ON THERE AND THEN: FROM OBJECT PERMANENCE TO DISPLACED REFERENCE

In the current debate about the emergence of language, researchers have looked for various sources of indirect evidence, either by comparing animals and humans, by analyzing the linguistic structure of certain present-day human lan-guages or by constructing computer models. These approaches have been suc-cessful, at least to the extent that many hypotheses about language emergence have been put forward on basis of them. However, it has been recognized lately that it would be useful to combine the results from the different approaches, be-cause that leads to a more complete picture of language emergence (Kirby, 2007). I will focus on one phenomenon, ‘displacement, ’ (or ‘displaced reference’) through two approaches to language evolution: one cognitive, the other linguistic. Displacement has been described already by Hockett (1960) as interesting from the point of view of language evolution, as it is a feature that is supposedly unique to human language. Humans seem to be the only ones that are able to talk about things that are not here and not now. In Hurford (2007) it is shown that animals do show signs of the beginnings of displaced reference, though not in their language