Babel's Dawn

Beyond Utrecht

The universe has four dimensions. Language is not so big, but perhaps it can boast two dimensions.

Download PDF of post

Two years from now the next Evolang conference is scheduled to be held in Kyoto, Japan and I’m guessing that by then we will have a clear answer to the close of last week’s post on this blog, “We’ve got to understand how biology and culture are two dimensions shaping every utterance.” I’m optimistic because scholars already know what each dimension is about, and it looks like some people have identified the glue that holds the two dimensions together. So let’s hop into a time machine and see what understanding is likely to be clear when the Kyoto conference finishes up.

Protolanguage After Torun

Nicholas Copernicus University in Torun, Poland hosted the "Ways to Protolanguage" conference last week.

The conference on “ways to protolanguage” held in Torun, Poland this week provided a good, maybe even grand, view of where thinking about the protolanguage concept stands. It was so successful that it left me doubting the concept’s further utility. Like Wittgenstein’s ladder, we’ve used it to climb to new heights. Now let’s toss it aside. 

A Protolinguistic Fossil

One of the interesting scholars of protolanguage who consistently makes data-rich presentations is Ljiljana Progovac. She focuses on examples of “living fossils” of protolanguage. Living fossils are species like lungfish that have changed very little from their distant ancestors. Living language fossils are holdovers from the beginnings of syntax. Previously she reported on small clauses (see: Fossilized Syntax and The Eternal Duality). At the protolanguage conference held his week in Torun, Poland she discussed “imperative VN compounds” which, despite the jargon-rich terminology, are vulgar, lively phrases like: fuck-wind, squeeze-penny, and lick-boot.

Five Ways to Investigate Speech Origins

The basic problem of studying the origins of language is, to understate matters, language leaves few fossils. There are five techniques for getting around this problem Tao Gong told audience members attending the “Ways to Protolanguage” conference in Torun. The presentation was co-authored by Bernard Comrie and William S.-Y. Wang. The presentation itself was too focused on method to find much space on this blog, but its list of techniques was very valuable.

Simulation Suggests Steps to Speaking of the Unseen

Language-users have a special problem in linguistic unreliability, i.e., the meaning the speaker intended may not match the meaning the listener takes. This problem was discussed at the conference on protolanguage (Torun, Poland) in a presentation led by Tao Gong, James Minett, and William S.-Y. Wang. In particular, the problem is most acute when language breaks from the here-and-now to address absent things (a phenomenon known technically as displacement). The speakers wondered if displacement existed at the protolanguage stage of evolutionary history and, if so, how was the reliability of linguistic information established? As there is no direct empirical evidence bearing on the question, the speakers presented simulated results and a theoretical framework for studying the question.

Does the Recapitulation Principle Apply?

In both children and the human lineage, word learning predates rule making, but rule making eventually evolved as a way to relieve the stress on memorization, reported (or at least I think they reported) two members of the University of York, Dimitar Kazakov  and George Tsoulas, to the “Ways to Protolanguage” conference in Torun, Poland.

Their presentation was titled “Applying recapitulation theory to language” and addressed the problem of whether the acquisition of language in children today offers any guide to how language evolved in the past. In other words, does the fact that modern children speak a kind of protolanguage before they speak syntactic language provide strong evidence that our ancestors used a protolanguage for many generations before they spoke a full, syntactic language?

Protolanguage Was Symbolic

Protolanguage evolved perhaps as much as two million years ago, in the context of stone tool use, but was already used for complex symbolic actions the University of California (Berkeley)’s anthropologist and linguist Terrence Deacon told his audience in the final session of the first day of the conference on protolanguage in Torun, Poland.  Deacon was not present, but presented his material over the Internet and took questions via Skype’s online telephone system.

Protolanguage Builds on Mimicry

“Bodily mimesis” (i.e., using one’s body for mimicry or representation) provided the social and cognitive prerequisites for the emergence of protolanguage, linguist Jordan Zlatev from Lund University in Sweden, told an audience today in the keynote address that began a three-day conference on protolanguage in Torun, Poland. When Derek Bickerton first proposed a protolanguage in 1990 the idea was to account for language by providing an intermediary step without requiring some leap “so vast and abrupt that evolutionary theory would be hard put to account for it.” But now we know so much more about the differences between ape and human abilities that we need to find a way to account for the leap from speechlessness to the protolanguage level.

To prove his point that protolanguage requires preparation Zlatev showed a slide listing the difference between animal communication and language: