Language & Species (1990), by Derek Bickerton

Derek Bickerton (b.1926) is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of

Hawaii and believes that creole languages provide a powerful insight into both the
acquisition of language by infants and the origins of language in humans. A creole
is a stable fully-functional language apparently arising from a pidgin, which is a
stripped-down lingua franca arising when people sharing no common tongue have
to live and/or work together. Examples include merchant seamen in distant ports
and, historically, slaves in the West Indies.

Bickerton is the main proponent of the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (LBH).

This theory states that the structural similarity between many creole languages
must arise from an innate capacity in the brain.

The following is a summary of Bickerton’s 1990 work Language and Species:

Chapter 1 The Continuity Paradox

Human and animal behaviour separated by one major distinction that not often
appreciated – language. Animal communications are holistic and limited, e.g.
vervet monkeys have warnings for various types of predators. By contrast, human
communications are complex and unlimited. How did one evolve from the other?
The theory of evolution states that features do not arise de novo but must be built
incrementally upon something already in existence, but how can something infinite
arise from something finite? This is known as the Continuity Paradox.

Bickerton resolves this paradox with the bold assertion that language in humans
did not arise from the vocalizations of other animals and that its primary function is
not in fact communication but representation. Communication is no more than a
handy spinoff.

Nouns do not correspond to real objects, only representations of them. If this were
not the case we could not have words for things like unicorns and golden
mountains, which do not exist in the real world. Our view of the world is always
representational and not absolute – what we see is a representation built up by
sensory data; through a glass, darkly as St. Paul might have put it.

Chapter 2 Language as Representation: the Atlas

Language can be regarded as a means of mapping reality in a style analogous to
both an atlas and an itinerary book. It important to realise that the atlas and the
itinerary book are both representations of reality and that therefore they cannot
represent with absolute verisimilitude. This limitation also applies to language – it
does not directly map the experiential world. Language is a mediated mapping, a
mapping that derives from the processing of sensory inputs.
In this chapter, Bickerton considers the atlas-like properties of language and states
that a word can have three levels of meaning. Our knowledge of the world, in
common with that of other animals, is derived from a series of mapping operations.
The first of these – shared with other animals – is from existential objects to neural
cells and networks in the brain. The first level of meaning is simple perception of,
say, a leopard (non-italicised and not in quotes). We can only perceive a leopard
when one is actually present, but we can think about leopards in their absence.
This second level of meaning is the concept of something, for example “leopard” –
the concept of leopards (in quotes). Some animal such as frogs almost certainly
don’t have concepts. Frogs react quickly to snap up passing insects, but this is
simply a hard-wired reaction to small rapidly moving objects (it ignores stationary
insects and reacts to pellets flicked across their line of vision, but it works more
often than not). Humans on the other hand do have concepts: for example an
unidentified sound at night will be matched against possible explanations. Vervets
probably fall somewhere in between and can equate the smell, sound and sight of
a leopard with the same thing. Finally there is leopard (italicised), which refers to
the word itself – a label - without any clear meaning being necessarily attached to
it.

“Leopard” and leopard are defined in terms of (the perception of a) leopard, but this
isn’t necessarily always the case; (the perception of a) burglar can only be
expressed in terms of the concept of a “burglar” and the word burglar; we can
define “paranoia” and label paranoia, but we cannot perceive paranoia.

Units relating to entities are insufficient to describe the world, because pretty well
everything we see is doing something; for example walking, running, swimming,
flying, etc. The subject/predicate distinction in language is so fundamental that it
tends to be taken for granted, but it corresponds to nothing in nature. You cannot
see an animal without perceiving at the same time what it is doing, e.g. a cow
grazing. There is no word for cow-grazing, but we would expect there to be if
language exactly mirrored reality. One possibility is that this is for reason of
economy, because we’d need words for cow-running, cow-mooing, etc. But
Bickerton believes that the explanation is that the concept of entities preceded the
concept of behaviours. Behaviours are more abstract than entities; a cow cannot
be anything other than a cow, but many types of animal can graze or run.

Behaviours are of course not the only things that can be predicated of entities.
Properties such as size, colour, temperature, etc may also be attributed to entities.
Typically these adjectives are paired, large/small, hot/cold, fast/slow, etc. While we
can have words such as fast, faster and fastest, there is no language that
represents a continuum of, say, speeds or temperatures.

The level of representation given by the lexicon abstracts away from and interprets
the flux of experience. It derives a wide range of entities, together with behaviours
and attributes that can be predicated of these entities. These form an inventory of
everything that we see; however the lexicon is not unstructured.

Words are hierarchical e.g. animal -> mammal -> dog -> Spaniel. The word “anger”
includes a range of words from irritation and annoyance through to rage and fury.
Anger in turn falls in the category of emotion. Words can not only be converted to
strings of other words, but fall into place within a universal filing system that
permits any concept to be retrieved and comprehended.

