[Linganth] Re: [ANTHRO-L] Is "motherese" universal?

[Ronald Kephart]

At 3:35 PM -0500 12/31/04, samuels at anthro.umass.edu wrote:

>...questions of whether  bipdalism, and the morphological results of
>selection for  bipedalism, were necessary precursors to the
>evolution of language is a much  more important question in
>paleoanthropology than it is in linguistic  anthropology. What can
>we contribute to that dialogue?

I can't type a response that does this question justice right now,
but I will say that I think we have extremely important contributions
to make. Any discussion of what the precursors of Language are has to
be informed by knowledge of what Language is-- what is required for
something to be a human language. That's where we come in, seems to
me.

Ron