the life logistic
The reading material for this week is Chapter 12 and sections 14.9 — 14.11 from Fitch (2010). Before you read this, here are some thoughts on the term ‘protolanguage’ that are good to keep in mind.
The term ‘protolanguage’ is relatively old, but was re-introduced into evolutionary linguistics (and popularised) by Derek Bickerton in his influential 1990 book Language and Species (see section 11.7 in the Fitch text for reference to even earlier uses). At the time, Bickerton had very clear ideas about the position of a supposed protolanguage stage in evolutionary history. It was an intermediate stage in which there was no syntax yet, with words strung together in essentially free order. The step from protolanguage to full language, according to Bickerton, was one sudden leap. Thus, for Bickerton it was a very straightforward thing to claim that there was one single protolanguage stage: it was at the point in history where multiple words were communicated, but where there was no syntax at all, and there were no other stages in between this stage and ‘full language’.
Other researchers have picked up the term protolanguage, and hypothesised about its properties. But these other researchers are not necessarily proponents of the ‘one huge leap’ hypothesis of syntax (even Bickerton himself has dropped this view in more recent work), and tend to advocate a more gradual trajectory to full, syntactically complex human language. Given these myriad senses, should we abandon the concept ‘protolanguage’ altogether, then? Some authors seem to imply this, by calling protolanguage a speculative concept (Bidese et al., 2012). While it may be speculative, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t still conceptually useful: as long as we keep in mind that the term ‘protolanguage’ is more a tool for hypothesising about the emergence of language than it is a literal point in time. If this is kept in mind, the term protolanguage can help us formulate clear, testable hypotheses about the origins of language.
In Chapter 12, Fitch (2010) discusses what he calls lexical protolanguage. The first half of the chapter discusses accounts of protolanguage that rely on ‘living fossils’ of early human language, and focuses on the work of Derek Bickerton and Ray Jackendoff. These accounts address questions about the structure of language in the language evolution process, but we will see that Fitch connects questions about the function of language to it as well. An open question, which we will discuss in more detail in next week’s tutorial, is how we came to have lexical protolanguage at all, since such a system (compared to e.g., pidgins, creoles, children, and language trained apes – to say nothing of other animal communication systems) is already quite complex.
In the second half of the reading, Fitch addresses a problem with protolanguage accounts like those of Bickerton and Jackendoff: they presuppose cooperative information sharing among individuals. Fitch discusses ways to explain its emergence:
This gives us a clear view of different existing positions in the debate about why language, a system that relies on cooperative information sharing, came into existence at all. At the end of the chapter, Fitch is still left with a question that was central in Bickerton’s and Jackendoff’s work: where does syntax come from? Fitch wisely states that different kinds of answers to this question may not be in conflict with each other: the fact that there are grammaticalisation processes does not contradict the idea that constraints on such processes have evolved biologically.
In chapter 14, Fitch discusses his own account: musical protolanguage. In the lecture, we will mainly focus on the holistic/synthetic (sometimes known as analytic/synthetic) debate, characterised mainly in the work of Allison Wray and Maggie Tallerman. Fitch’s text gives a concise summary of Wray’s work, and some of the criticism that it has received.
In all, different accounts of protolanguage tend to emphasise different processes in the emergence of language, and especially since protolanguage is theoretical rather than concrete, these accounts are rarely mutually exclusive. For example, one likely reason why the holistic/synthetic debate has received less attention in the last decade is because it is highly plausible that both synthesis and analysis played important roles in language evolution to some degree (Dowman, 2008; Smith, 2006). Add to this the possibility that there was more than one protolanguage stage, then most accounts of protolanguage are compatible with one another.
Bidese, E., Padovan, A., and Tomaselli, A. (2012). Against protolanguage. In L. McCrohon, T. Fujimura, K. Fujita, R. Martin, K. Okanoya, R. Suzuki, and N. Yusa, editors, Five approaches to Language Evolution: proceedings of the Workshops of the 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language.
Fitch, W. T. (2010). The Evolution of Language. Cambridge University Press.
Dowman, M. (2008). The multiple stages of protolanguage. In A. D. Smith, K. Smith, & R. Ferrer i Cancho (Eds.), The evolution of language: Proceedings of the 6th international conference (p. 419-420). World Scientific.
Smith, K. (2006). The protolanguage debate: bridging the gap? In A. Cangelosi,A. Smith, & K. Smith (Eds.), The evolution of language: Proceedings of the 6thinternational conference. World Scientific.
Smith, K. (2010). Is a holistic protolanguage a plausible precursor to language? A test case for modern evolutionary linguistics. In M. A. Arbib and D. Bickerton, editors, The emergence of protolanguage: holophrasis vs compositionality. John Benjamins.