AUTHOR=Reboul Anne C.

TITLE=Why language really is not a communication system: a cognitive view of language evolution

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=6

YEAR=2015

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01434

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01434

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>While most evolutionary scenarios for language see it as a communication system with consequences on the language-ready brain, there are major difficulties for such a view. First, language has a core combination of features—semanticity, discrete infinity, and decoupling—that makes it unique among communication systems and that raise deep problems for the view that it evolved for communication. Second, extant models of communication systems—the code model of communication (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B38">Millikan, 2005</xref>) and the ostensive model of communication (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B48">Scott-Phillips, 2015</xref>) cannot account for language evolution. I propose an alternative view, according to which language first evolved as a cognitive tool, following <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B20">Fodor’s (1975</xref>, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B21">2008</xref>) Language of Thought Hypothesis, and was then exapted (externalized) for communication. On this view, a language-ready brain is a brain profoundly reorganized in terms of connectivity, allowing the human conceptual system to emerge, triggering the emergence of syntax. Language as used in communication inherited its core combination of features from the Language of Thought.</p>