A DARWINIAN APPROACH TO MEANING

A review of The Origins of Meaning: Language in the light of evolution by James R Hurford. Oxford University Press (2007). 388 + xiv pages. Price: £21.00, ISBN: 978-0-19-920785-5 (hardback).

MARTIN EDWARDES

City of London Academy (Southwark)

James Hurford is a key researcher in the study of language origins. He has been involved in the project for decades, has been instrumental in the organisation of several conference series on the subject (including the influential biennial series, Evolang), and has been a key member of the highly productive language evolution team at Edinburgh University. Any book on language origins by Hurford is certainly worth reading; and this volume lives up to expectations.

Hurford’s approach in this volume is determinedly Darwinian: everything is examined in terms of individual fitness paradigms, and there is a clear intention to avoid post hoc explanations of language evolution based on the current efficacies and efficiencies of language. The approach is also eclectic, considering the evidence from a range of sources – human and animal cognition, anthropology, evolutionary theory, predicate logic and, of course, linguistics. In terms of linguistics, Hurford’s approach is probably best described as cognitive; but he is not dogmatic in his analyses, and borrows from functional and transformational-generative theory as needed. His intention is not to argue from linguistics to the evolution of language, but to use the linguistics to explain the evolution.

So what does Hurford say in this volume? First, it must be emphasised that this is the first half of a two-volume project which is intended to look at all aspects of language evolution. This volume concentrates on meaning – the pragmatic and semantic content of language. The next volume will look at the morpho-syntactic and phonological aspects of language. Having said that, the structures of meaning that Hurford proposes in this book do provide broad clues to the morpho-syntactic forms that are likely to be considered in volume II.

In chapter 1, Hurford sets out his terminology, vital in a book which crosses so many disciplinary boundaries and therefore has to deal with multiple definitions of the same word. He is particularly concerned with the issue of what counts as a concept in human and other cognition, and contrasts his position to that of Donald Davidson (1982). For Hurford, concepts are instantiated in brains, but not necessarily all brains. He differentiates between proto-concepts or categories, which are widespread among mammals, and full concepts, which are likely to be communicative.

Chapter 2 argues for a gradual evolutionary development of cognition, and gives several aspects of nonhuman cognition that are precursors of human language-related cognition. These include abstraction, metacognition, displaced reference, recognition of animacy, transitive inference, semantic memory and co-representation of both sensory and motor information within concepts. All of these have, at different times, been cited as features differentiating humans from other animals; Hurford shows that they all have precursors in nonhumans.

Episodic memory, another supposedly exclusively-human attribute is examined in chapter 3. This is especially of interest because it seems to appear in humans at the same time as language. Once again, though, Hurford identifies precursors of episodic memory in other animals, such as food caching and retrieval behaviours. He proposes that some nonhumans do have useful concepts of past and future; what they do not have is the capacity for what Immanuel Kant (1783) labelled “synthetical judgments”. Humans are able to generate predicated concepts and utterances for which the truth or falsity is not within the utterance itself but within its context. We tend to hold that the vast majority of human language exchange is about facts, or semantic content; but in fact the largest part is concerned with non-current events and non-present objects – it is episodic. Hurford, however, extends the argument to look at language as a communal phenomenon, and shows that synthetic utterances that have common semantic values in a community (such as “snow is cold”) will be treated as communally analytic. The human capacity to make synthetic judgements is implicated in our capacity to negotiate internally synthetic judgements into externally agreed analytic judgements. This is the true value of episodic memory to humans.

Chapter 4 looks at the capacity of animals to use propositional logic. Hurford identifies the predicate argument structure used by some nonhumans as proto-propositional, in that the propositions are implicit rather than explicitly and consciously manipulable by the animal. The propositions that animals can form are context-dependent and therefore not capable of cognitive generalisation; but, within their contextual constraints, they act semantically very similarly to human language. Proto-propositions do seem to offer a base on which human language can be built.

The heart of the book is chapter 5. Here, Hurford sets out his main theory. He describes the chapter as tidying the house of linguistics, making it fit to receive visitors from other disciplines. It is much more than this, it brings in the builders, the decorators and the Feng Shui experts, and makes at least the language origins room of the house of linguistics a more pleasant place to live and work in.

