Volume 29, Number 11 · June 24, 1982
Where Does Language Come From?
By Carol Fleisher Feldman, Jerome S. Bruner
Roots of Language
by Derek Bickerton
Karoma Publishers (Ann Arbor, Michigan), 351 pp., $24.95
Rarely does the question of the origins of human language provoke serious attention from linguists. It is not that the subject is a trivial one, or that it lacks a history of speculative debate. But discussions of how language originated tend to pass over the very features of human language that make it human. They deal neither with its formal lexico-grammatical structure nor with why languages make particular semantic distinctions in particular syntactic ways. How did it come about, for example, that inflection, word order, and morphology do so much work in so many languages; or that virtually all languages make such neat work of such knotty matters as noting causativeness and transitivity or distinguishing what linguists call 'unmarked,' or ordinary, expressions from marked, extraordinary expressions?
Review, 3269 words
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