The very title of Dan Everett’s book is a challenge to more than what, since the 1960s, has become linguistic orthodoxy. In 1866 the French Academy of Sciences forbade further discussion of the subject rightly arguing that there was insufficient evidence to make discussion anything more than wild speculation. How Language Began surveys the many subjects that now have a contribution to make to this ever-fascinating topic. Particularly interesting is the research in the field of Evolutionary Biology, which leads Everett to postulate that speech did not spring whole from the brain of homo sapiens but may well have been developed by our cousins on the evolutionary tree homo erectus.
Where Chomsky’s exploration of language is psycholinguistic, examining and attempting to describe the emergence of language in the individual human brain, Everett’s is a more generous sociolinguistic approach. He attributes the structure of language to the demands of culture and the need of the members of all societies to communicate. It is, he argues, an evolutionary process not one that is biologically programmed into all human brains (Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device). Everett is drawing, of course, on a knowledge of more than European languages. The Pirahas of the Amazon jungle, whose language Everett described, do not have tense markers because life is so precarious that they live in the present.
Most cogent (and difficult) is a large section on new knowledge about the human brain produced by the use of recent technology such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging. This indicates that, when people speak, many areas of the brain are shown to be active. Language, he argues, is intimately connected to other cognitive functions, including gesture. There is in the brain no one place, as was supposed in the last century, for language. Chomsky’s hypothesis is simply wrong.
It is disappointing that Everett not only does not refer to alternative sociolinguistic descriptions of language like that associated with MAK Halliday and the Australian school of linguistics, but does not seem to know about the fascinating work of Guy Deutscher, who has put forth exciting hypotheses about the emergence of grammatical features based on his study of ancient Akkadian documents. (See earlier blog.)
I see Everett has already (2016) published another book, which sounds pretty challenging – Dark Matter of the Mind: the Culturally Articulated Unconscious. I look forward to moving on to that.