Making of Language

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,

Linguistics, 2000

2013

Diachronica, 1991

De Gruyter eBooks, 2001

Journal of Neurolinguistics, 2017

The beginning of the human language story Half a century ago, Eric Lenneberg (1967) wrote "The Biological Foundations of Language" and Noam Chomsky (1968) "Language and Mind". Both pioneered from different perspectives research on the neurobiological and cognitive underpinning of the human language system. In turn, many different research programs emerged to examine how structures can be mapped onto computations and how they correspond to properties of the human brain and vice versa. Specific questions about "language evolution", that is about how the biological capacity for language emerged or evolved, have been mainly left out until Paul Bloom and Steven Pinker (1989) took up this issues in the late 80s by publishing their seminal work on "Natural Language and Natural Selection". In the last ten years, research on the biology and evolution of language resurfaced as a mainstream research agenda in many disciplines and reflects a truly multidisciplinary endeavor, including in cognitive science and linguistics. In this vein, here a collection of rather diverse but distinguished contributions are presented by experts from different disciplines to further the discussion about what human language is and how its biological foundations might have emerged or evolved in our species. Many aspects are controversially discussed and must remain without doubt to be mysterious. New data produced faster than ever close often those differences but raise at the same time new challenging questions. Since Charles Darwin (1871) published in "The Descent of Man" his view on language as one of the most important distinction between "man and the lower animals" by emphasizing at the same time the similarity between animal and human communication, some questions are fundamental and current as before. These questions include the biological capacity of language, whether this capacity is specific to language or comprises other cognitive domains such as music or mathematics, how is language related to the theory of mind, mentalizing or intentionality, did other species in the human lineage used "language", did the biological capacity of language and/or cognition gradually evolve, which brain structures or circuits sustain language and what is the relationship of phenotypic plasticity such as preference for (certain) language structures and successful biological adaptation (if such a relationship exists). Various studies demonstrate that language is not an isolated and encapsulated module, which operates completely independent of other cognitive domains (e.g., Fadiga, Craighero, & D'Ausilio, 2009; Hillert, 2014). Syntactic principles of language seemed to be shared with other human-specific cognitive domains to various degrees: rhythmic synchronization in music (e.g.,

eds.) Mouton -De Gruyter 1. The"taboo" on the origins of language.

Reviewer Meets Reviewed, Royal Anthropological Institute, 19 November, 2012

Language, 2015