Words are also constrained by contiguity. For example there is no word for “left leg
and left arm”, or “every other Friday” or “red and green”. The referent must be an
uninterrupted piece of matter or time or space. This even applies to abstract
properties like ownership, location, possession, existence. Some languages, such
as English, use one verb (is) for existence, location, ownership (e.g. there IS a
book, the pub IS across the road, the book IS yours) and another (have) for
possession (I have a book); but no language groups together existence/ownership
and location/possession (the equivalent of the pub HAVE across the road). This
suggests that contiguity constraints exist even in highly abstract domains.
Semantic space may well be an intrinsic property of the brain; the lexicon is carved
up into convenient chunks.

Chapter 3 Language as Representation: the Itineraries

While a map can tell you what the terrain is like, an itinerary is required to tell you
what journeys may be taken. Similarly there are rules governing a journey through
semantic space. Sentences are underlain by three types of structural consistency:
predicability, grammaticisation and syntax.

Predicability imposes constraints between entities and predication – e.g. “the story
is true” or “the cow is brown” are permissible, but not “the story is brown” or “the
cow is true”. Only abstract qualities can be predicated of abstract nouns; and
concrete qualities of concrete nouns. What can and cannot be predicated can be
drawn up (elaborated) on a tree diagram. A quality at the top of the tree can be
predicated of any class below it, but of no class above it. A quality on a side branch
can only be predicated of a class on the branch below it.

For example, trees, pigs and men can all be dead; but only pigs and humans can
be hungry; and only humans can be honest. All of these things plus thunderstorms
can be nearby, but only thunderstorms could have happened yesterday; and so on.

Three observations may be made about the tree. Firstly it has binary branching.
There is no obvious reason for this. Why only two? Why not three or more
branches at each node? Secondly there is a contiguity constraint – for example
anything applying to humans and plants must also apply to animals. Thirdly the
tree does not seem to be derived from experience of the world as children as
young as three or four used only slightly truncated trees. This does suggest that
language as a classification mechanism is constrained by the human-specific
conceptual analysis of the natural world.

Grammatical items are structural pieces that hold the meaningful parts of the
sentence together – either inflections (-ing, -ed, etc), or words like “of” as in “the
handle of the door”, or above, below, on, in, at, by, before, after, while, etc. Some
languages to not express all these relations; others express relations not found in
English. For example Hopi and Turkish both have inflections that differentiate
between information gained through personal experience or obtained second hand.
But grammaticization is only used on a few relations – those pertaining to
singular/plural, and past/present/future (tense).

No language grammaticizes more than a fraction of the possible relations and

while tenses and singular/plural seems to be a universal feature of language there
is no language with grammatical constructs for edible/inedible, friendly/hostile, etc,
even though these things would be useful. It seems that we are obliged to
grammaticize some things, yet other things cannot be grammaticized. While one
might dismiss this as a mere convention of languages, conventions can be broken
and these never are. We can expand lexicon but not grammar. The latter appears
to be a black box; we can neither alter it nor explain it.

Syntax is highly complex, yet we can all master its subtleties. A sentence is
constructed of phrases; each phrase is a hierarchical not linear entity. A sentence
of 10 words can be re-arranged over 3 million ways, only one of which is correct –
yet we can do it effortlessly. Without syntax, complex ideas could not be
communicated.

Chapter 4 The Origins of Representational Systems

Language must have evolved as a representational system, not for
communications. How did this happen? Our senses give us a species-specific view
of reality, only a subset of the data potentially available (e.g. little smell data, unlike
dogs). This is the primary representation system, or PRS. All such systems arose
from cells that could differentiate between two states, a distinction between
sensory cells and motor cells, and motor cells capable of more than one behaviour
type in response to a given stimulus. Humans alone have a secondary
representation system (SRS) – language.

At lowest level there are organisms like sea anemones that can identify chemical
signature of hostile starfish and execute an escape manoeuvre. Next is conditional
response such as a crayfish that becomes habituated to being touches and
eventually does not waste energy on an escape manoeuvre, or a grub that only
moves if light-levels increase above a certain threshold. Ability to evaluate data is
more complex in – say – lizard stalking a fly, where there is actual data processing
by the brain leading to a choice of behaviours.

Vervet monkeys are genetically-programmed to respond to snakes. Similarly, if you

touch something hot you move your hand away without thinking too hard. But such
an approach has its limitations. Wildebeest do not always flee when they see a
lion. If they did, they’d have less time to feed and they’d either exhaust themselves
or starve. So they become alert – indeed they experience fear. But they don’t flee
until threat assessment becomes critical. But fear – an emotion – is crucial to
making a decision to flee.

Representations are either innate (metabolizing food, growing hair, producing

sentences, etc) or learned (writing, sewing, swimming, etc). We are conscious of
learned representations, but cannot access innate representations. But all
representations lead to category formation – to form a category three things are
needed: an object in the external world; patterns of cell activity in observers brain
directly or indirectly triggered by the object’s presence; and the observer’s
response, both internal and external to these patterns. Categories are species-
specific.

