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Hurford, J. (2001) Protothought had no logical names. In Jürgen Trabant and Sean Ward, editors, New Essays on the Origins of Language, pages 117--130. Mouton, Berlin.
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Protothought had no logical names
James R Hurford,

1 Introduction The evolutionary history of any complex system, such as human cognition, or the human lan­ guage capacity, necessarily starts with something simpler 1 . It is accepted as a working hypothesis that a precursor of modern human capacity for complex syntactic language was a capacity for protolanguage (Bickerton, 1990), a kind of communication system with no syntax. In protolan­ guage, although words may have been uttered in short sequences, there were no rules defining wellformedness of strings, and therefore words in protolanguage could not be said to belong to separate syntactic classes, such as Noun or Verb. A view commonly encountered about the emergence of true syntactic language is that, during the protolanguage period, there existed a somewhat complex system of mental representation, capable of representing the structure of events with their participant agents and patients. In this view, the move to syntactic language was in large part an externalization of this pre­existing system of representation. ``The mechanism [of syntax] was there all the time, but it was not being used for language.'' (Bickerton, 1998:350) Let us call such a system of mental representation `protothought'. It is often assumed that the structure of this protothought was something like Predicate Calculus (but possibly without quantifiers). 2 Predicate Logic, Semantics and Psychology Assuming something like a modern Predicate Calculus form of mental representation for our pre­ linguistic ancestors actually attributes to them at least a five­way distinction between types of atomic mental entities, as the following simple formulae illustrate. CAME(john) [translation: `John came'] 9x[TALL(x) & MAN(x) & CAME(x)] [translation: `A tall man came'] In such representations, one has to distinguish the following types of atomic element, each of which functions in the representations in a distinctive way and relates to external meanings ...
BibTex
@incollection{hurford01protothoughtHad,
  author={J. Hurford},
  title={Protothought had no logical names},
  year={2001},
  pages={117-130},
  address={Mouton, Berlin},
  editor={Jürgen Trabant and Sean Ward},
  publisher={},
  booktitle={New Essays on the Origins of Language},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/hurford01protothoughtHad.html}
}

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