks a berry, knowing that they are inedible, and spits it out;
2. Peter looks at her and infers from what she is doing that she thinks that these berries are inedible, and concludes that they are inedible;
3. Mary intended that Peter would draw this conclusion (it was her intention to inform Peter);
4. Peter infers from the fact that Mary had established eye contact with him that it was her intention that he would draw this conclusion;
5. Mary intended that Peter would infer from her having established eye contact with him that it was her intention that he should draw this conclusion (it was her intention not just to inform Peter but to communicate with him—that is, to establish mutual understanding).”
6. Chris Knight proposes that a revolutionary cultural shift was marked by the use of ocher for body adornment between 130,000 and 70,000 years before the present. He argues that ocher, the color of blood, was used by coalitions of females to disguise evidence of fertility. From these symbolic beginnings, culture emerged. Knight talks about the human revolution, but he doesn’t define it as a sudden event that explains all of language. Rather, he says, the defining feature of a revolution is that it turns the world upside down.
7. N. Chomsky et al., On Nature and Language.
8. Q. Wen, D. B. Chklovskii, “Segregation of the Brain into Gray and White Matter.”
9. A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita, W. O’Neil, Image, Language, Brain, 23.
10. http://www.derekbickerton.com/.
11. In the words of Pinker and Jackendoff, after E. O. Wilson.
12. C. Yang, “Dig-Dig, Think-Thunk.”
13. E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, R. Lewin, Kanzi, chapter 7.
Chapter 16. The future of language and evolution
1. D.-E. Nilsson, S. Pelger, “A Pessimistic Estimate of the Time Required for an Eye to Evolve.”
2. Dan Dediu, Simon Kirby’s Ph.D. student, and the phonologist Bob Ladd have found a significant correlation between these two genes and the presence or absence of tone in a language, such as Chinese. They argue that the recent variant of the genes, which most Europeans possess, makes tone languages less likely. It’s possible that possessing one of these genes means that learning or producing a tone is more difficult. Said Kirby, “If correct, this will be the first time that genetic difference has been shown to make a difference in the language faculty such that it changes the structure of the world’s languages.”
3. H. Stefansson et al., “A Common Inversion Under Selection in Europeans.”
4. Nicholas Wade, New York Times, Tuesday, March 7, 2006.
5. Does this mean that language is a mechanism of evolution in the same way that sexual and asexual reproduction are—that is, a device that changes the status of evolutionary process? If this were true, it would mean that there is something very important about language (and saying this would not be simply a case of anthropocentrism in the same way that, to continue an analogy by Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, if we were all elephants, this book would be exploring “trunkitude” as the accomplishment of evolution. Trunks are unique features but they are not evolutionary mechanisms).
6. F. Dyson, “Make Me a Hipparoo.”
7. In “Language Evolution: A Brief Guide for Linguists,” Derek Bickerton argues that language and human evolution have stopped. He writes, “Of course it [language evolution] has stopped, because the biological development of humans (saving the odd minor development like the spread of lactose tolerance or proneness to sickle-cell anemia) has, to all intents and purposes, stopped also. What is happening (and has been happening for perhaps as many as a hundred thousand years) is cultural change (sometimes misleadingly described as ‘cultural evolution’); within the envelope of the language faculty, languages are recycling the limited alternatives that this biological envelope makes available…language evolution and changes in languages operate on different time-scales, involve different factors, and follow different courses to different ends (or rather, to the end of a complete language faculty in the first case and to no particular end in the second). To muddle them merely confuses an already sufficiently confused field.”
8. W. J. Sutherland, “Parallel Extinction Risk and Global Distribution of Languages and Species.”
9. See T.W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species, for a discussion of this topic.
10. Ibid., chapter 14.
11. Ibid.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aitchison, Jean, The Seeds of Speech: Language Origin and Evolution (Cambridge, England: Canto, 2000).
Alford, Bobby R., “Core Curriculum Syllabus: Review of Anatomy—the Larynx,” http://www.bcm.edu/oto/studs/anat/larynx.htm, accessed 2006.
