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Harlow: Longman. Pinker, S. London: Allen Lane. Priscian Institutiones grammaticae. Grammatici Latini Vol. Rochester, S. New York: Plenum Press. Saussure, F.

Paris: Payot. Smith, W. A high goal of linguistics has traditionally been to explain language an ambiguous term, as we will see immediately , rather than merely to describe it. Given this high goal, it is vital to be clear about the thing or things to be explained, the explanandum or explananda of our subject. One is the biologically given human faculty of language. This faculty is what constitutes the language- readiness of a normal newborn infant, prepared to absorb the torrent of experience assailing it from the buzz of conversation around it, and the associated activities, and after a few years to become a competent participant in this buzz and these activities.

Each language is a body of complex conventional behaviour highly articulated spoken and written buzz and associated activities in a more or less clearly defined community. The conventionality of the behaviour implies that each participant has mentally internalized a collection of normal patterns much like that also learned by his fellows in the community.

Clearly, different kinds of explanation are needed for the biological faculty, Language, and the historico-cultural entities, languages. Just as clearly, the thumb-nail definitions of them I have started with make some tricky presuppositions and need further amplification.

And to complicate things further, it turns out that the biological and historico-cultural processes are to a degree intertwined, in processes of gene-culture co-evolution. The necessary amplifications and added complexities will be touched on as we proceed.

As this chapter is largely targeted at linguists, it will be useful to carve linguistics near to its commonly understood natural joints, so without too much revision of the usually assumed boundaries, it will be possible to deal with, for example, evolutionary semantics, evolutionary.

Equally, but calling on different explanatory mechanisms, and discussed in less detail here, one may distinguish evolutionary phonology and evolutionary morphosyntax. Any revision of boundaries is motivated by the distinction between different modes of explanation, biological and historico-cultural. I will take as biologically given to each normal newborn human the semantic, pragmatic and phonetic prerequisites of the Language faculty.

Filling that out a bit, and still roughly speaking, the semantic prerequisites for Language include a faculty for concept formation, mental representation of propositions about the world, and computation of inference, the pragmatic prerequisites include a disposition to cooperative engagement with others and an ability to guess their intentions rather accurately, and the phonetic prerequisites include coordination of the acoustic patterns of speech with the motor control necessary for producing and decoding articulate sounds.

And all this had to be in place, at least in some rudimentary form, in the earliest hominin ancestors of Homo sapiens, otherwise Language as we know it would not have evolved. We will see small evolutionary seeds of these prerequisites for Language in the behaviour of non-human animals, more or less directly genetically related to humans. By contrast, the complex morphosyntactic and phonological structures of individual languages are the products of centuries, in most cases many millennia, of culturally transmitted, and culturally enhanced, patterns of behaviour.

A child experiences the behaviour of older people already regularly using and productively combining established words and constructions, and begins to use and productively combine the same words and constructions, perhaps with some tiny idiosyncratic innovations, which may or may not survive to be passed on in future generations. This conceives of evolutionary morphosyntax and evolutionary phonology as largely matters of cultural evolution, successive waves of learning and cumulating small innovations.

There can be no doubt that, in the long view of prehistory at least back to the emergence of our species, the syntactic and phonological complexities that we see in languages today emerged out of something simpler. At the end of this chapter, I will very briefly argue that we can speculate rather confidently about what such simpler proto-forms of languages were like. In this introductory delineation of the different mechanisms called on to explain Language and languages, we immediately see an instance of the phenomena studied by linguistics beginning to make sense in the light of evolution, as they would not if evolution were not considered.

The rest of this chapter will discuss each of the branches of linguistics in suitable, biological or cultural, evolutionary terms. Niko Tinbergen suggested four questions that need to be answered in seeking explanations for any biological phenomenon. These questions can be posed of the human faculty of Language, in the following ways.

What are its parts and how do they interact with each other? Specifying the mechanism of languages is an interdisciplinary enterprise, in which linguists, psycholinguists and neuroscientists must collaborate. Such terms are not part of the vocabulary of psychology, neuroscience or biology. It is assumed that the mechanisms underlying all individual languages are significantly similar.

When a person uses a language, mechanisms of both storage and computation are involved. Words and constructions are summoned up from memory, and in production combined by the brain into more or less complex structures. In language recognition, the same memory store is used, and the brain analyses received complex input, mapping it onto understandings of what was said, or even of what the speaker intended. All such specifically linguistic mechanisms collaborate in the brain with more language-peripheral processes, such as understanding and management of the social and physical context.

In the case of languages, they serve both for public communication between people and to some extent for the facilitation of private thought. It needs to be shown how the mechanism, the parts of a language and their workings, are applied to carry out these functions. The study of how precisely language facilitates private thought, relying on some independent characterization of what thought itself consists of, is challenging, and as yet little developed.

