Bickerton, Derek, (1991) `Language origins and evolutionary plausibility', Language and Communication, 11,1/2:37-39.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles

....communication is likely to have been advantageous, when we get down to the level of individuals reaping that advantage on particular occasions, all stories that we can tell seem oddly inept. Perhaps this is just a measure of the temporal and cultural gap between us and the relevant ancestors. Bickerton (1990, 1991) is among those who emphasize the role of (internal) representation over that of communication in any adaptive account of human language. In any account of the functional motivation of language, the question of whether it was the communicative or the representational aspects that contributed most ....

....that of communication in any adaptive account of human language. In any account of the functional motivation of language, the question of whether it was the communicative or the representational aspects that contributed most to the adaptedness of language surely bulks too large to be ignored. (Bickerton, 1991:37) Superior mental representational power has been listed as a necessary precondition to language. If communication is envisaged in Saussurean terms of a meaning in one head (speaker) being recreated in another head (hearer) the two heads involved clearly must have the power to represent these ....

Bickerton, Derek, (1991) `Language origins and evolutionary plausibility', Language and Communication, 11,1/2:37-39.

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