Signs and Offline Brain Systems in Language Evolution

Abstract

Denis Bouchard’s book is a refreshingly new take on the old problem of detailing the processes by which humans became linguistic creatures, a puzzle that researchers of varying disciplines have been attempting to solve since long before the inception of modern biolinguistics. It is perhaps not surprising that the book, divided into four parts, starts with several chapters that call to our attention the apparent failure to provide a definite answer to this question. Bouchard argues that, for a start, language cannot be explained scientifically if linguistics receives a treatment or a status that is different from the other sciences, a mistake that he finds evidenced by the scarcity of principled explanations in the literature. A principled explanation is one that considers the object of study as dependent on logically prior elements from which it arises. Since language can be considered as a system that links percepts and concepts, or representations of sound and meaning, the principled elements of language should be those studied by the sciences of meaning and perception. Explaining the evolution of language, in sum, is determining how the systems that produced concepts and percepts changed in the brains of our ancestors so that their products could be linked and become signs. The existence of signs is, therefore, “the only special property of language” (p. 97). Parts II and III of the book, introducing Bouchard’s own Sign Theory of Language (STL), invite us to consider the evolutionary implications of assuming that language is just a system of signs. But first, what is a sign? According to Saussure (1916), a sign can be defined as a relation between a representation of a sound pattern (a signifier, e.g. /dɔg/), and a representation of a chunk of cognition (a signified, e.g. the concept of dog). Two special properties of signs are crucial to understanding their nature: abstraction and arbitrariness. Signs are