Hurford provides a workable model of propositional cognition in its transition from nonhuman to human, and an effective notation with which to express it. The model provides both a systematic structure which permits the transitional forms of cognition he is proposing, and a process by which the structure can be generated. Although the model is simple in description, it is complex enough to permit analysis of one-, two- and three-argument forms. It also incorporates aspects such as the concatenation processes of Halliday’s (2004) logical metafunction. The notation is intended as a simplified way into linguistic semantics for non-linguists, but it is more powerful than that and has something useful to say to linguists, too.

Chapters 6 and 7 look at communication in the light of the model described in chapter 5. Chapter 6 considers evidence for dyadic communication in nature, and finds it common. Hurford also shows that chimpanzees seem capable of emulation (the ability to use similar methods to achieve the same ends), but have trouble with imitation (copying another’s actions as an act of solidarity). Chapter 7 shows that nonhuman triadic communication – signalling between two individuals about a third thing – is, at best, unproven. There does seem to be some capacity for demand-pointing in apes that have been exposed to humans as helpers, but even here there is little or no pointing between conspecifics. In the wild, chimps signal to express emotional states; they have little control over the state itself or the signal it produces. External deixis is unnecessary because the emotional state is internal. This contrasts with human babies who point not just to demand but also to share attention. Deixis seems to be at the heart of triadic communication, and the impoverished deixis of apes stands in the way of their achieving true triadic communication.

The evolutionary theory behind language is examined in chapter 8, and Hurford starts with the two traditional paradoxes of language origins: if it is so advantageous, why did only one species adopt it; and why are we willing to share information with each other? Hurford proposes a niche-constructing change which facilitated new levels of social co-operation. He takes the view that the basic driver has to be kin selection, but that proximity of closely-related groups created a second level of indirect kin selection – everyone nearby is worth co-operating with because they are very likely to be a close relative. We can see this principle at work in the supercolony of argentine ants (Linepithema humile) which stretches over 3,000 miles around the coast of Spain: because of a very small founder population, most of the ants are related and individuals do not differentiate between nests or nestmates (Giraud et al, 2002). Although this is not an example that Hurford cites, it does give evidence for the validity of his proposal.

Chapter 9 is about co-operation, trust and fairness among primates, and therefore also has a strong evolutionary thread. Hurford admits that this is the difficult problem of human origins: why are we so altruistically co-operative – so willing to be nice to each other? Building on his two-level kin selection proposal in chapter 8, he uses our capacity for deixis to suggest a communicative environment in which prehumans are exchanging abstract predicates. He then adds in a new level of understanding of the minds of others – the key evolutionary change that made prehumans into humans. Hurford thus gives us a credible, cumulative map of how language came to be. He wisely puts only very rough dates on the events, but his model matches, in general terms, the archaeological evidence so far discovered.

Hurford’s final chapter, Epilogue and Prologue, gives a summary of this volume and a foretaste of the next. He indulges in a little speculation about the process of grammaticalization, which makes language variable and raises its own evolutionary problem: once language was up and running as a universal communicative device, why did variation appear and nullify the advantages of the universality? This needs its own explanation which Hurford does not provide, but he hints that this may be answered in volume II.

This volume is an important addition to the probably burgeoning bookshelf of any language origins researcher. Hurford offers an analysis of the problems that meaning creates for language origins, and a workmanlike solution to those problems. He writes in a clear and open way, and there are few difficult paragraphs in the book. If you take the view that meaning is not at the heart of language origins then read this book to be persuaded otherwise. If you see meaning as one of, or the, issue in language origins then this book is an important contribution to the field. Whatever your interest in language origins, you will find this book useful and informative.

REFERENCES

DAVIDSON, D. (1982): Rational Animals. Dialectica 36, 318-327.

GIRAUD, T., PEDERSEN, J. S. & KELLER, L. (2002):Evolution of supercolonies: The Argentine ants of southern Europe. PNAS, vol. 99, no. 9, 6075-6079.

HALLIDAY, M. A. K. & MATTHIESSEN, C. M. I. M. (2004): An Introduction to Functional Grammar (third edition). London: Arnold.

KANT, I. (1783): Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Tr. Paul Carus (1902). Available at www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20306/kant_materials/prolegomena1.htm (ref. 28 February 2009). 

 Address for correspondence: MARTIN EDWARDES, City of London Academy (Southwark), 240 Lynton Road, London SE1 5LA. E-mail: martin.edwardes@btopenworld.com.