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The following might be of help....
January 6, 2009 by Anonymous, 43 weeks 5 days ago
Comment id: 33631
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I think it all hinges on "for." Language is not "for" communication in two senses. First, the evolutionary sense. Not much can be concluded firmly in this sense, despite much spilt ink, but generally in evolution, current utility doesn't reflect historical origin. Take feathers: probably evolved for insulation; later co-opted for flight. The same is probably true of language. But we'll never know. What we do know is that language didn't evolve in all its ramified glory so Tolstoy could write _War and Peace_.
Second, even in the current-utility (or functional) sense, language is "for" many things besides communication. Chomsky seems to limit communication to the imparting or absorbing of factual information, as in, "Hey, there's a tiger over there. Perhaps we should leave the area as quietly and quickly as possible, no?" or "Two plus two is four." or "My name is Doug." To the Chomster, such use of language is real but doesn't encompass all uses of language. It doesn't cover when we think to ourselves, for instance. It doesn't cover purposely ambiguous poetry. Furthermore, we communicate emotional states with facial gestures, body language, music, non-verbal actions.
Interesting post! Some good articles (I'm a complete amateur here, so...):
Lewontin, R. C. (1998) The evolution of cognition: Questions we will never answer. In D. Scarborough and S. Sternberg, editors, An invitation to cognitive science, Volume 4: Methods, models, and conceptual issues. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~junwang4/langev/localcopy/pdf/lewontin98theEv...)
Pinker, Steven, and Paul Bloom, “Natural Language and Natural Selection,†Behavioral and Brains Sciences 13 (1990): 707-84. (http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/04/99/bbs00000499-00/bbs.pink...)
Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch (2002). “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?†Science 298:1569-1579. (http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~mnkylab/publications/languagespeech/HauserCh...)
And I just found Lewontin on a podcast on this very topic: http://brainsciencpodcast.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/brain-science-podcast...