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Introduction: The Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

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Extract

We must therefore see the whole varied congeries of living things as a single very ancient Being, of inconceivable vastness, and animated by one Spirit.—SAMUEL BUTLER, God the Known and God the Unknown.

Science has opened all kinds of perspectives. In particular it has shown life as a slow upward-evolving process. It has shown that there is something in evolution which we must call progress, and it has shown that we ourselves are now trustees for any evolutionary progress that remains to be made.—JULIAN HUXLEY, Science and Social Needs, 1936.

What, then, is the difference between the central unifying faculty of reason in man, out of which language arose, and the corresponding central faculty in the animals, which expresses itself in a few natural cries; and how in our present state of knowledge can this difference be distinctly brought into view and described in a concrete way? This is a complex question, and can be best answered for our purpose by breaking it into four parts.

Type
Section II-The New Investigation
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 25 , Special Issue S1: The Birth of Language , 1980 , pp. 51
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1980

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