Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language (original) (raw)

On the Origin of Language

Biosemiotics, 2010

Thomas Sebeok and Noam Chomsky are the acknowledged founding fathers of two research fields which are known respectively as Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics and which have been developed in parallel during the past 50 years. Both fields claim that language has biological roots and must be studied as a natural phenomenon, thus bringing to an end the old divide between nature and culture. In addition to this common goal, there are many other important similarities between them. Their definitions of language, for example, have much in common, despite the use of different terminologies. They both regard language as a faculty, or a modelling system, that appeared rapidly in the history of life and probably evolved as an exaptation from previous animal systems. Both accept that the fundamental characteristic of language is recursion, the ability to generate an unlimited number of structures from a finite set of elements (the property of 'discrete infinity'). Both accept that human beings are born with a predisposition to acquire language in a few years and without apparent efforts (the innate component of language). In addition to similarities, however, there are also substantial differences between the two fields, and it is an historical fact that Sebeok and Chomsky made no attempt at resolving them. Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics have become two separate disciplines, and yet in the case of language they are studying the same phenomenon, so it should be possible to bring them together. Here it is shown that this is indeed the case. A convergence of the two fields does require a few basic readjustments in each of them, but leads to a unified framework that keeps the best of both disciplines and is in agreement with the experimental evidence. What is particularly important is that such a framework suggests immediately a new approach to the origin of language. More precisely, it suggests that the brain wiring processes that take place in all phases of human ontogenesis (embryonic, foetal, infant and child development) are based on organic codes, and it is the step-by-step appearance of these brain-wiring

The Ongoing Debate on Language Evolution

How and why language has evolved to become what it is today, is the subject of intense debate. Chomsky long ago proposed that human language competence should be seen as a set of biologically inherited language principles. The adaptationist view suggests that the human cognitive apparatus must be specialized to language and was selected for by evolution. The non-adaptationist view rejects that idea and instead suggests emergence via a non-adaptationist route. Recently a third view language as shaped by the brain suggests that language is easy to learn and use because language has developed in such that it adapted to the capacities of our brains (which developed before language began to emerge). In this view, language acquisition is seen as resting on general cognitive processes, and constraints thereof. An alternative view suggests major aspects of UG are neither biological nor cultural in origin; rather that they reflect universal semiotic constraints inherent in the requirements for producing symbolic reference itself. Details of the evolutionary path of language remain unknown because we cannot revisit the world in ancient times to properly examine the subject of our speculation. A serious obstacle in this debate is the lack of scientific evidence supporting a coherent definition of Universal Grammar. Clarity with regard to this debate requires an in depth understanding of facts, concepts and theories which currently belong to different scientific disciplines.

The Origin of Language: Why it never happened

Language Sciences, 1997

Questions about the origin of language hold an important position in the self-images of many, possibly all, of the world's known cultures. It seems, after all, a natural question to ask, from within a culture, about the historical foundations of that culture's practices. Are not some of the first reflective questions that children ask of the kind: Why do we do this? And is it not a natural response to such questions to provide an account of how the practice in question began? Why do questions about the origin of language continue to fascinate us? Perhaps this is because an account of the origin of language provides a narrative way of satisfying a people's feeling that they are special; it is a vivid and comprehensible way of explaining why, from their intra-cultural perspective, they are different, whether in contradistinction to other groups of people or to other animal species. Animal behaviorists have said that, from the perspective of the animal in the wild, the fundamental phenomenological divide is between those who want to eat me and those whom I want to eat. However, from the internal perspective of a human culture, the most important phenomenological division is between those who make sense and those who do not; or to put it in another, slightly more enlightened way, between those who make sense the way we do and those who do not. In the first case, we humans as a species are on one side of the divide and all nonhuman animals are on the other. Whereas in the second case, the divide is between those within our culture and those 'others' who, because what they say makes no sense, the ancient Greeks simply called 'barbarians'. A culture's self-image is formed as a reflexive by-product of the daily tasks of making sense of its environment, of its members' biological being, of its group activities and interactions, and of those very methods it uses, primarily verbal methods, in order to make that sense. Accordingly, those who do not make sense as we, in our culture, do-that is, members of other cultures and other species-will typically not be perceived by us merely as different versions of the same basic kind of thing that we are, but rather as categorically different: as different kinds of things entirely. Our culture's account of the origin of language is a readily grasped way of making sense of why we make sense, and they don't. An origins myth is a compelling way of explaining to ourselves, and thereby justifying to ourselves, our ways of making sense. It might, in this respect, be likened to a reflection in a mirror of that mirror's own reflective properties. Today, however, the origin of language has become the focus of scientific research. Indeed, it has become a pivotal topic in the modern sciences of man, drawing attention from a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive psychology, anthropology, evolutionary science,

Language as an evolutionary system

Physics of Life Reviews, 2005

John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry argued that human language signified the eighth major transition in evolution: human language marked a new form of information transmission from one generation to another [Maynard Smith J, Szathmáry E. The major transitions in evolution. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press; 1995]. According to this view language codes cultural information and as such forms the basis for the evolution of complexity in human culture. In this article we develop the theory that language also codes information in another sense: languages code information on their own structure. As a result, languages themselves provide information that influences their own survival. To understand the consequences of this theory we discuss recent computational models of linguistic evolution. Linguistic evolution is the process by which languages themselves evolve. This article draws together this recent work on linguistic evolution and highlights the significance of this process in understanding the evolution of linguistic complexity. Our conclusions are that: (1) the process of linguistic transmission constitutes the basis for an evolutionary system, and (2), that this evolutionary system is only superficially comparable to the process of biological evolution.

Language as Technology: Some Questions that Evolutionary Linguistics Should Address

Over the past two decades, studies of the phylogenetic emergence of language have typically focused on grammatical characteristics, especially those that distinguish modern languages from animal communication. The relevant literature has thus left the reader with the impression that language is either exclusively or primarily mental; in the latter case, its physical features, phonetic or manual, would be epiphenomena that may be overlooked. I argue that language is natural collective technology that evolved primarily to facilitate efficient communication in populations whose social structures were becoming increasingly more complex. It emerged through hominines' exaptation of their own anatomy, thanks to the same mind that was enabling the complex cultures they were producing. Linguistic constraints of various kinds are emergent properties that are largely consequences of the modalities used, a position that does not expect signed languages cum legitimate linguistic systems to replicate the general architecture of spoken languages in all respects. The rest of the paper speculates on how the architecture of spoken languages evolved, gradually, with some features presupposing the prior emergence of others, whereas some others conjure up concurrent emergence. The facts suggest a complex non-unilinear evolutionary trajectory with many alternative options, consistent with emergent technologies in which considerations of optimality are absent.