Language and human behavior /

In the past few years there have been several fascinating books for the "intelligent layperson" on issues of evolution, consciousness, and language. Representative examples include Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained (1991) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (CH, Nov'95), and Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (CH, Jul'94). Readers of these and most similar books might come away knowing Bickerton as a clever researcher without much impact as an original theoretician (unless they have also read his Language and Species, CH, May'91). The present book should put an end to the belief that Bickerton only supplies data for the theories of other people. Here is a brilliant exposition of the primacy and centrality of language in thought and consciousness. Not a simpleminded linguistic relativity model (Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, 1956), it exploits the richness of syntax and contrasts the situation-bound "protolanguage" of chimpanzees, the language of young children, and pidgin languages to language with syntax. The latter permits "offline" thinking, i.e., thinking about the abstract rather than the immediate. This miracle of thought is attributed to sudden mutation or the "punctuated equilibrium" of Eldridge and Gould (Niles Eldridge, Reinventing Darwin, 1995). This book is excellent by itself, but reading Bickerton's "adversaries" will give additional flavor to the discussion of language, consciousness, and evolution. Upper-division undergraduate through faculty. P. L. Derks; College of William and Mary