Arbib, Michael A., “From Monkey-Like Action Recognition to Human Language: An Evolutionary Framework for Neurolinguistics,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2005):105–24.
Arnold, Kate, and Klaus Zuberbühler, “Semantic Combinations in Primate Calls,” Nature 441 (2006): 303.
Baker, Mark C., The Atoms of Language (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
Balaban, E., M. A. Teillet, and N. Le Douarin, “Application of the Quail-Chick Chimera System to the Study of Brain Development and Behavior,” Science 241 (1988): 1339–42.
Balter, Michael, “Are Human Brains Still Evolving? Brain Genes Show Signs of Selection,” Science 309 (2005): 1662–63.
Baronchelli, Andrea, Maddalena Felici, Vittorio Loreto, Emanuele Caglioti, and Luc Steels, “Sharp Transition Towards Shared Vocabularies in Multi-Agent Systems,” Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment 2006 (2006): P06014.
Bates, Elizabeth, “Comprehension and Production in Early Language Development: Comments on Savage-Rumbaugh et al.,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 58 (1993): 222–42.
———, “Construction Grammar and Its Implications for Child Language Research,” Journal of Child Language 25 (1998): 443–84.
———, “Plasticity, Localization and Language Development,” in Sarah H. Broman and Jack Fletcher, eds., The Changing Nervous System: Neurobehavioral Consequences of Early Brain Disorders (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 214–53.
Bates, Elizabeth, and Frederic Dick, “Beyond Phrenology: Brain and Language in the Next Millennium,” Brain and Language 71 (2000): 18–21.
———, “Language, Gesture, and the De
veloping Brain,” Developmental Psychobiology 40(2002): 293–310.
Bates, E., F. Dick, and B. Wulfeck, “Not So Fast: Domain-General Factors Can Account for Selective Deficits in Grammatical Processing,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22(1999): 96–97.
Bauer, Laurie, and Peter Trudgill, Language Myths (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).
Bekoff, Marc, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt, The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).
Belpaeme, Tony, Bart de Boer, and Paul Vogt, “Modelling Language Origins and Evolution,” paper presented at Fifth Evolution of Language Conference, Leipzig, Germany, March 2004.
Ben-Ari, Elia T. “A Throbbing in the Air,” BioScience 49 (1999): 353–58.
Beran, M. J., D. M. Rumbaugh, and E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, “Chimpanzee (Pan Troglodytes) Counting in a Computerized Testing Paradigm,” The Psychological Record 48 (1998): 3–19.
Bever, Thomas, and Mario Montalbetti, “Noam’s Ark,” Science 298 (2002): 1565–66.
Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit, “From Heofonum to Heavens,” Science 303 (2004): 1326–28.
Bickerton, Derek, Language & Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
———, Language and Human Behavior (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).
———, “Chomsky: Between a Stony Brook and a Hard Place,” www.derekbickerton.com, accessed 2005.
———, “Language Evolution: A Brief Guide for Linguists,” Lingua 117 (2007): 510–26.
Blackburn, Robin, and Oliver Kamm, “For and Against Chomsky,” Prospect Magazine, November 2005.
Blackburn, Simon, “Meet the Flintstones,” The New Republic (November 25, 2002).
Bond, A. B., A. C. Kamil, and R. P. Balda, “Social Complexity and Transitive Inference in Corvids,” Animal Behaviour 65 (2003): 479–87.
Brakke, K. E., and E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, “The Development of Language Skills in Bonobo and Chimpanzee—I. Comprehension,” Language and Communication 15(1995): 121–48.
Brannon, Elizabeth M., and Herbert S. Terrace, “Representation of the Numerosities 1-9 by Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta),” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 26 (2000): 31–49.
Breuer, Thomas, Mireille Ndoundou-Hockemba, and Vicki Fishlock, “First Observation of Tool Use in Wild Gorillas,” PLoS Biology 3 (2005): e380.
Bromberger, Sylvain, “Chomsky’s Revolution,” The New York Review of Books 49 (April 25, 2002).
