Steps towards a history of the emergence and accretion of human language (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cumulative Cultural Evolution and the Origins of Language
Biological Theory, 2016
In this article, I present a substantive proposal about the timing and nature of the final stage of the evolution of full human language, the transition from so-called ''protolanguage'' to language, and on the origins of a simple protolanguage with structure and displaced reference; a proposal that depends on the idea that the initial expansion of communicative powers in our lineage involved a much expanded role for gesture and mime. But though it defends a substantive proposal, the article also (perhaps more importantly) defends and illustrates a methodological proposal too. I argue that language is a special case of a more general phenomenon-cumulative cultural evolution-and while we rarely have direct information about communication, we have more direct information about the cumulative cultural evolution of technical skill, ecological strategies, and social complexity. These same factors also enable us to make a reasonable estimate of the intergenerational social learning capacities of these communities (on which rich communication depends) and of the communicative demands these communities face. For example, we can, at least tentatively, identify forms of cooperation that are stable only if third party information is transmitted widely, cheaply, and accurately. So we can use these more direct markers of information accumulation to locate, in broad terms, the period in our evolutionary history during which we became lingual. Keywords Communication and cooperation Á Cumulative cultural evolution Á Evolution of language Á Gestural origins of language Á Protolanguage to language transition
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2000
The contributors largely agree that there was continuity between pre-language and the emergence of language. Where to find channels of continuity becomes the problem. They eschew looking to some one thing but, rather, see language resulting from a convergence of physical and cognitive developments in the context of expanding social life. They note that monkeys and apes are cognitively capable of learning social relationships and attributing them to one another and learning instrumental relationships that link goals with actions that use instruments. This leads to "a key hypothesis: the internal representation of language meaning in the brain derives from the primate representation of social situations" (Worden, p. 153). An obvious question concerns the emergence of phonologically discrete speech sounds by which, in their various combinations, humans create vocabularies. It is difficult to see this capacity as being selected for to this end in the first place. Nor can one see articulated human speech as simply an elaboration of primate calls. Rather, it must have resulted from changes in the vocal tract that were adaptations to erect posture and which incidentally resulted in articulatory capabilities. Once there, these capabilities began to be exploited to make a variety of different sound sequences that could be used to communicate wants and feeling states in social interaction. Naming things as an adjunct to gesturing would naturally accompany
Evolution, lineages and human language
Language, 2018
In life as in language, living beings act in ways that are multiply constrained as history works through them both directly and as mediated by what we identify as structures (e.g. genes or words). Emphasising direct effects, we replace the 'language metaphor of life' with the view that language extends the domain of the living. Just as a living proteome system manages without central control, so does language. Both life and language enable living beings to expand into –and create – new domains or Umwelten. Pursuing the parallel , we link emphasis on fitness with Berthoz's notion of simplexity and the distributed view of life/language/cognition. The semiosphere evolved, we suggest, as systems found novel ways of tapping into the bio-ecology's energetics. Accordingly, there are striking parallels between how regulatory genes influence body structures and how, in humans, community histories re-echo during conversation. In both cases, cross-talk prompts living systems to re-enact a lineage/community's music (or 'worldviews'). While rejecting Berthoz's residual neuro-centrism, we find 'simplexity' to be a powerful heuristic. Instead of proposing a single explanatory principle (e.g. computation, autonomy), lineages and communities build on meaning by altering ways of coordinating/cooperating. In all cases, life and language cooperate to bring forth new possibilities.
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
Like any other animal species, humans have developed, over thousands of years, varied waysof communication, such as mural paintings and stone carvings. However, there is overall agreementthat language is the sole property of the human race as no similar communication system of suchcomplexity has been observed in the animal kingdom. Another feature that also fascinatedresearchers is how language has evolved with time. The earliest vocal human language can beroughly traced back as far as 20.000 years ago, although anthropologists agree that pin!pointing theexact date is not "uite relevant to our understanding of language and the significant changes whichoccurred in the course of recorded history. And whether they be spontaneously implementedchanges or, in a modern time frame, academic reforms, the impact of these modification onmainstream culture is of greater proportions than one might think.
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.