For humans, categories are basically concepts, “concept” is simply the name we
give a category. In non-human animals, categories might be referred to as proto-
concept. Which came first – language or concepts? Probably language originally
labelled proto-concepts derived from pre-linguistic experience; this was later
expanded to be capable of deriving concepts not present in PRS, e.g. absence,
golden mountains, etc. While the SRS can divide the universe exhaustively, PRS
must do the same, e.g. for frogs, everything is either a frog, a pond, a large
looming object or something else not relevant to frogs.

Pigeons can develop quite sophisticated categories – can be trained to peck

certain classes of object, e.g. tree pictures. Such behaviour cannot be entirely
innate as they can be trained to respond to objects they could have no knowledge
of. But some categories - trees, humans, etc – probably are innate; probably
categories of things that are significant to a particular species are innate, but the
ability to analyse novel objects as well, by utilizing this processing power
subsequently evolved. However provided the referents of particular proto-concepts
remained relevant, these would be retained and new ones would be added over
evolutionary time.

Categories/proto-concepts such as “tree”, “human” etc may be precursors of

nouns. Some monkeys have temporal cortex cells that respond to movement of a
primate-like figure – could these be proto-verbs? But these are agent-plus-actions
rather than actions – human language does not conflate an entity and its behaviour
into single words; subject-predicate distinction is fundamental as seen earlier.

Tiger running, tiger walking, tiger attacking could be broken down into “tiger” +
action; however tiger running, dog running, insect running cannot so easily be
broken down into X + “running” as the types of “running” differ, as opposed to only
one type of tiger. This is why verbs are more abstract than nouns and are harder to
represent. However if only a subset of a particular behaviour is considered, it can
be restricted to species likely to perform it – for example only primates can “grab
with hand”.

Proto-nouns might have represented species interacting with hominids. Proto-

verbs might have been actions only hominids could perform. This implies
awareness of conspecifics with which the creature interacts – in turn implying a
social species. Awareness of self is a cornerstone of language and consciousness.

Chapter 8 Mind Consciousness and Knowledge

Einstein’s claims notwithstanding, language is required for thinking. Much goes on
beneath the level of conscious thought that the thinker is unaware of. Mind,
consciousness and the search for knowledge may all arise from having a
language-based SRS with a syntax processor.

Even if the human mind does derive from language, this does not tell us about the
precise relationship between language and mind. It was once believed that a full
understanding of language would serve as a “window on the mind”, but this implied
that language permeated the mind at every level. This in turn implied that the mind
was a single problem-solving mechanism, as often been assumed by empiricists.

This view is seemingly at odds with the “modular mind” theory of Jerry Fodor,
Howard Gardner, Annette Karmiloff-Smith etc. Despite the success of modularity
theories, there is a problem. If modularity emerged after language there would not
have been enough time for other modules, each with their own unique mechanism,
to have evolved subsequently. [If Steven Mithen is correct, modularity considerably
predates the emergence of fully-modern Homo sapiens (Mithen, 1996)].

Conversely if modularity emerged first and remained largely uninfluenced by the

development of language it would only work if these were independent of language
[which I believe is the accepted view] and language was not a representational
system but merely a code for expressing the output [why?]. It would also predict
human intellectual capabilities largely pre-existed language, which is clearly not the
case [Mithen’s “cognitive fluidity” seems to be the answer here (Mithen, 1996)].

Bickerton’s resolution of this modularity versus window-on-the-mind problem is to

suppose that that syntax processing is not an isolated module but a particular type
of nervous organization that permeates and interconnects those areas of the brain
devoted to higher reasoning processes, concepts and the lexicon, a type of
organization that automatically sorts material into binary-branching tree structures.
Other modules will then receive and output material that has been pre-processed
to conform to syntactic principles [this suggests a mechanism by which Mithen’s
“cognitive fluidity” might work, though in fact Mithen is critical of Bickerton’s proto-
language and believes utterances of early humans were holistic (Mithen, 2005)].

What is “I”? Am I the whole body or just mind or a homunculus? Human language
divides entity from behaviour, so “I am hungry” suggests “I” is divided from being
hungry. Is the central directing “homunculus” a product of language – nothing more
than an illusion – or is it something more? The latter suggests the human organism
is indeed divided in some way, and not necessarily the way language suggests it
is. In other words, the brain is modular.

Experiments with left/right hemispheres have suggested that right hemisphere has
only PRS, lacks syntax capability but can do inference.

“I” cannot control the entire organism – cannot control bodily functions, which carry
on if I’m asleep or unconscious. There is accessible I – linked to language and
inaccessible I – not linked to language. This is better than mind-body model.
Talking I is a module that forms a part of accessible I, though sometimes other
modules grab the microphone. “I forced myself to do x” means “information in the
SRS indicated that doing X would bring long term benefit, despite short-term
appeal of doing Y”.