It is the domain of linguists, psycholinguists and neuroscientists, with the possibility of some useful input from philosophers. The study of how languages serve communication is rather less challenging, just because communication is public. Philosophy, linguistics and even folk theories converge on ideas relevant to the communicative functions of language, ideas such as reference to objects and events, speech acts, and information structure. Parts of language e.

In biology, this is the province of embryology, charting the route from a single cell to an adult organism. There is no linguistic analogue of the single cell. Instead, developmental linguistics has to make do with the first behavioural signs of language in newborns. Even in neonates, there is evidence of the influence of experience in the womb, with babies apparently sensitive to the different types of rhythm found in languages. The different subsystems of languages, their phonology, syntax and lexicon, have different sensitive periods for their development.

Accurate native-like pronunciation is extremely difficult to achieve after about ten years of age, much syntax can be acquired after that age, though with more effort than earlier, and the acquisition of new vocabulary can continue into late life. In all cases, complex developments are built upon simpler foundations.

Children start with one-word utterances, proceed to two- word utterances, and then move on quite fast. Likewise with syllable structure, with. The progression from simple units to more complex ones is a necessity of the learning process. Complex cases cannot be learned without the prior learning of simpler building blocks. This, obviously, is the domain of any putative evolutionary linguistics.

Evolutionary linguistics is less well developed than other aspects of the subject, partly for the very good reason that solid evidence about the evolution of the Language faculty is hard to come by. Language leaves no fossils, in the sense of remnants of behaviour that can be dug up. Tinbergen was not concerned with any phylogeny other than the biological kind, the evolution of a species, as he was a biologist not concerned with human culture.

Cultural transmission of behaviour in a group is far, far more developed in humans than in any other species. And human languages, in particular, are unique in life on Earth as complex culturally evolved artefacts. That is, what is seen early in child language development is also likely to have occurred early in the emergence of the first languages in our species, probably around , years ago. There is no logical necessity for ontogeny to recapitulate phylogeny, and sometimes it does not.

But the principle of simpler beginnings being the foundation for more complex structures also applies in phylogeny. In the case of language, modern children have the advantage of learning an existing system. For the phylogenetic story we wish to tell, the focus is necessarily on innovations not drawn from any existing system. Cases where modern children naturally come up with expressions that are not found in the ambient adult language are likely to be especially valuable as clues to the innovative possibilities that have driven the cultural evolution of languages.

Among other things, this concerns the denotations of predicating words, the referents of referring expressions, the combinations of these into meaningful propositions, and relations of valid inference among propositions.

The evolutionary question is: where did this stuff come from? Naturally assuming that these are not metaphysical or Platonic entities, we take a mentalist approach to the question.

That is, we suppose that relations between words in a language and things in the external world are mediated by mental representations in the heads of language users. A mentalist approach to predicates, reference and propositions is outlined in more detail just below. In describing something as red, for example, a speaker judges that the referent matches a certain range of the colour spectrum categorically defined in his mind, and distinguished there from other regions of the spectrum, denoted by other colour terms.

Likewise, one carries a mental distinction between what counts as a person and, say, a rock or a tree. To a large extent, such mental categories are formed and kept distinct by. Imagine you are watching birds out of your window. You see various different repeating types, and perhaps note their different habits. You can do this without knowing what the different bird types are called.

Likewise with flowers, trees, spicy tastes, smells, various sounds of nature, many of which you can recognize and keep distinct, without knowing their names. Thus, we assume that there exist mental acts of categorical judgement independent of any sentences in a language that might express predication.

The qualification should be enough to satisfy any who insist on keeping predication pure and simple as a solely linguistic phenomenon. Mentally categorizing individual objects with their properties is relatively simple.

Judging relationships between objects is more complex, obviously, because it involves more objects. Judging two objects to be of the same, or different, category involves first making individual judgements about each separate object, then mentally comparing the judgements arrived at. Another more abstract predication is that expressed, for example, by Red is a colour. This is more abstract because redness is a first-order property predicate of objects, such as ripe cherries and cricket balls, and being a colour is a second-order property predicate applicable to redness, along with blueness, greenness, etc.

It is not clear whether this latter type of abstract predication is available to us independently of language. But, given language, it certainly is. The most basic referring expressions, deictic terms such as this and that, in typical uses, are the linguistic expressions of mental indices provided by the attention system.

These indices are temporarily linked to whatever object or event in the world an individual happens to be attending to at the time of use. The attention mentioned can be effected through any of the senses, but typically through vision and audition, which provide the possibility of joint attention by different individuals. In the terms adopted here, acts of paying attention to things are mental acts of reference.

Attention to something need not be accompanied by any linguistic act. But if communication is successful, the mental representations that users have of these referents are clear and well separated in their minds from other kinds of things, such as dogs and kangaroos.

A person knows a whole lot of entities, their properties and behaviour, and this knowledge is largely, though not entirely, independent on language.

