Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Introduction to Linguistics

Fall 2006

Week 1 - The Origin(s) of Language

     Answers to questions about the origins of language have long been sought-after in the field of linguistics and indeed were sought-after long before there was such a field called linguistics. Recently, however, with the advent of more structural approaches to language and certainly more realistic approaches to the complexity of language such endeavors into the origins of language were largely abandoned. They were seen by linguists as being futile and impossible to come up with in a truly scientific manner. Therefore, such questions were left to philosophers and the theories they came up with were basically laughed at by linguists, who felt they knew more about how language actually worked and rightfully so. Now, however, as the focus in linguistics moves away from an over dependency on structuralism to one more focused on cognitive approaches to language, thus bringing the brain and its structure into the forefront of the discussion, questions centered around the origins of language have enjoyed a tremendous resurgence in the last few years. Almost every linguist is concerned or at least sees the importance of resolving the origin issue and now that we now have better working models of language and the brain feel that this might actually be possible. The key to the origin issue, as well as the language issue itself, is of course the brain.

     Recent discoveries about how the brain works, made possible by new unobtrusive techniques for scanning and modeling the mechanisms of intact brains, have allowed researchers to greatly enhance their understanding of how the brain is organized and its mechanisms of use. In these new models of the brain, which go way beyond the aphasia-based studies of the past, the focus is no longer on mere localization, but rather on systems in the brain. Such findings have not only spurred on the development of new fields of study such as cognitive neuroscience but have made the study of the origin of language not only a viable but also a very important issue across many different fields.

     Language has always been a very special interest of psychologists because it is the central part of what makes us human and distinguishes us from other creatures. Now, how language might be encoded or housed in the brain has become a central issue as new and exciting information floods in from brain scans and psycholinguistic experiments. This is not a not a peripheral issue as has often been the case until recently. How language relates to overall brain structure and functioning tells researchers what language might be like. Nothing less than the exact structure and nature of language as an identifiable brain function are at stake. Models will rise and fall based on this new information, which is currently flooding in. All these questions have reemerged because the two main models arguing over the structure and very nature of language both need to find a viable explanation of the origin of language which supports their own theory. Thus, linguistic evolution has become a battleground for the supremacy of one model over another because it is felt that origins are somehow provable while specific models may not be without substantial evidence from outside linguistics itself.

     We, therefore, start our own discussion of language and, more specifically, formal views of language (linguistics) by looking at the origin issue. This is because coming to terms with how language might have evolved in humans and the restrictions imposed by a specific course of evolution could and maybe should tell us about the very nature of language itself. This in turn tells us how we might go about teaching language in a more effective way, for the benefit of our students.

     There are several different ways of approaching the study of linguistic origins. In the past, in the early period, in the 17 and 18 hundreds, most of the papers written about this were by philosophers and philologists expounding on such theories of the origins of lexical items such as the `bow wow` theory and `ouch` theory. Since that time a wide range of new and widely accepted fields of study have emerged. They include, genetics, anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, neurology, cognitive psychology, and of course linguistics. All of these are currently used, both together and separately to try to come up with viable explanations for how language might have developed. What has managed to be determined from all these studies is that language seems to be very much a human trait. Other creatures, while they might have quite sophisticated systems of communication, none of them comprise a language as such because they all have their limitations. In effect, they are all what psychologists and linguists would call hard-wired. Calls, in other animals are seen as being part of their behavioral repertoire and as such beyond the realm of their own control. For these other creatures the main factor all the different indication systems have in common is the idea that it controls them. Communication and such animals is behaviorist in the strictest sense of the word because it is simply a conditioned response and cannot be controlled. Once more, these communicative systems are extremely limited, as we would expect due to their behaviors nature. Human language, on the other hand, has gone beyond the limits of a few simple hardwired codes with fixed meanings. Human language is infinite. Human language is limitless (infinite) in its scope, architecture, and potential. Human beings can control their linguistic abilities to an extent impossible in other animals. The most simple evidence of this is that we can simply choose to be silent if we so wish, a feat impossible to animals. Thus, once we have accepted the idea that language is limited to humans we need to turn our focus to what might have spurred on the development of language within the brain of our species. This includes the general development and spread of our species across the globe.

