Language and Species (Hardcover)

by Derek Bickerton (Author) "Anyone who sets out to described the role played by language in the development of our species is at once confronted by an apparent paradox,..." (more)
Key Phrases: constructional learning, predicability tree, species with language, Farmer Giles, Battle of Lepanto, Bill Bailey (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Language and Species presents the most detailed and well-documented scenario to date of the origins of language. Drawing on "living linguistic fossils" such as "ape talk," the "two-word" stage of small children, and pidgin languages, and on recent discoveries in paleoanthropology, Bickerton shows how a primitive "protolanguage" could have offered Homo erectus a novel ecological niche. He goes on to demonstrate how this protolanguage could have developed into the languages we speak today.

"You are drawn into [Bickerton's] appreciation of the dominant role language plays not only in what we say, but in what we think and, therefore, what we are."--Robert Wright, New York Times Book Review

"The evolution of language is a fascinating topic, and Bickerton's Language and Species is the best introduction we have."--John C. Marshall, Nature

About the Author

Derek Bickerton is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaii and is the author of several books, including Roots of Language.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 305 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; First Printing edition (December 15, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226046109
• ISBN-13: 978-0226046105
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,976,652 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you smile at me I will understand because that is something everyone does in the same language, February 23, 2007

By	Steve Reina (Troy Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Language and Species (Paperback)

If you smile at me I will understand because that is something that everyone does in the same language. David Crosby from the song "Wooden Ships"

What songwriter David Crosby artfully offered in his song "Wooden Ships" Bickerton broadens in his thought provoking work Langauge and Species. Namely, Bickerton suggests that human language did not evolutionary just drop in out of the blue but rather evolved from other evolutionarily pre existing hominid and primate proto language systems.

And honestly, the only problem with Bickerton's work is Noam Chomsky.

At the outset of his book, Bickerton incorrectly asserts that Chomsky is the Isaac Newton of linguistics. As research progresses forward, it becomes more apparent that Chomsky is rather the Sigmund Freud of linguistics. This is because just like Freud, Chomsky was able to assert a comprehensive theory at just the right point in the development of a field that operated to at one in the same time stifle inquiry into or obfuscate the ability to discern the answers to important questions.

And a big for instance of this stifling relates to the question of the origin of language...a point Chomsky has consistently opposed addressing.

Another for instance is the slobbery regard Chomsky seems to have for the supposed uniqueness of human language. In this regard, hearing Chomsky describe the supposed uniqueness of human language is like hearing an elephant describe the uniqueness of its trunk. To be sure, there is a complexity to human language that seems lacking in other animal communication systems but again we can only say that the uniqueness seems lacking. Significantly, no one has succeeded in translating whale song, dolphin communication, or even bird song. It's very speciesist to say that because we cannot understand the language that other animals use it must be inferior in complexity to ours.

Indeed what we do know is that certain shared facial patterns characterize common emotional states among mammals (from the half lided sleepy look to bared teeth aggressiveness). Why then should language be so of a kind different and so of a kind unique in kind rather than merely quality.

Happily, it's Bickerton's sensitivity to these issues and his willingness to challenge Chomskian convention that makes this book significant for his courage to 1) posit a theory of language origins and 2) suggest that at the end of the day, maybe our language isn't really that far divorced from the pro language after all.

To be sure, Bickerton's theory at the end of the day may be wrong. Like Greespan in The First Idea, Bickerton is eager to press into service the long discredited idea of ontogeny recapitulating philogeny. And his supposed examples of the similarity between his so called "ape speak" and the language of two year olds don't really support his supposed correspondences.

However, all that is quite beside the point in a field that until only recently hasn't even bothered to consider the question of origins or for that matter the idea that human chauvanistic views might even be wrong at all.

5.0 out of 5 stars One additional note..., October 13, 2002

By	Geoff Puterbaugh (Chiang Mai, T. Suthep, A. Muang Thailand) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Language and Species (Paperback)

The review above is excellent, and I just wanted to add one point. Aside from language evolution, Bickerton makes one point that philosophers should be paying attention to. The question is how we get from sense perceptions to words, and Bertrand Russell for one got this wrong. He imagined that words map directly to sense perceptions, and got into huge philosophical trouble. The truth is apparently a bit more complex. We humans (and other beasts) have what might be called a "sensory subsystem," which senses the outside world and hands us a "concept." In the case of a frog, for example, the concept of "bug" produces appropriate catch-the-bug behavior. In the case of humans, the concept "bug" gets mapped onto the word for "bug" (which would be "malang" in Thai, "insecte" in French, etc.) So, in Bickerton's view, our words map to "concepts," which in turn map to sense perceptions.

This may seem to be similar to quarreling over angels dancing on the head of a pin, but in fact it is a huge difference, and would be directly relevant to anyone who wanted (say) to make computers speak English.