Brumm, Adam, Fachroel Aziz, Gert D. van den Bergh, Michael J. Morwood, Mark W. Moore, Iwan Kurniawan, Douglas R. Hobbs, and Richard Fullagar, “Early Stone Technology on Flores and Its Implications for Homofloresiensis,” Nature 441 (2006): 624–28.
Bustamante, Carlos D., Adi Fledel-Alon, Scott Williamson, Rasmus Nielsen, Melissa Todd Hubisz, Stephen Glanowski, David M. Tanenbaum, Thomas J. White, John J. Sninsky, Ryan D. Hernandez, Daniel Civello, Mark D. Adams, Michele Cargill, and Andrew G. Clark, “Natural Selection on Protein-Coding Genes in the Human Genome,” Nature 437 (2005): 1153–57.
Cáceres, Mario, Joel Lachuer, Matthew A. Zapala, John C. Redmond, Lili Kudo, Daniel H. Geschwind, David J. Lockhart, Todd M. Preuss, and Carrolee Barlow, “ElevatedGene Expression Levels Distinguish Human from Non-Human Primate Brains,” PNAS 100 (2003): 13030–35.
———, “Zipf’s Law from a Communicative Phase Transition,” European Physical Journal B 47 (2005): 449–57.
———, “When Language Breaks into Pieces: A Conflict Between Communication Through Isolated Signals and Language,” Biosystems 84 (2006): 242–53.
Cangelosi, Angelo, and Domenico Parisi, Simulating the Evolution of Language (New York: Springer, 2002).
Cangelosi, Angelo, Andrew D. M. Smith, and Kenny Smith, eds., The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference, paper (Singapore: World Scientific, 2006).
Cantalupo, Claudio, and William D. Hopkins, “Asymmetric Broca’s Area in Great Apes,” Nature 414 (2001): 505.
Carr, Philip, “Scientific Realism, Sociophonetic Variation, and Innate Endowments in Phonology,” in eds. Noel Burton-Roberts, Philip Carr, and Gerard Docherty, Phonological Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 67–104.
Carruthers, Peter, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen P. Stich, eds., The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew, “Many Perspectives, No Consensus,” Science 303 (2004): 1299–300.
Cattuto, Ciro, Vittorio Loreto, and Luciano Pietronero, “Semiotic Dynamics and Collaborative Tagging,” PNAS 104 (2007): 1461–64.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., Genes, Peoples, and Languages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Cheney, Dorothy L., and Robert M. Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
———, How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Chomsky, Noam, “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” Language 25 (1959): 26–58.
———, “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” in eds. Leon A. Jakobovits and Murray S. Miron, Readings in the Psychology of Language (Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 142–43.
———, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971).
———, “The Case against B. F. Skinner,” The New York Review of Books 17 (December 30, 1971).
———, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).
———, “Chomsky Replies,” The New York Review of Books 20 (July 19, 1973).
———, Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975).
———, Rules and Representations (London: B. Blackwell, 1980).
———, “Discussion of Putnam’s Comments,” n ed. M. Piattelli Palmarini, Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 321.
———, Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988).
———, “Universal Grammar,” The New York Review of Books 38 (December 19, 1991).
———, “Language and Evolution,” The New York Review of Books 43 (February 1, 1996).
———, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
———, “Chomsky’s Revolution: An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books 49 (July 18, 2002).
Chomsky, Noam, Adriana Belletti, and Luigi Rizzi, On Nature and Language (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Chomsky, Noam, Marc D. Hauser, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, “Appendix. The Minimalist Program,” http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~mnkylab/publications/recent.htm. Chomsky, Noam, and Mitsou Ronat, Language and Responsibility (Hassocks, England: Harvester Press, 1979).
Christiansen, Morten H., and Christopher M. Conway, “The Importance of Hierarchical Learning: A Computational Study of Sequential Learning in Human and Non-Human Primates,” paper presented at Evolution of Language conference, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., March 2002.
Christiansen, Morten H., and Simon Kirby, Language Evolution, Studies in the Evolution of Language, vol. 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language Page 38