The Roles of Expression and Representation in Language Evolution

\We should search for the ancestry of language not in prior systems of animal communication but in prior representational systems." (Bickerton, 1990:23) \. .. it is not plausible that our internal representation of statements, which we use in order to reason and draw inferences in other modes, will map in a simple element-by-element fashion into the words with which we express those statements in speech.. .. Nobody really has the least idea what is physically going on in the head when we reason, but I agree that whatever goes on is likely to relate in a fairly abstract way to the words of spoken utterances, which are adapted to the necessary linearity of speech and to the fact that speaker and hearer are working with separate models of reality." Sampson, 1997:100)