Beyond mysticism? Review of Jackendoff, R. (2002) Foundations of Language, Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution

At the Fourth International conference on the Evolution of Language in 2002 at Harvard University (Hurford and Fitch, 2002), Marc Hauser and Michael Studdert-Kennedy joined Noam Chomsky in a roundtable discussion of the evolution of language. Given Chomsky’s famous disdain for evolutionary arguments, this was an event to be witnessed. Alas, it was not enlightening. Chomsky dismissed every suggestion about evolution and language as a ‘fairy story’, prompting one scholar in the field to observe that ‘any discipline that cannot give any account of its long history is itself a fairy story’. This view about the evolutionary origins of language is as important as Jackendoff’s emphasis (p.18) on its complexity: ‘One need not have an account of all of it, but one may not wilfully ignore it and still expect to be allowed in the game’.