Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

The basic processes of syntax are categorized into four main categories. These categories include a process for assembling words into hierarchical structures, processes for determining the boundaries of segments within such structures, and processes for moving segments within such structures and lastly, processes for determining the reference of elements that are not phonetically expressed. The syntax characterizes all languages, whether signed or spoken, in a highly developed form but it is entirely absent both from the productions of language-trained animals and the natural communication systems of other species. Children first acquire nouns, then a few verbs, and only later begin to add other word classes. The acquisition of grammatical items follows some time after the emergence of recognizable syntactic structures, even if those structures do not normally begin to appear until age two or thereabouts, and the earliest stages of development constitute an example of protolanguage, rather than full human language. The emergence of these structures is typically quite rapid with several types of both simple and complex sentence appearing within a few weeks. Creole languages are really a special case of child language development, representing what the language faculty produces when structured input is severely reduced.

In dealing with the nature of protolanguage, an important formative factor in its development, and one that would surely have influenced that nature, has too often been neglected: the precise circumstances under which protolanguage arose. Three factors are involved in this neglect: a failure to appreciate radical differences between the functions of language and animal communication, a failure to relate developments to the overall course of human evolution, and the supposition that protolanguage represents a package, rather than a series of separate developments that sequentially impacted the communication of pre-humans. An approach that takes these factors into account is very briefly suggested.

For the benefit of linguists new to the field of language evolution, the author sets out the issues that need to be distinguished in any research on it. He offers a guided tour of contemporary approaches, including the work of linguists (Bickerton, Carstairs-McCarthy, Chomsky, Hurford, Jackendoff, Pinker, Wray), animal behaviour experts (Dunbar, Hauser, Premack, Savage-Rumbaugh), neurophysiologists (Arbib, Calvin), psychologists (Corballis, Donald), archaeologists (Davidson), and computer modellers (Batali, Kirby, Steels). He criticises the expectation that recent discoveries such as `mirror neurons' and the FOXP2 gene will provide easy answers. He emphasises the extremely interdisciplinary nature of this field, and also the importance of involvement in it by linguists, after more than a century of neglect.

Language and Species presents the most detailed and well-documented scenario to date of the origins of language. Drawing on 'living linguistic fossils' such as 'ape talk,' the 'two-word' stage of small children, and pidgin languages, and on recent discoveries in paleoanthropology, Bickerton shows how a primitive 'protolanguage' could have offered Homo erectus a novel ecological niche. He goes on to demonstrate how this protolanguage could have developed into the languages we speak today.