How could language have evolved?

Johan J Bolhuis,Noam Chomsky,Robert C Berwick,Ian Tattersall

doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001934

Johan J Bolhuis, Noam Chomsky + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001934

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Abstract

The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language "phenotype." According to the "Strong Minimalist Thesis," the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary theory must explain) is hierarchical syntactic structure. The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000-100,000 years ago, and does not seem to have undergone modification since then, though individual languages do of course change over time, operating within this basic framework. The recent emergence of language and its stability are both consistent with the Strong Minimalist Thesis, which has at its core a single repeatable operation that takes exactly two syntactic elements a and b and assembles them to form the set {a, b}.

Highlights

It is uncontroversial that language has evolved, just like any other trait of living organisms
The language faculty is often equated with ‘‘communication’’—a trait that is shared by all animal species and possibly by plants
The origin of the language faculty does not generally seem to be informed by considerations of the evolution of communication. This viewpoint does not preclude the possibility that communicative considerations can play a role in accounting for the maintenance of language once it has appeared or for the historical language change that has clearly occurred within the human species, with all individuals sharing a common language faculty, as some mathematical models indicate [1,2,3]

Summary

Conceptualizations of Language

The language faculty is often equated with ‘‘communication’’—a trait that is shared by all animal species and possibly by plants. In place of a complex rule system or accounts grounded on general notions of ‘‘culture’’ or ‘‘communication,’’ it appears that human language syntax can be defined in an extremely simple way that makes conventional evolutionary explanations much simpler In this view, human language syntax can be characterized via a single operation that takes exactly two (syntactic) elements a and b and puts them together to form the set {a, b}. The auditory-vocal domain is just one possible external interface for language (with signing being another), it could be argued that the strongest animal candidates for human-like syntax are songbirds and parrots [1,41,42] Do they have a similar brain organization underlying auditory-vocal behavior [4,43,44], they exhibit vocal imitation learning that proceeds in a very similar way to speech acquisition in human infants [4,41,42]. This yields something like {what, {boys, {eat, what}}}, in this way marking out the two required operator and variable positions for what

The Nature of Evolution

Conclusions