REVIEW ARTICLE Biology and language: a consideration of alternatives1

This article reviews an important set of issues concerning biology and grammar, focusing on two recent books on this topic: The language organ, by Stephen Anderson & David Lightfoot (TLO), and Bio-linguistics, by T. Givón (BL). These books represent opposite extremes of the language evolution/acquisition debate and it is therefore instructive to compare and contrast them in a single review article. Beyond the books themselves, of course, looms the debate on the origins of human language, the very ontology of the physical vs. the non-physical, and the conception of our role as linguists in the greater endeavour of human learning. Therefore, my larger purpose here is to consider some of the issues that each side raises that the other side ignores and to suggest an alternative way of proceeding to understand language’s emergence, based on recent work by various researchers that does not fit neatly into either of these two extremes. Let’s be clear about a couple of things before considering the books under review here in detail. First, knowledge about the neurophysiology and the evolution of language has never been demonstrated to be either necessary [1] I would like to thank Ted Briscoe, an anonymous JL reviewer, Andrew Spencer and Paul Postal for comments on this article, though none of them are to be blamed for any errors that have remained or any misinterpretations I may have made of their remarks