In logic, propositions are composed from two types of term, a predicating term and one or more referring terms. Thus, for instance, That is a cat and Kevin is furry both express propositions. Propositions are sometimes identified as facts about a world, existing somehow independent. Taking a mentalistic view, a proposition is a mental combination of a category and a mental index. The index is the mental referent, the category the mental predicate.

We can know propositions, without ever having expressed them in language, even subvocally. For instance, I know that a certain sort of grey caterpillar habitually munches a certain kind of plant in my garden, but I do not know the names of either caterpillar or plant.

Oops, now I have just expressed that proposition linguistically, albeit with circumlocution, but before I did, I knew the proposition independently of language, an observed fact about those caterpillars and those plants. There surely are some facts propositions about the world that are either unobservable or ineffable, or both. We will never know everything, let alone be able to say it. Obviously, from the point of view of language, we are only interested in such propositions as can in principle be expressed in language.

Not only do we hold propositions in our heads, we can also manipulate them in chains of inference. If you know that Kevin is a cat, you know he is a quadrupedal mammal. More complexly, if you know Kevin is tougher than Amelia, my cat, and that Amelia is tougher than Sherman, my creampuff dog, then you also know that Kevin is tougher than Sherman. This shows that you can do transitive inference, among many other kinds of inferential calculations involving propositions.

Now, to repeat the evolutionary question: where did this stuff come from? Having taken a mentalist viewpoint, we cannot shrug the question off by assuming that, ever since the Big Bang, referents, predicates and propositions always existed, timelessly, even though there were not always brains adequate to entertain them. Their mental correlates have only existed for as long as there have been brains powerful enough to house and process the corresponding neural representations.

At least, the existence of brains, or central nervous systems of some kind, is a convenient starting point here, though it is debatable. We cannot yet push our evolutionary question further back than the emergence of brains, say to protozoa. And even the emergence of brains does not necessarily immediately give rise to the type of fully- fledged semantic mental representations that are a basis for language.

The availability of mental indices for variable and versatile attachment to objects of attention is a prerequisite for dealing practically with the world, in any somewhat advanced animal. An animal manipulating, say, a stick, to fish termites out of a mound is attending to the stick and the hole in the mound.

At other times, say when grooming another ape, the attentional indices may be linked to particular patches of skin and lice therein. Such instances are fleeting, but are the basis for more permanent mental representations. A social animal that recognizes particular fellow troop members and behaves differentially and systematically toward them, e. In truth as well as proverb, elephants never forget. What this means, at the least, is that elephants can preserve, over many years, representations of particular individuals, who have behaved either well or badly toward them, be they humans or other elephants.

Long-term memory for individual objects, linked to their significant properties, is uncontroversial among mammals and birds. Non-human animals apart from honey-bees do not communicate to each other about things distant in space and time, but they do clearly have memories about things distant in space and time.

Starting to communicate about what they remember and know is another matter. A more complex type of memory than memory for objects and their properties, a memory for specific events involving several individuals, is more debatable. This is known as. It is the kind of memory impaired in some amnesics. Clearly, humans have a far greater capacity than other animals for remembering and recalling events from the past.

Experiments with a wide range of animals, including apes, and some birds scrub jays in particular have shown that they have the ability to remember for a short time events they have observed or in which they have participated. A chimpanzee called Panzee was able to signal to a trainer the location of a kiwi fruit that another trainer had hidden the day before.

Scrub jays have been shown to remember where they cached perishable food, and only to retrieve it if not too much time has elapsed since it was cached. By contrast they remember where non-perishable food was cached and go back to it after longer periods.

Of course, human capacity for remembering events is much more far-reaching, in time, space and the kind of events recalled. But the existence of some kind of episodic memory in other animals, however simple, shows that this aspect of the mental representation of facts about the world is quite ancient, possibly dating from the emergence of birds and mammals, or possibly having evolved separately several times since. Many non-human animals clearly engage in some degree of advance planning of their actions.

This can involve representation of places, movements, objects and possibly planned complex events. Animals do not confuse planning of future actions with memories of past actions, although the actions themselves may be of the same type. Thus, an implicit understanding of the difference between past and future is attributable to non-human animals.

Surely, this should be no surprise. Among symbol-trained animals, Alex the African grey parrot was capable of the kind of abstract judgement involved in Red is a colour. This is clear because experimenters would show Alex an object, and ask What colour is this?

Note that the question was not the first-order question Is this red? Now, Alex had been taught a set of language-like symbols, spoken words in his case. It has not yet been shown that any non-human animal is capable of this kind of second-order predication independent of having learned some overt symbols for the first-order predicates, e.

Non-human animals are capable of a degree of computation involving the propositions they know. Social monkeys, such as baboons, know the pecking order of their troop in detail. They know, for any given pair of animals, which is dominant to which.

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