Language and Species

Rating:
Summary: A superb book
Review: A century ago, early linguists came up with so many crack-pot theories of language origins that the subject was banned.

Now that mankind is beginning to assimilate Darwin's great discovery, we would expect to see an inquiry into language origins informed by the fact of evolution. And this is precisely what Derek Bickerton has provided in this EXCELLENT book!

It may be fairly tough going for some readers, including me. As I recall, I put it aside four years ago as something I just couldn't understand. But, during the next four years, I did a lot of thinking about computers and natural language ("Will a computer ever speak English?") and started seeing some of the still-hazy concepts necessary to carry out this quest (if it can indeed be done!)

Well, it turns out that the question of "How language evolved" on the road from mammals to primates to humans, is intricately linked to the question of making a computer speak English: many of the concepts involved are identical. So (eventually) it becomes just second nature to realize that we never experience the outside world directly (how could we?) but receive sense impressions (a first representation) that are then mapped onto a system of concepts (a second representation) which are then mapped onto a human language (a third representation). In the world of software, this would amount to a sensory subsystem supplying a representation to a self-generated and self-generating system of objects (a second representation), which could then be mapped to any human language, Swahili or Turkish or whatever.

This simplified scheme makes no allowance for many things which Bickerton discusses: predication, grammatization, and syntax ("and the greatest of those is syntax.")

I think I'll be re-reading this book. It's packed with valuable information.

Highest recommendation!