Comments on Derek Bickerton's Book (2014) More than Nature Needs

By Razie Mah

Derek Bickerton is an emeritus professor in Linguistics at the University of Hawaii. His other works include Language and Species (1990), along with many publications on the character of pigdin and creole. This work synthesizes ideas from a long and productive career.
The evolution of language has proven to be a difficult topic. Bickerton's work refutes one thesis, proposed by Noam Chomsky and others, that language appeared suddenly by way of a fortuitous mutation. He does so by offering an alternate hypothesis, which turns out to be a parallel evolution of the symbolic operations of parole and langue. These operations were able to evolve once hominins adopted words (in the same fashion that pidgin is adopted, for lack of any other method to communicate.)
Here, the word "language" exclusively means "speech-alone talk". As it turns out, hand talk may be readily substituted in for "language" as well. To me, this makes more sense, since manual-brachial gestures were under voluntary control in the walking southern apes, but the vocal tract was not.
Also, Bickerton locates the start of "language" at the appearance of anatomically modern humans. To me, this works for the addition to speech to an already established hand talk.
In sum, Bickerton's proposals apply to a long period before the appearance of anatomically modern humans. The gracile australopithicenes (who discovered words) and the early Homo genus (who evolved syntactical operations for langue and parole) span two million years. Then, Homo heidelbergensis broke the slow increase in brain size by initiating grammar-dependent behaviors.
These comments re-articulate Bickerton's argument, using the category-based nested form plus a time-map for the evolution of talk that goes from protolanguage, to hand talk to hand-speech talk, then finally, with the first singularity, to speech-alone talk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Feb 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781942824381

Razie Mah

See website for bio.

Book preview

Comments on Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky’s Book (2016) Why Only Us

By Razie Mah

Published for Smashwords.com

2018

Notes on Text

In Why Only Us: Language and Evolution, computational scientist Robert Berwick linguist joins Noam Chomsky in a rehash of a familiar proposal: Human language appears at the same time as archaeological evidence for symbolic cultural artifacts. These comments offer an alternate approach using category-based nested forms.

Prerequisites include A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form (#1) and Sensible and Social Construction (#2).

‘Words that belong together’ are denoted by single quotes or italics.

Table of Contents

Prelude

First Key Point

Second Key Point

Third Key Point

An Example

Evolutionary History and the Niche of Language

Moving towards the Bitter End

Prelude

0001 Why Only Us: Language and Evolution begins with a question.

It ends with the same question.

0002 This pattern reflects a Semitic textual style. Berwick and Chomsky want the reader to recognize a possibility.

That possibility concerns language.

0003 The possibility addresses many questions: Why does language evolve? Is it for communication or mental symbolic processing? What about the mechanics of speech? Are we like birds? Birds vocalize. Some birds learn their songs. Some don’t. What is meaning of their words?

0004 Um... what am I saying?

0005 In Sura 30, verse 22, Mohammed recites that the varieties of languages and colors are signs of God.

Yes, for each of us, there is only one tongue and one pair of eyes. For all of us, there are many languages and many colors.

Mohammed, also, wants the reader to recognize a possibility.

First Key Point

0006 Why do humans talk? Why do birds sing?

0007 Let me go back to a pair of primal ancestral hominins. They bond because the female needs a male for protection. Her male is necessary to deter infanticide by other males. He does other things as well. He brings home bone fat from an already scavenged carcass some distance off.

0008 How does he do it?

He follows the vultures in order to locate a carcass. It is already mostly eaten. But, long bones are full of fat. Few animals can chew through the bone. He uses a crude stone tool to crack open the long bones. He eats his fill and now carries