Bickerton on Fitch

In response to W. Tecumseh Fitch's post "Musical protolanguage: Darwin's theory of language evolution revisited" (2/12/2009), Derek Bickerton sent the commentary presented below.

[Guest post by Derek Bickerton]
I yield to no-one in my admiration of Darwin. But admiration should not blind us to the fact that in many cases he was, inevitably, limited by the state of knowledge in his time. Not only Mendelian genetics, but also almost the entire ancestry of humans, was wholly unknown to him; ethology and the study of non-human communication had yet to be systematically developed, and linguistics still lay in the womb of philology. It is truly amazing, not that he was sometimes wrong, but that he was so often and so stunningly right.

He was right when he saw language as the seed, rather than the fruit, of human intelligence. But appealing as the notion is, he was wrong in proposing a scenario in which language issued from a "musical protolanguage". Tecumseh Fitch argues that his own account, developed from Darwin's, is soundly based on principles of evolutionary biology. It is therefore somewhat surprising that his account pays as little attention to the evolution of humans (and the ways in which this evolution differed from that of other primates) as do those of biologically-naïve linguists or psychologists.

The notion of a terrestrial and heavily-predated primate indulging in any form of vocal activity-especially one that must, in quantity as well as quality, have exceeded those of all other primates barring gibbons-is simply bizarre, as I point out in a chapter of my book Adam's Tongue (out next month) devoted to the "singing ape" hypothesis:

"What could possibly have been the functions of song for a pre-human species in largely treeless grasslands? Song as a pair-bonding mechanism is highly unlikely. Human ancestors probably weren't monogamous-great apes aren't, and neither are we, even if we try or pretend to be, so a monogamous interval at any time in the past looks unlikely. But suppose we did go through a monogamous period. If two mates don't happen to be out of sight of one another up two different trees, there are countless more effective ways of bonding than yodeling at each other.

"Human ancestors probably weren't territorial, either-at least not in the sense of holding small, well-defined chunks of territory. Most likely they had a fission-fusion social structure, like that of contemporary apes, that's to say groups would be continually splitting up and reforming, merging with other groups. In open terrain, where different groups might utilize the same areas at different times without conflict or even contact, what would be the point of noisily-defended frontiers?

"Furthermore, the terrains in which gibbons and human ancestors lived were such that for maintaining contact sound was essential in one and useless, even dangerous, in the other…On the savanna, where there are beasts with keen hearing far larger and more lethal than our ancestors, to sing out with any frequency would have been to write one's own death warrant. Moreover, the absence of trees and the level or undulating nature of most savannas means that, in contrast with the rain-forest, animals are visible at considerable distances. To be out of sight is, under those conditions, almost always to be out of earshot–there's little point in yelling and hoping your friends will hear you.

"To assume that, even if our ancestors had sung before, they would go on singing under these conditions is absurd-something you can do only if you think that behavior and environment are completely divorced from one another… Conditions on the savanna were such that while they lived there our ancestors very probably produced less sound than our ape relatives, not more. If this was indeed the case, a single source for music and language becomes highly unlikely. Unless, of course, someone succeeds in coming up with some function pre-humans had to perform, under those same savanna conditions, that they couldn't have performed by any means other than by singing. It's unlikely anyone will, but never say never in science."

To persuade us of the "musical protolanguage" theory, Tecumseh will have to come up with a scenario in which singing (of some kind) somehow increased human fitness. Here he has proposed mother-child interaction (as already suggested by Dean Falk in a recent article, "Prelinguistic evolution in early hominins: Whence motherese?", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27(4):491-503, 2004). The problem with this is that all other primates have mother-child interactions, but only one has picked on this kind. Why? Why humans? And this doesn't end the problems that "musical protolanguage" raises.

Tecumseh recognizes that the severest of these problems ("the greatest explanatory challenge for all musical protolanguage theories") is how sound acquired sense-how a continuously variable medium with no specific reference turned into strings of discrete chunks with individual meanings. However, he skips nimbly over the solution:

"Supporters of the more intuitive "synthetic" model of protolanguage, in which words evolved first followed by syntactic operations for combining them (e.g., Bickerton, 1990), have subjected holistic models to extensive criticisms (Bickerton, 2007; Tallerman, 2007, 2008). However, I argue that most of these critiques miss their mark if the notion of a musical protolanguage is accepted as a starting point (cf. Fitch, in press). Jespersen/Wray's model of holistic protolanguage thus dovetails nicely with the musical protolanguage hypothesis, in ways that I believe resolve many, if not all, of these criticisms (cf. Fitch, 2006; Mithen, 2005)."

As I don't have a copy of Fitch (in press), I remain in the dark as to what these ways are. All I know is that when Dean Falk made the same proposal, I wrote a commentary that, inter alia, pointed out she gave no account of how symbolic meaning — symbolic use of words or signs to refer to particular classes or individuals — emerged from originally meaningless sounds. Significantly, she responded to all the points I made… except for that one.

Maggie Tallerman and I have made some very specific and pointed criticisms of the "holistic protolanguage" model, most of which have never been satisfactorily answered by anyone, as far as I know. If Tecumseh believes he can answer them, he should show how.

He does point out that "Darwin… embraces all three of the major leading theories of word origins of his contemporaries" but he fails to point out that at least two of these are incompatible with one another. For according to Darwin, "the attachment of specific and flexible meanings to vocalizations required only that 'some unusually wise ape-like animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey'" (and of course that some even wiser primates should have understood what was meant-a lion coming, or lions often hang around here, or one was seen here last week, or "Gee, guys, see how well I can imitate a lion!"). But of course this onomatopoeic proposal is incompatible with "musical protolanguage", since it avoids the holistic phase altogether and goes straight to the kind of compositional, already-symbolic protolanguage that Tecumseh rejects. The "lion's roar" idea needs a good bit of tweaking, but at least it's nearer the mark than a holistic protolanguage.

A major motive behind "musical protolanguage" is Strict Continuism — the belief that language grew seamlessly from animal communication. Animal calls — if translated into humanese, and that turns out to be a very dodgy business in itself — are, like holophrases, often the equivalents of whole clauses: "Mate with me"; "Stay off my territory"; "Terrestrial predator coming — get up a tree". Split these into their components and for a few glorious moments it seems that the transition problem has been solved. But in Adam's Tongue I go more deeply into the transition problem than anyone ever has before. And it's the transition problem — how any species could get from a standard animal communication system to even the crudest and most basic kind of protolanguage — that lies at the very heart of language evolution, and without which all "explanations" are mere hand-waving, smoke and mirrors.

I know that Bickerton and Fitch are both friends of my Language Evolution lecturer Maggie Tallerman, so i can't help but imaginging them bickering in the school yard! Hehehe. I proper love this field now though. I think i may have a future arguing with these guys...

Article taken from http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1148