ANTH151 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Proto-Indo-European Language, Generative Grammar, Phonetics
10 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
ANTH151 Lecture
VIII: Language
Noam Chomsky and Innate Grammar
• Saw an unbridgeable gap between animal calls and speech
• Saltation - leap to language
• Chomsky: humans born with innate grammar because language too complex to learn (mental
module)
• Made it hard to talk about language evolution
Saltation event or emerging gradually over evolutionary time?
• Although I believe it was gradual, I will try to explain how both approaches make sense
• Challenge it how to study unique system that leaves no physical trace
Background (terms)
• Semantics: the study of word meaning (vocabulary)
• Semiotics: the study of grammatical structuring (profoundly distinguishes language from
animal call systems)
• Animal call systems
• What were the first languages like? Proto-languages?
Evolution of language
• When did language arise? Difficult to say because of absence of material remains, but
500,000 to 50,000 years ago, certainly
• Brain large enough 500,000 years ago?
• Anatomical changes in throat likely in place before split from Neanderthals?
• Modern humans frequently said to arise 200-300,000 years ago
• Evidence of ‘cultural big bang’ only about 50,000 years ago
• No intermediate steps preserved, no comparative animal cases, so hard to even guess what
phylogenetic trajectory would have been. Children learning language a poor analogue because
they are immersed in language environment
Animal communication
• Many forms of communication: whale song, bee dancing, prairie dog ‘talking,’ dolphin
whistles, vervet monkey calls, chimpanzee hoots
• Different from ‘animal languages’
Human language
• Arbitrariness: no inherent link between symbol and signified
• Cultural transmission
• Discreteness: language built up of smaller units
• Displacement
• Layers: language has both semantic and surface meaning
• Metalinguistics: talk about talk
• Productivity
• Recursive: phrases inside phrases or nested
What can language do?
• Human languages v animal call systems
• Displacement - talk about something not present (not just indexical)
• Things absent, remembered, abstractions
• Productivity - ability to produce novel expressions
• Cultural transmission - codes must be learned - complexity greater
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Birdsong (based on research of Peter Marler)
• Young birds learn species-typical songs from adults
• Dialects form from learning
• Birds have critical learning period when adult influence is crucial
• To develop song, birds must hear typical songs and hear themselves
• Young birds go through ‘subsong’ phase like babbling
• Vocal imitation self reinforcing
• Left brain hemisphere specialised
Evidence of language in hominin evolution
Shift in anatomy
• Larynx
Great leap in language
• Evidence from Linthicum technology should make us suspicious about sudden change in
cognition (long periods of intermediate steps v saltation events)
• Because no material evidence of language, intermediate steps wiped out
• People do exist who have no language (e.g. The deaf in places without sign language)
• Absence of language at crucial stage deflects cognitive development
Evidence from gesture
• Original languages may have been gestural
• Overlap in brain areas (dexterity and vocal control is difficult)
• Mersin Donald argues ‘mimetic’ reasoning before symbolic (symbol before grammar)
• Some evidence of primary grammatical order? Speakers of SVO languages shift to SOV
when gesturing
The first language communities
• Understanding first languages analogy to present might be like studying first tools by analogy
to current tools
• Earliest communities were tiny, with intense, long-term relations. ‘Society of intimates’ with
‘all generic information shared’ (Givon 1979)
• Early communities likely did not amass so much information and may have been socially
closed. Non-explicit opaque expression
Stages of language evolution - proposal
• Symbols: unlike calls, symbols have multiple uses - formulaic phrases can survive brain
damage to language
• Open class of symbols: most complex call system: dozens - average adult: 10s of 1000s of
words - generative phonology (syllables
• Concatenation: multiple words (infant ‘sentences’)
• Simple syntax: using word order to communication (e.g. Pidgin)
• Full fledge grammar: phrasing, relational words and inflection
Co-evolution of brain and language
Language and thought
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - languages affect ways of thinking
• Differences not just lexicon and vocabulary (not just semantics)
• Syntax differences in word order and arrangement
• Gendered pronouns
• Verb tenses - future?
• Bias ways of thinking
• Hopi verbs designate degree of definiteness
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Saltation event or emerging gradually over evolutionary time: although i believe it was gradual, i will try to explain how both approaches make sense, challenge it how to study unique system that leaves no physical trace. Difficult to say because of absence of material remains, but. Children learning language a poor analogue because they are immersed in language environment. Animal communication: many forms of communication: whale song, bee dancing, prairie dog talking," dolphin whistles, vervet monkey calls, chimpanzee hoots, different from animal languages". Speakers of svo languages shift to sov when gesturing. The first language communities: understanding first languages analogy to present might be like studying first tools by analogy to current tools, earliest communities were tiny, with intense, long-term relations. All generic information shared" (givon 1979: early communities likely did not amass so much information and may have been socially closed.
