S. Johansson, Origins of language (rozdział 9).pdf

Origins of Language

Constraints on hypotheses

Sverker Johansson

University of Jönköping

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Amsterdam

Philadelphia

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of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sverker Johansson

Origins of Language : Constraints on hypotheses / Sverker Johansson.

p. cm. (Converging Evidence in Language and Communication

Research, issn 1566–7774 ; v. 5)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Language and languages--Origin. 2. Human evolution. 3.

Biolinguistics.

P116.O76

2005

401--dc22

2004066031

isbn 90 272 3891 X (Eur.) / 1 58811 629 8 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)

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John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands

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C HAPTER 9

HYPOTHESES OF LANGUAGE ORIGINS

The previous chapters have all dealt with various background material needed in

order to understand the constraints on language evolution hypotheses. In this and

the following chapters, the focus will be on the main issue itself — why and how

and when did the human language capacity evolve among our ancestors? There

are two main issues in explaining the evolution of any feature (Byrne, 2000):

Historical : at what time, and at what point in the family tree, did different

aspects of language appear?

Causative : what were the selective advantages that drove the evolution of lan-

guage, and what evolutionary precursors did it evolve from?

The causative issue is the main focus of Chapter 10 and Chapter 11, with historical

data used mainly to constrain causative hypotheses. Possible selective advantages

are discussed in Chapter 10 and possible evolutionary precursors in Chapter 11.

The main thrust of the current chapter is to clarify the structure of the problem.

It is clear from the previous chapters that there is much that we simply do not

know about the human capacity for language, certainly concerning its history, but

also concerning the details of its implementation in modern humans. It is far from

well established exactly how and where the human brain processes language, and

the links between linguistic theory and neurological observables are tenuous at

best. This means that ﬁrm conclusions will be difﬁcult to achieve.

A reasonable starting point in the analysis of the evolution of language, is the

last common ancestor of us and the chimpanzees. Presumably this ancestor had

roughly the same capabilities and exaptations that modern chimpanzees do, so

what needs to be explained here is how we went from chimpanzee-like 1 to human-

like linguistic abilities, in less than ten millions years. The principal questions to

be answered here are the two that Bickerton (2001) succinctly express as “How

did meaningful units (words or signs) evolve?” and “How did syntax evolve?” (p.

583). All else is ancillary.

1 The linguistic abilities of chimpanzees are not negligible, as shown in Chapter 7, but we are concerned

here only with the capabilities that humans have but chimps lack, notably the universal acquisition of

and habitual use of a rich language with complex syntax.

158 Origins of language

This removes quite a few areas from consideration, notably the entire sensory

system — as shown in Chapter 5, the senses of an ape are perfectly adequate for

language perception already. Likewise, the apparent capacity for at least proto-

symbolic thought (see page 131) and rudimentary self-awareness (see page 154)

among apes show that these two areas also can be dissociated from the origin of

language.

At the opposite extreme, those unique human features that are exquisitely adap-

ted for language, notably our vocal tract, cannot be invoked as explanations for the

evolution of language either — language must have been in use before natural

selection had any reason to adapt the vocal tract for it. So the vocal tract can

be disregarded as well, at least in the early stages of language evolution. The

vocal tract adaptations can, however, be used to constrain the time frame of speech

origins.

9.1 Historical background

The issue of language origins has been discussed by philosophers for as far back as

we can trace the history of philosophy. The contrast between speaking humans and

dumb beasts has played a central role in this discussion, and possible scenarios for

a transition from one state to the other were proposed well before Darwin ﬁrmly

anchored our origins with apes rather than angels. There are many still-current

hypotheses that have precursors in previous centuries.

Aristotle saw language as a major distinction between humans and animals, and

regarded our ability to communicate thoughts as the key difference between our

language and animal cries, but he never put together a coherent proposal for the

origins of language (Everson, 1994a). Epicurus, writing around 300 B.C., may

have been the ﬁrst to do so, with a stimulus-response scenario in which external

events caused people to utter certain sounds, a speciﬁc noise in response to each

type of stimulus. Different people had the same innate pairing of stimuli and

response-noises, setting the stage for joint reference to emerge (Everson, 1994b).

More serious proposals concerning language origins came forth from several

Enlightenment philosophers in the 18th century, when both the essentialism of

classical times, and the Christian doctrine of divine creation, began to lose their

hold. Leibniz (1710) was one early pioneer, with his lingua adamica with ono-

matopoetic roots. Condillac (1746) worked out a more detailed and inﬂuential sce-

nario of language invention (Wells, 1987; Coski, 2003; Taylor, 1997). In Condil-

lac’s scenario, language starts with gestures (cf. Section 9.6 below). The ﬁrst

gestures were actually not intended for communication, just natural reactions to a

situation, but were sufﬁciently self-explanatory (iconic or otherwise) for viewers

to understand. Condillac’s prime example involves somebody reaching out for an

object barely out of reach, and somebody else noticing this and giving it to him.

Hypotheses of language origins 159

Over time, the sender ﬁrst notices the receiver’s reaction, and then starts exploiting

it. The gesture ceases to be an actual attempt to reach out and becomes stylized,

eventually conventionalized. Pretty much the same process can be observed in the

ontogeny of many children, where an attempt to reach up to Daddy to be picked

up eventually becomes conventionalized as a ‘pick-me-up’ gesture with minimally

raised arms.

Syntax, in Condillac’s scenario, emerges from the natural iconicity of the gestu-

ral-mimetic depiction of sequences of events. Reid (1765) further emphasizes the

role of mimesis and pantomime (cf. page 175), drawing a connection between

language and art.

The relationship between language and thought, assumed at the time to be in-

timately connected, is a problem in this scenario, as it appears to require non-

negligible powers of thought before language gets off the ground. Condillac (1746)

is criticized on this point by both Rousseau (1755) and M uller (1866), even though

Condillac (1746) circumvents the problem quite elegantly. In Condillac’s solution

associative learning, together with what amounts to memetic evolution of word-

meaning associations, is sufﬁcient for joint reference to emerge (Wells, 1987).

Rousseau’s own scenario for language origins (1781) posits a ﬁrst stage with

both gestures and cries, gestures driven by need and cries by passions. Rituals and

songs had a key role in the transition from cries to more language-like systems

(Gans, 1999a).

Monboddo (1774) is the ﬁrst to explicitly emphasize the social aspect of lan-

guage origins, though it is implicit in both Condillac (1746) and Rousseau (1781).

In Monboddo’s scenario, there are four original types of communicative self-

explanatory signs:

Facial expressions

Painting

Emotional cries

Imitative iconic sounds

Imitation is central for Monboddo in the further development of language, though

he is not able to explain the transition from iconic noises to arbitrary convention-

alized words. Monboddo actually got some of his inspiration from ﬁrst-hand ob-

servations of orangutans, which he regarded as prelinguistic humans in the natural

state (Limber, 1982).

Herder (1772) is the next key ﬁgure in the history of language origin hypothe-

ses, with his seminal Abhandlung uber den Ursprung der Sprache . In it, Herder is

quite critical of Condillac and other Enlightenment thinkers on this topic, perhaps

unfairly so (Wells, 1987).

Herder starts with a discussion of ‘natural language’, the emotional cries that

humans and animals have in common, but concludes that these are irrelevant for

the origin of ‘real’ human language. Instead, he tries to identify a key difference

between humans and animals, that can explain why we speak but they don’t. The

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