Possible stages in the evolution of the language capacity (original) (raw)
The Evolution of Human Language
Advances in consciousness research, 2004
presents three perspectives on the evolution of language as a key element in the evolution of mankind in terms of the development of human symbol use. (1) He approaches this question by constructing possible scenarios in which mechanisms necessary for symbolic behavior could have developed, on the basis of the state of the art in evolutionary anthropology and genetics. (2) Non-linguistic symbolic behavior such as cave art is investigated as an important clue to the developmental background to the origin of language. Creativity and innovation and a population's ability to integrate individual experiments are considered with regard to historical examples of symbolic creativity in the visual arts and natural sciences. (3) Probable linguistic 'fossils' of such linguistic innovations are examined. The results of this study allow for new proposals for a 'protolanguage' and for a theory of language within a broader philosophical and semiotic framework, and raises interesting questions as to human consciousness, universal grammar, and linguistic methodology.
linguist reared in the then dominant structuralist tradition associated with Leonard Bloomfield, together with Richard Ascher, an anthropological palaeontologist, published an an article in Current Anthropology entitled "The human revolution" (Hockett and Ascher 1964). In this article the authors made a bold attempt to bring together what was then known about hominid palaeontology, new understandings of the environmental changes in Africa, and speculations about the important consequences of bipedalism, to suggest what may have been involved in the evolutionary emergence of humans. However, almost for the first time within the framework of discussions of this sort, they presented the steps and stages involved in the evolution of language. As they pointed out, in previous discussions of human evolution from a palaeontological perspective, language was generally overlooked or dealt with purely in terms of evidence for the presence or absence of articulate speech. In this article, the authors make use of Hockett's notion that human language is a complex of "design features", some of which are found to be in common with other animal communication systems (see Hockett 1960). By setting out these features it was possible to specify more precisely what it was that had to evolve to bring into being a system of communication with all the features of human language. On this approach, language did not evolve as a single package, but in a more piecemeal fashion, each separable feature having its own evolutionary history. Hockett and Ascher supposed that an early step would have been for a primate call system-their proto-hominid model was based on what was then known of gibbon calls, which had been described with some thoroughness by C. R. Carpenter (1940)-to be transformed from a closed system to an open system through 'blending', a process by which calls of different meanings could be joined together to make calls with more complex meanings. It was then further transformed by the discovery of the possibility of what Hockett referred to as "duality of patterning", according to which meaningful units within the system are created through combinations and re-combinations of sound units that have no meaning in themselves but which function to keep meaningful units distinct from one another. Hockett and Ascher's article, in accordance with Current Anthropology practice, was accompanied by commentaries by a number of other scholars. In this way, this discussion of language origins was brought to the attention of a wider audience of scholars in disciplines such as palaeoanthropology, archaeology, anthropology, and even linguistics. The article had the effect, thus, of beginning the process of re-legitimating the topic of language origins. Shortly after this, and from another quarter, came the publication of Eric Lenneberg's Biological Foundations of Language (1967). In this book Lenneberg set out to show, in great detail, the biological features of humans that seemed to be special adaptations for speech and language, arguing that humans are biologically specialised as speaking creatures. This book contained an appendix by Noam Chomsky in which the idea that humans
Language and the evolution of cognition
1995
The main purpose of this article is to discuss the kinds of mental representations that are required for language to evolve. Firstly, I distinguish between cued and detached representations. A cued representation stands for something that is present in the current external situation of the representing organism, while a detached representation may stand for objects or events that are neither present in the current situation nor triggered by some recent situation. The inner environment of an agent is defined as the collection of all detached representations of the agent. The fundamental difference between signal and a symbol is that the reference of a symbol is a detached representation, while a signal refers to a cued representation. Icons also refer to detached representations, but unlike symbols, the choice of representation is not arbitrary, since an icon in some aspects resembles the thing it represents.