The content of Language

One of the major advantages of human language over other forms of animal communication is displacement, the ability to communicate a message when either the sender or the receiver is not directly in contact with the conditions or events involved in the message - in other words, being able to talk about a time or place other than here and now. We can talk about what we ate for dinner last night, about what is going on in another room or another part of town, or about what will happen in the future. This contrasts with most nonhuman communication, which can deal only with evens in the present. A chimp’s cry of fear can refer only to immediate present, not to something that happened yesterday or that might happen tomorrow.

We know that chimps can think about other times and places because they sometimes make tools for getting termites before they actually arrive at the termite nest. This means they can anticipate the need for the tool and take action without the stimulus of seeing the termite nest. But as far as we know, they cannot communicate this message to other chimps. If they ever became able to teach other chimps displacement, using language abilities learned from humans, this would be a major step toward humanlike communication.

Our ability to use displacement is a major reason why we have been able to build up cultural tradition. Because we can talk about the past, we do not have to learn or invent everything ourselves; instead we can rely on learning and inventions of our ancestor. As we look at human evolution, both biological and cultural, we must recognize the important of language in this regard. By using displacement to build on the past, humans were better able to compete with other animals. Thus the evolution of the brain, which allowed for the increase in memory that went along with the expanded use of language, must have provided a new basis for interaction among human groups.

Somewhere between our earliest prehuman ancestors and modern homosapeins, speech and language content became so important for human survival that they led to changes in the vocal apparatus and in the brain. These changes testify to the growing interaction between biological and cultural evolution as the two processes continued to affect each other and together led to modern human culture.
The content of Language