Sounds like this is a definite book to read: The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization.
Michael Corballis, as noted in this review, thinks its recursive thinking, done without any special fluency in language, let alone a language "module," that makes us human.
I've not read that one, but, at my nearest semi-major library, I did find another book by Corballis, "The Truth About Language" (Goodreads review).
And extractions from that:
The Truth about Language: What It Is and Where It Came From by Michael C. Corballis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Excellent book from the preface on.
Many people know the name of Noam Chomsky, but they may not know that, while he dethroned B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist approach to linguistics, his own theory, which broadly falls into humanist linguistics, has itself become largely passé.
Two major newer schools, with a fair amount of overlap but with distinct emphases, are in the lead today: functionalist and Darwinist schools of linguistics. Michael Corballis comes from the later, though he’s conversant with the former. In the same broad train of thought as a Michael Tomasello, he talks in this book about the likely route for development of human language.
Corballis says straight up that he knew he would butt heads with Chomsky, Gould and others. He rejects Chomsky’s massive modularity of the brain (as does most modern neuroscience) and rejects Gould for saltationist ideas about the origin of language.
Corballis says that he sees normal, incremental neo-Darwinian evolution at work.
Early in part 1, chapter 1, he calls out Chomsky for ignoring most of the vast variation between languages in his attempt to posit a universal grammar. He even QUOTES Chomsky to that effect.
“I have not hesitated to propose a general principle of linguistic structure on the basis of observation of a single language.”
This is basically like the old “spontaneous emergence” idea of maggots in rotten meat, Galen’s claiming the human liver has seven lobes because monkey livers do, or similar.
Now, after refuting Chomsky, what ideas does Corballis offer up?
First is that language probably in part evolved from gestural issues. He notes that human babies point to things just to note them as an object of attention, vs chimps who point because they want.
Next, he notes humans’ ability to mentally time travel. Tis true, he notes, that corvids may not immediately revisit seed caches if they think another of their species has been spying on them, but that’s about it as far as looking to the future among animals. Elephants and primates seem to retain some memory of deceased loved ones, but of itself, that doesn’t reflect mental time travel backward, really. Only humans seem to have that in great degree. This, in turn is part of larger “displacement” in language, moving ourselves spatially as well as temporally. Related to that is that, in English at least, many prepositions can have both spatial and temporal functions.
Beyond that, he postulates that humans (and possibly earlier members of the genus Homo) having third-order theory of mind, vs primates (and presumably, cetaceans) having only second-order TOM, and a restricted and species-specific one at that, is probably a big factor in language development. Language recursiveness and nesting would seem to underscore this.
In all of this, though, Corballis notes that primates have some gesture usage, and that even dogs can recognize specific human words.
Next, it’s off to grammar. After a basic look at parts of speech, Corballis notes how and why, in English and other language, some things like “helping verbs” evolved … and then, in some successor languages, devolved again. As part of this, and the idea that languages in general started as noun-verb only items similar to modern pidgins, Corballis notes the role of cultural evolution.
Corballis ends with his “Crossing the Rubicon” of how he things language began. (I’ll end there to avoid spoiler alerts.)
UPDATE, July 5, 2024:
Beyond that? Carl Zimmer reports that new research indicates language evolved primarily for communication, and NOT for thinking. Fun sidebar? This is another overturning of Chomsky's claims about language. (I can't say "research," since Chomsky did basically none.) Also, this would tie in with people like Corballis stressing cultural evolution's role in the development of language.
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