A Darwinian approach to meaning

Abstract

James Hurford is a key researcher in the study of language origins. He has been involved in the project for decades, has been instrumental in the organisation of several conference series on the subject (including the influential biennial series, Evolang), and has been a key member of the highly productive language evolution team at Edinburgh University. Any book on language origins by Hurford is certainly worth reading; and this volume lives up to expectations. Hurford’s approach in this volume is determinedly Darwinian: everything is examined in terms of individual fitness paradigms, and there is a clear intention to avoid post hoc explanations of language evolution based on the current efficacies and efficiencies of language. The approach is also eclectic, considering the evidence from a range of sources – human and animal cognition, anthropology, evolutionary theory, predicate logic and, of course, linguistics. In terms of linguistics, Hurford’s approach is probably best described as cognitive; but he is not dogmatic in his analyses, and borrows from functional and transformational-generative theory as needed. His intention is not to argue from linguistics to the evolution of language, but to use the linguistics to explain the evolution. So what does Hurford say in this volume? First, it must be emphasised that this is the first half of a two-volume project which is intended to look at all aspects of language evolution. This volume concentrates on meaning – the pragmatic and semantic content of language. The next volume will look at the morpho-syntactic and phonological aspects of language. Having said that, the structures of meaning that Hurford proposes in this book do provide broad clues to the morpho-syntactic forms that are likely to be considered in volume II.