ABSTRACT
To cast light on this, it can be helpful to speculate on what Hurford (1999: 178-83) terms ‘preadaptations’ for language – cognitive, social and physiological.
Preadaptive bases for human language
Cognitive
A language-using creature needs an ability to link non-iconic symbols (such as words) to things through reference and denotation (see ). According to Bickerton (1990), there may have been a precursor to the type of language spoken by humans today, which was available to the less highly developed precursors of Homo sapiens, Homo erectus. Bickerton calls this kind of language proto-language, though with a sense not to be confused with that given to this term in - , where it denotes the hypothetical parent languages of today’s language families, reconstructed on the basis of assumptions about language change. Bickerton’s protolanguage is, rather, a simple system of lexical items and simple rules for stringing these together, but devoid of the complex
Until the early 1990s, linguists tended to approach the question of the origin of language with caution, because they felt that it was not possible to provide any reliable evidence on the matter. The mood changed in 1990 with the publication of an issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences (volume 13), which carried a paper by Pinker and Bloom, together with peer commentaries, suggesting that the evolution of language was no more mysterious than the evolution of any other human trait or characteristic, and that the primary failure of research in the field was one of synthesis of the available evidence (Pinker and Bloom 1990: 727; Aitchison 1996/2000: viii).
