I am grateful to Juan Uriagereka (2000) for his thorough and thoughtful review of my book The Origins of Complex Language (henceforth Origins; Carstairs-McCarthy 1999). The book tackles fundamental questions about the relationship among syntax, semantics, and cognition, and Uriagereka is not persuaded by all my suggestions about the prehistory of this relationship. I will not pursue these large issues here; rather, I want to address a more circumscribed issue that is nevertheless crucial to the argument of the book, so that my failure to discuss it is an important omission, as Uriagereka points out. This issue is whether the syllable, as a unit of phonological description, is modality-neutral (so as to be equally at home, with fundamentally the same sense, in descriptions of signed and spoken languages), or whether the syllables of signed and spoken languages are really different phenomena, so that the use of the term SYLLABLE for both draws attention to resemblances that are more accidental than fundamental. I will argue that the evidence supports the latter view more strongly than the former; therefore, when discussing language evolution, it is legitimate to appeal (as I do) to aspects of spoken syllables that are undoubtedly modality-dependent, such as their physiological underpinnings in the vocal apparatus.

Before addressing this issue directly, I would like to summarize briefly why it is important in the context of my book. Second, by way of reassurance, I will explain why the conclusion that I reach does not belittle sign languages, nor imply any old-fashioned skepticism about their entitlement to be recognized as real manifestations of the human language capacity.