CHAPTER 14 The evolution of human communication and language

territorial songs, and by vervet monkey alarm calls. We are not yet sure exactly what is conveyed by whale songs, but a reasonable default hypothesis would seem to be that they convey messages of the same expressive power as complex birdsongs. We may be wrong about this, but the current belief is thus that any human language is capable of communicating the sum total of all that any animal species can communicate, and more. More, because we alone, as far as we know, can tell each other about ctional or abstract objects, and about events far distant in time and space. In the bulk of this chapter, I will list and discuss some of the most important differences and similarities between human languages and nonhuman communication systems, with an evolutionary perspective, in particular drawing on results from comparative psychology pertaining to our closest relatives, the non-human primates (see related discussion on language in Chapter 13). We must rst make the vital distinction between Language, the biologically given universal human capacity, and languages, such as English, Swahili, Cantonese, Dyirbal and Navajo, which are culturally developed systems enabled by the biological capacity. Noone speaks Language; Language (with a capital L) is not a language. This contrasts with animal communication systems. True, different chaf nch, and other songbird, dialects exist, but their range is far less than that among human languages. Human language stands out in a number of ways from the topics of almost all of the other chapters in this book. Although every communication system can claim in some way to be unique, human language is spectacularly unique in its complexity and expressive power. Complexity is hard to measure, but a clue is given by the fact that The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002), which is just a description of Modern Standard English, weighs in at over 1700 pages. The headings of the rst half-dozen descriptive chapters, out of eighteen, are: The verb, The clause: complements , Nouns and noun phrases, Adjectives and adverbs, Prepositions and preposition phrases, and The clause: adjuncts. No non-human communication system demands anything like this degree of detail to describe it. And English is just one of over 6,000 human languages, all of comparable complexity. As for expressive power, this is also hard to measure. We can't see far into the minds of nonhuman animals to know what exactly they can …