The Origins of Meaning: Language in the Light of Evolution (Studies in the Evolution of Language) [Hardcover]

I came to this book as someone with a long interest in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. More recently my attention has been drawn to questions of 'abstract' human intelligence, particularly the semantic faculties that underpin it and that must have co-evolved with language. Though I am no linguist, and the book is written by a linguist, it has nonetheless been one of the most thought-provoking reads on the structure of the human mind I have encountered in quite a while. As the title implies the book is a survey, quite a detailed one in fact, of what we know and can conjecture about the evolutionary precursors of human language and its supporting faculties, as found in animals today. It does not attempt to construct any kind of evolutionary narrative, but is rather concerned as to what possible faculties in early hominids could have been utilised to kick start the process of development towards language. The book is divided into two sections dealing respectively with what linguists evidently term semantics, the meaning of language as used by the individual, and pragmatics, how language is used intentionally to manipulate each others' minds.

The first section is the one I found most absorbing, particularly when it focussed on what psychology has to tell us about what both humans and animals have cognitively in common when deconstructing events and scenes encountered in the world, and extracting their salient features. Another interesting aspect of this section, obvious once pointed out, is that while both humans and primates have highly developed declarative or propositional memories, in which to store normalised facts about the world, humans have a vastly more developed episodic memory. This is the memory faculty that allows us to remember events, their sequences and constituents, thus endowing us with a sense of personal history. Primate precursors of episodic memory are woefully undeveloped in comparison. An intelligent chimp might remember something that happened yesterday, and a gorilla might be able to indicate what it ate 15 minutes ago, but always about food, and only in return for food.

The second section was a tougher read. I have to admit my eyes tend to glaze over when texts become extended inventories of animal studies, as this does in part. But this is all good information, and I made myself read it carefully to try and soak up the implications. Pointing and the following of another's gaze are absolutely vital for language acquisition in humans, and its primate precursors have been studied extensively. The most interesting aspect of this section for me was that dealing with the matter of linguistic co-operation and the deep mystery it implies for the initiation of the virtual spiral by which language grew. Even when we are not materially co-operating there is a level at which we must all co-operate if we are to make language work together. So arguments from natural selection beg the question as to what advantage was to be gained by whom when we very first began to share information with one another, for free. Primate studies tend to show that our near cousins are often adept at Machiavellian deception, and very often indifferent to the wellbeing of their peers, and there is no obvious example of the kind of altruistic co-operation in which information sharing might have been fostered. On the other hand there are species in which failure to share, meat or information about meat, is punished, even to the detriment of the punisher, which offers an interesting possible precursor. Arguments of kin selection, prisoner's dilemmas and so on are proffered, but none are decisive, and the best reconstruction we can hope for is that some fortuitous combination of such mechanisms provided the seed of language, and ultimately of abstract intelligence.

This was not an easy read, which is not to say that it is not very well and engagingly written, but the book is essentially a marshalling and distillation of a quite remarkable amount of material from a wide diversity of disciplines. As such, it requires careful and patient reading. As I read it, I found that my functional map of the human mind changed quite drastically. I had always understood that the processing of our social world accounted for a significant portion of our cognitive economy, but reading this I came to a new appreciation of just how much. Mr Hurford is currently preparing a companion volume on `The Origins of Grammar', due to be published in September 2011. I look forward to it with great interest.