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Seeing Language Working

Mike Beakenl appears to understand that the first manifestation of language had to be intentionally produced visible movement (henceforth, gesture). The center of his argument, however, is that the operative cause was the cooperation of creatures on the way to becoming fully human. In "To the Reader" he eloquently states his book's purpose, "... to restore human beings to a central place in language studies" (vii). With this most laudable aim, Beaken has written an excellent introduction to the study of language as a natural social system. Although few would deny that language is used for human activity, many linguists suppose-while protesting disbelief in magic-that language is a system so complex and abstract that babies must be born with a (biologically impossible) language organ to understand and acquire it. Beaken effectively refutes such nonsense, and with dialectical materialism, as elucidated by Marx and Engels, he shows how language has helped hominids become human, survive, multiply, and radically change life on the planet. In short, he finds the origin of language in cooperative labor ("Chapter 2: Language and Labour"). An anthropological linguist will find little to disagree with in this argument, for Beaken defines