Derek Bickerton strikes a more worried tone when discussing the odd fact that few linguistics appear to be interested in language evolution. .. . . He argues that a largely cultural emergence of symbolic representation combined with a biological adaptation of brain circuitry capable of encoding syntactic structure were the two distinct evolutionary sources that gave rise to human language. only later would a preference for the spoken modality have evolved, and then entirely contingent on the prior existence of the symbolic and structural components of language. From this perspective, the evolutionary dissociation of symbols and structures are reflected in ape language studies, where learning of symbolic relations approaches a near-human level of performance but where only a limited grasp of syntax has been demonstrated. Bickerton concludes that a capacity for structural manipulations of symbols may be the key adaptation that gives us, but no other species, language in all its intricate complexity. ~ Page 5
Understanding the evolution of language is a hard problem, but it is really the hardest problem in science, as we have provocatively suggested in the title of this chapter? This question is difficult to answer. Certainly, other scientific fields have their own intrinsic obstacles; those studying consciousness have already laid claim to the phase ‘the hard problem.’ Nevertheless, it is worth considering the unique challenges that face language evolution researchers. Language itself is rather difficult to define, existing as it does both as transitory utterances that leave no trace and as patterns of neural connectivity in the natural world’s most complex brains. It is never stationary, changing over time and within populations which themselves are dynamic. It is infinitely flexible and (almost) universally present. It is by far the most complex behaviour we know of -- the mammoth efforts of twentieth century language research across a multitude of disciplines only serve to remind us just how much about language we still have to discover. ` Page 15
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Dinesh said:
Dinesh said: