The Origin of Speech

Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language

by Peter MacNeilage

This book explores the origin and evolution of speech. The human speech system is in a league of its own in the animal kingdom and its possession dwarfs most other evolutionary achievements. During every second of speech we unconsciously use about 225 distinct muscle actions. To investigate the evolutionary origins of this prodigious ability, Peter MacNeilage draws on work in linguistics, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and animal behavior. He puts forward a neo-Darwinian account of speech as a process of descent in which ancestral vocal capabilities became modified in response to natural selection pressures for more efficient communication. His proposals include the crucial observation that present-day infants learning to produce speech reveal constraints that were acting on our ancestors as they invented new words long ago.

Genres: Linguistics, Language

408 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Hrodbeorht Ishbilia · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting theory on the origin of our capacity to produce speech, hampered somewhat by a vitriolic and bitter perspective on generative phonology (not entirely unwarranted I should add). The author’s disdain for the field (and linguistics generally) is an undercurrent throughout, making it a rather difficult read. That said, the ‘frame-content’ theory of speech production (our mandibular movement is the frame, CV syllables the content, as I understand it) was plausibly defended with a wide amount of evidence, including biological-evolutionary (Parts II and III), cognitive-neurological (Part IV), and even philosophical (Part I) perspectives. I can only really comment on a few basic errors with technical aspects of phonology (such as the IPA illustration in Part II) and a few theoretical oversights; for instance, the author does not mention alternative syllable types which are widely found (C, N, etc), such as syllabic bilabial nasals, which are in many ways more basic than CV syllables (this should be worth at least considering!). There was a rather baffling example about how crosses are like syllables in Part VII, which I found rather odd. However, overall, I think the piece raises compelling points that are worth considering even today, though the book is now almost twenty years old!