Why Only Us: Language and Evolution

224 Pages·2015·1.37 MB·english

by  Robert C. Berwick

Why Only Us

Why Only Us

Language and Evolution

Robert C. Berwick
Noam Chomsky

The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England
© 2016 Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by

any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or
information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the
publisher.
This book was set in Sabon LT Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Berwick, Robert C., author. | Chomsky, Noam, author.
Title: Why only us : language and evolution / Robert C. Berwick and
Noam Chomsky.
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2016] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015038384 | ISBN 9780262034241 (hardcover : alk.
paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Language acquisition–Psychological aspects. | Human
evolution–Psychological aspects. | Minimalist theory (Linguistics) |
Biolinguistics. | Psycholinguistics.

Classification: LCC P118 .B475 2016 | DDC 401/.93–dc23 LC record

available at h ttp://lccn.loc.gov/2015038384

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Acknowledgments vii
1 Why Now? 1
2 Biolinguistics Evolving 53
3 Language Architecture and Its Import for Evolution 89

4 Triangles in the Brain 109
Notes 167

References 179
Index 201

Acknowledgments

Evolution as we know it would not be possible without change,
variation, selection, and inheritance. This book is no excep-

tion. We were fortunate to have numerous people suggest
changes, encourage variation, and weed out the deleterious
mutations. But like everything else in biology, evolution, even

artificial selection, remains imperfect. We alone, not our genes,

and certainly not all who have helped us, bear full responsibil-
ity for all remaining imperfections. Only by further numerous,
slight, and not-so-slight successive modifications, could these

chapters hope to form an “organ of extreme perfection.” Only

time will tell. We hope we can pass on anything that is valu-

able here to the next generation, who may really solve the
puzzle of language evolution.

Novel evolutionary change is the hardest of all. We are
indebted to Marilyn Matz for her inspired idea to write this

book. We would also like to thank the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences, underwriting the conference

where chapters 3 and 4 were first born, and the key people

who organized it: Johan Bolhuis, Martin Everaert, and Riny
Huybrechts. A slightly different version of chapter 2 first

appeared in Biolinguistic Investigations, edited by Anna Maria
Di Sicullo and Cedric Boeckx, Oxford University Press.

1

Why Now?

We are born crying, but those cries herald the first stirrings of
language. German babies’ cries mirror the melody of German

speech; French babies mirror French speech—apparently
acquired i n utero (Mampe et al. 2009). Within the first year
or so after birth, infants master the sound system of their

language; then, after another few years have passed, they are

engaging their caretakers in conversation. This remarkable,
species-specific ability to acquire any human language—the
“faculty of language”—has long raised important biological

questions, including the following: What is the nature of lan-

guage? How does it function? How has it evolved?

This collection of essays addresses the third question: the
evolution of language. Despite claims to the contrary, in truth

there has always been strong interest in the evolution of lan-
guage since the very beginning of generative grammar in the

mid-twentieth century. Generative grammar sought, for the
first time, to provide explicit accounts of languages—

grammars—that would explain what we will call the Basic

Property of language: that a language is a finite computa-
tional system yielding an infinity of expressions, each of which

has a definite interpretation in semantic-pragmatic and senso-
rimotor systems (informally, thought and sound). When this