Written by Ray Jackendoff - PDF document

w did Written by Ray Jackendoff What does the question mean? In asking about the origins of human language, wefirst have to make clear what the question is. Thequestion is not how languages gradually developedover time into the languages of the world today.Rather, it is how the human developed overtime so that we Ñ and not our closest relatives, the And what an amazing development this was! Nolanguage. Human language can express thoughts onan unlimited number of topics (the weather, the war,the past, the future, mathematics, gossip, fairy tales,how to fix the sink...). It can be used not just toconvey information, but to solicit information (ques-tions) and to give orders. Unlike any other animalcommunication system, it contains an expression for not the case. Every human lan-guage has a vocabulary of tens of thousands ofwords, built up from several dozen speech sounds.Speakers can build an unlimited number of phrasesand sentences out of words plus a smallish collec-tion of prefixes and suffixes, and the meanings ofsentences are built from the meanings of the individ-ual words. What is still more remarkable is thatevery normal child learns the whole system fromhave at most a few dozen distinct calls, and they aresorts of meanings conveyed by chimpanzee commu-(such as some songbirds and some whales), themeanings of the combinations are not made up ofthe meanings of the parts (though there are manyspecies that have not been studied yet). And theattempts to teach apes some version of human lan-guage, while fascinating, have produced only rudi-mentary results. So the properties of human lan-guage are unique in the natural world. How did we get from there to here? All present-daylanguages, including those of hunter-gatherer cul- tures, have lots of words, can be used to talk aboutanything under the sun, and can express negation.As far back as we have written records of humanlanguage Ñ 5000 years or so Ñ things look basical-ly the same. Languages change gradually over time,sometimes due to changes in culture and fashion,sometimes in response to contact with other lan-guages. But the basic architecture and expressivepower of language stays the same. The question, then, is how the properties of humanlanguage got their start. Obviously, it couldn't havebeen a bunch of cavemen sitting around and decid-ing to make up a language, since in order to do so,they would have had to have a language to startwith! Intuitively, one might speculate that hominidshuman ancestorshuman ancestorsy grunting or hooting orcrying out, and 'gradually' this 'somehow' developedinto the sort of language we have today. (Such spec-ulations were so rampant 150 years ago that in 1866the French Academy banned papers on the origins oflanguage!) The problem is in the 'gradually' and the'somehow'. Chimps grunt and hoot and cry out, too.What happened to humans in the 6 million years orso since the hominid and chimpanzee lines diverged,and when and how did hominid communicationbegin to have the properties of modern language? Of course, many other properties besides languageferentiate humans from chimpanzees: lowerextremities suitable for upright walking and running,e not just in the size of the brain, but in its acter differences between human and chimpanzee brains,what evolutionary pressures. What ar The basic difficulty with studying the evolution of. About the only defini- tive evidence we have is the shape of the vocal tract(the mouth, tongue, and throat): Until anatomicallymodern humans, about 100,000 years ago, theshape of hominid vocal tracts didn't permit the mod-ern range of speech sounds. But that doesn't meanhominids could have had a sort of language thatused a more restricted range of consonants andvowels, and the changes in the vocal tract may onlyhave had the effect of making speech faster andmore expressive. Some researchers even proposeally or suddenly) switched to the vocal modality,e as a residue.These issues and many others are undergoing livelyinvestigation among linguists, psychologists, andbiologists. One important question is the degree towhich precursors of human language ability arefound in animals. For instance, how similar are apes'systems of thought to ours? Do they include thingsthat hominids would find it useful to express to eachother? There is indeed some consensus that apes'social world provide foundations on which theArelated question is what aspects of language areThis issue is particularly controversial. Some researchers er developed in apes. Other researchers acknowledge thebrains required additional changes that adapted them Did it happen all at once or in stages? ow did these changes take place? Some researchers brain by which humans express complex meaningsthrough combinations of sounds. These people alsotend to claim that there are few aspects of languagethat are not already present in animals. Other researchers suspect that the special propertiesof language evolved in stages, perhaps over somemillions of years, through a succession of hominidn an early stage, sounds would have beenin the environment, and individuals would be able to invent new vocabulary items to talk about newthings. In order to achieve a large vocabulary, animportant advance would have been the ability to'digitize' signals into sequences of discrete speechsounds Ñ consonants and vowels Ñ rather thanunstructured calls. This would require changes in theway the brain controls the vocal tract and possiblyin the way the brain interprets auditory signalssystem of single signals Ñ better than the chimpanzeesystem but far from modern language. Anext plausiblestep would be the ability to string together severalsuch 'words' to create a message built out of themeanings of its parts. This is still not as complex asmodern language. It could have a rudimentary 'mearzan, you Jane' character and still be a lot betterthan single-word utterances. In fact, we do find suchear-old children, in the begin-opose that the system of 'protolanguage' is stillpresent in modern human brains, hidden under thenot yet developed. 'protolanguage' a richer structure, encompassing suchgrammatical devices as plural markers, tense markers, that the earth is flat Ó). Again, some hypothesize thatthis could have been a purely cultural development, and some think it required genetic changes in thebrains of speakers. The jury is still out.When did this all happen? Again, it's very hard totell. We do know that something important hap-pened in the human line between 100,000 and50,000 years ago: This is when we start to find cul-e would call civilization. What changed inthe species at that point? Did they just get smarter(even if their brains didn't suddenly get larger)? Didthey develop language all of a sudden? Did they of the intellectual advan-tages that language affords (such as the ability tomaintain an oral history over generations)? If this iswhen they developed language, were they changingfrom no language to modern language, or perhapsfrom 'protolanguage' to modern language? And if thelatter, when did 'protolanguage' emerge? Did ourcousins the Neanderthals speak a protolanguage? Atthe moment, we don't know.One tantalizing source of evidence has emergedrecently. Amutation in a gene called FOXP2 hasbeen shown to lead to deficits in language as wellas in control of the face and mouth. This gene is aslightly altered version of a gene found in apes, andit seems to have achieved its present form between200,000 and 100,000 years ago. It is very temptingefore to call FOXP2 a 'language gene', but nearlyeveryone regards this as oversimplified. Are individu-ently know very little about how genes deter-evertheless, if we are ever going to learnmore about how the human language abilityomising evidence will probablycome from the human genome, which preserves somuch of our species' history. The challenge for thefuture will be to decode it. For further information Christiansen, Morton H. and Simon Kirbeds.eds. Language Evolution . New York: OxfordUniversity Press.Hauser, Marc; Noam Chomsky; and W. TecumsehFitch. 2002. The faculty of language: What is it, whohas it, and how did it evolve? Hurford, James; Michael Studdert-Kennedy; and Chris Approaches to the Evolution of Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Jackendoff, Ray. 1999. evolution of the language capacity , Trends inCognitive Sciences Pinker, Steven, and Ray Jackendoff. 2005. of language: What's special about it? 95.210-36. The Linguistic Society of America 1924 for the advancement of the scientific study oflanguage. The Society serves its nearly 6,000 person-al and institutional members through scholarly meet-advance the discipline.The Society holds its Annual Meeting in early Januaryeach year and publishes a quarterly journal, LANGUAGE, and the LSABulletin. Among its specialeducation activities are the Linguistic Institutes heldevery other summer in odd-numbered years and co-sponsored by a host university.The web site for the Society (http://www.lsadc.org)includes The Field of Linguistics (brief, nontechnicaland statements and resolutions issued by the English-only/English-plus debate, bilingual educationt, NW, Suite 211Duplicate as needed Linguistic Society of America