every nonlinguist should read),and the reluctance of other scholars to
explore their territory,however regrettable,is all too easy to understand.
In addition to being poor popularizers,linguists are poor defenders of
territory.In the 1970s and thereafter,they largely abandoned the debate
over “animal language”projects such as those of Premack and Premack
(1972) and Gardner and Gardner (1969).But long before that,and for
long after the Paris ban,they abandoned language origins.Even today
one can number on the fingers of one’s hands the serious linguists who
are genuinely interested in the topic.However,undefended territory
does not remain vacant for long,and members of other disciplines
(anthropologists,psychologists,biologists) hastened to colonize the area
with deplorable consequences.
I call those consequences deplorable not because I am a linguist with
a strong sense of territoriality but because,by ignoring all that we know
about language,nonlinguists are doing the whole field a disservice.As I
pointed out elsewhere (Bickerton 1996),if one is going to write about
something evolving,it is helpful to know exactly what that something is.
Features specific to human language (the most interesting of which are,
as stated above,still unknown to most nonlinguists) form one of the most
important constraints on evolutionary theories.Any valid theory of evo-
lution should be able to explain not merely how language began but also
why language is as it is and not otherwise.In other words,an evolution-
ary theory that fails to explain the universal properties of language is
valueless.
Biomusicologists might derive benefit from two things.First,they can
glean from linguists the folly of surrendering territory.They can convince
musicologists in general of the legitimacy of evolutionary studies,and do
their best to ensure that no one ignorant of music is allowed to pontifi-
cate on the topic.Second,they can determine the extent of similarity
between language evolution and music evolution by determining
whether human music,like human language,possesses nontrivial uni-
versal characteristics (see the Universals in Music section,this volume).
In music as in linguistics (Nettl,this volume),the search for universals
and the search for origins have not always or necessarily gone together.
Indeed,universals do not necessarily derive from evolutionary processes;
they could,in principle,have arisen from historical accident or be due
merely to the way the world is constituted.
Within linguistics two distinct approaches to the question of univer-
sals have long been established.The first is that of Greenberg (1963),
which looks merely at surface similarities between languages and
involves such things as the linear ordering of constituents;the second is
that of Chomsky (1965),which seeks to analyze language at a deeper
level and uncover highly abstract properties that all natural human155 Biomusicology and Language Evolution Studies