ANTH151 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Lithic Technology, Merlin Donald, Acculturation
Language origin and development: The ability to communicate – do other animals
talk?
• Noam Chomsky and Innate Grammar
o Saw an unbridgeable gap between animal calls and speech
o ‘Saltation’ – leap to language
o Chomksy: humans born with innate grammar because language too
complex to learn (‘mental module’)
o Made it hard to talk about language evolution
• Saltation event or emerging gradually over evolutionary time?
o Challenge is how to study unique system that leaves no physical trace
• Background
o Semantics → the study of word meaning (vocab)
o Semiotics → the study of grammatical structuring (profoundly
distinguishes language from animal call systems)
o Animal call systems
o What were the first languages like? Proto-languages?
• Evolution of language:
o When did language arise?
▪ Difficult to say because of absence of material remains, but
500,000 to 50,000 years ago
o Brain large enough 500,000 years ago
o Anatomical changes in throat likely in place before split from
Neandertals? Hypoglossal nerve, descent of larynx
o Modern humans frequently said to arise 200-250,000 years ago
o Evidence of ‘cultural big bang’ only about 50,000 years ago?
o No intermediate steps preserved, no comparative animal cases so hard
to even guess what phylogenetic trajectory would have been
o Children learning language a poor analogue because they are immersed
in language environment
How is language different from a call system?
• 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 - this is what makes it different:
• Arbitrariness → no inherent link between symbol and signified
• Cultural transmission
• Discreteness → language built up of smaller units (unlike call systems)
• 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 vs. animal call systems
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
o Displacement → talk about something not present (not just indexical)
▪ Things absent, remembered, abstractions
o Productivity → ability to produce novel expressions
o Cultural transmission → codes must be learned; complexity greater
o Other animals may have latent potential…
• Communication e.g. birdsong:
o Young birds learn species-typical songs from adults
o Dialects form from learning
o Birds have critical learning period when adult influence is crucial
o To develop song, birds must hear typical songs and hear themselves
o Young birds go through ‘subsong’ phase like babbling
o Vocal imitation self reinforcing
o Left brain hemisphere specialised
• Evidence of the capacity for language in hominin evolution:
o Shift in anatomy → chimpanzee and human – throat and mouth
(larynx)
▪ Throat and mouth - newborn infant, neanderthal, adult human
• ‘Great leap’ in language?
o Evidence from lithic technology should make us suspicious about
sudden change in cognition (long periods of intermediate steps v.
saltation events)
o Because no material evidence of language, intermediate steps wiped
out
o People do exist who have no language (e.g. the deaf in places without
sign language)
o Absence of language at crucial stage deflects cognitive development
• Evidence from gesture
o Original languages may have been gestural
▪ Overlap in brain areas (dexterity → vocal control is difficult)
o Merlin Donald argues ‘mimetic’ reasoning before symbolic (symbol
before grammar)
o Some evidence of primary grammatical order? Speakers of SVO
languages shift to SOV when gesturing
• The ‘first language’ communities
o Understanding first languages by analogy to present might be like
studying first tools by analogy to current tools
o Earliest communities were tiny, with intense, long-term relations.
‘Society of intimates’ with ‘all generic information shared’
o Early communities likely did not amass so much information and may
have been socially closed. Non-explicit opaque expression.
• Stages of language evolution (proposal)
o Symbols → unlike calls, symbols have multiple uses e.g. food…,
food!, food? Etc. – Formulaic phrases can survive brain damage to
language
o Open class of symbols → most complex call system: dozens – average
adult = 10s of 1000s of words – generative phonology (syllables)
o Concatenation → multiple words (infant ‘sentences’)
o Simple syntax → using word order to communicate e.g. pidgin
o Full fledged grammar → phrasing, relational words and infection
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
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: brain large enough 500,000 years ago, anatomical changes in throat likely in place before split from. How is language different from a call system: animal communication many forms of communication: whale song, bee dancing, prairie dog talking", dolphin whistles, vervet monkey calls, chimpanzee hoots, different from animal languages". Society of intimates" with all generic information shared": early communities likely did not amass so much information and may have been socially closed. Hopi verbs designate degree of definiteness: whorf"s examples, nootka language (vancouver islands) Culture" becomes biological as language affects brain function. In long run, capacity for language likely proved an advantage in selection, What can we do with language: human language distinctive in that it has all the characteristics, language generates a shared virtual world" of abstract concepts, ideas, mistakes, memories and expectations.