     Biologists, linguists, and archaeologists, working together have traced the advent of our species back to approximately 100,000 years ago. They determine this by measuring the shape of the heads in skeletons they have found. The fact that modern human skeletons have been dated to the same time period (100,000 years ago) in both east and southern Africa and the Middle East puts doubt on that specific date and pushes it back a bit. Interestingly the onset of language has been dated to approximately the same period but with a much wider range. Estimates for the onset of human language have been claimed to be between 150 and 50 thousand years ago. But such estimates are problematic at best because any physical evidence comes from biological data (earlier humanoid species lacked the vocal apparatus to produce the same range of sounds that we produce today) which is not conclusive (they simply might have used other sounds) in addition to archaeological evidence. The date for language is linked with dates for both skull fragments and a rapid and widespread expansion of the species. This is somewhat problematic because it is based on the belief that language would give any species which possessed it a huge advantage over other species, thus allowing such rapid expansion. While this is probably true there is no direct evidence that language did in fact exist at the time of the great Homo Sapiens Sapiens expansions across the globe. To try to find more support we need to look at language itself as it functions in the large and diverse human population today.

     All normally developed humans have language. Thus, there does not seem to be a no language option for individuals, nor is there any human society which lacks language. All human languages are also more or less equally complex (although in different areas as you hopefully saw in the summer reading) and equally sufficient in fulfilling their infinite purpose. Thus there are more sophisticated or more primitive languages (we won`t address the rare issue of pigins here). In addition, all human languages are quite similar in their general design (but there is a growing debate on really how similar they are and what the cause of such similarities might be). Certainly brain size has been linked to language. We (homo sapiens sapiens) have one of the highest body to brain ratios (not the actual highest) and that seems to be at least part of the basis of our linguistic ability, but it may no just be the size but also the basic configuration of the brain. The human brain is a wonderful anomaly in that in the evolution of our species we have not actually lost any brain structure, but rather have only added new structures. The human brain has three main parts, the brainstem or the reptilian brain, the midbrain or the mammalian brain, and the cortex which is a structure unique to us in its size and complexity. Thus, from an evolutionary point of view the cortex would seem to be the key to language and in localization studies of the cortex, this is where speech reception and processing centers have been found to exist. Yet the cortex may not provide the entire answer to the language problem.

     All these questions about language and its evolution fall back on opposing hypotheses. The first of these, the `bang` hypothesis posits that language evolved in one fell swoop al at once. In effect changes in the brain suddenly made language possible. This the hypothesis linked to the generative view of language developed and championed by Noam Chomsky. Based on this view, language is seen as a separate organ in the brain. The alternative view claims that language as a specific skill or function of the brain developed slowly and in close connection with other brain systems and functions. In the view the development of language and cognitive power go together. Over a long series of incremental changes both the brain has become to know it and human language developed. In this way language can be seen as having created or helped form the brain. There is a symbiotic relationship between language cognition and the brain in this view.

     During this course we will take a close look at both sides of these opposing arguments and try to determine what works best for us and which ultimately makes the most sense. We will be doing this not by discussing more about the origins of language but by looking really asked the internal structure of language. In this exploration we will hopefully come up with a good feeling of what language is.

P.S.

It should be noted here that the development of language is necessarily accompanied by a development in cognitive skill. Thus when we are talking about the advent of language and the effect that this might have had on our species must also be assumed that we are simultaneously talking about the advent of a high level of consciousness and a degree of cognitive intelligence far superior to previous versions of our species or other known species. The point to be made is that linguistic development and cognitive development cannot be separated from an evolutionary and quite possibly from a developmental perspective as well.