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Part One
The Nature of Language
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Chapter 1
Are Humans Unique?
1.1 On origins
When God created all birds and wild animals, says the Book of Genesis (2: 19), āHe brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.ā Adamās language was lost in the midst of the confusion at Babel and, later, in a different vein, Herodotus tells of a curious experiment supposedly carried out by the Egyptian prince Psammitichus, in which two newly born children were brought up silently by a solitary shepherd, in the hope that the original language of Adam would spontaneously flow out of the babiesā mouths. To Psammitichus disappointment, the first utterance was the Phoenician word bekos (ābreadā), thus discontinuing his hypothesis that the Egyptians were the oldest nation on earth. Similar experiments, including one by the Scottish king James IV, are reported to have been staged throughout the centuries, with Hebrew taking on the privileged position originally occupied by Phoenician.
Whatever the historical accuracy of these accounts, they highlight two beliefs which still persist in the laymanās view of the nature of language. First, language is identified with naming, to the total exclusion of the myriad of other facets that constitute it and make up the subject-matter of this book. Secondly, the origin of language is regarded as a sudden event (as maintained by the discontinuity theory), rather than as the result of continuous evolution happening over thousands or millions of years (as held by the supporters of the continuity theory).
The biblical doctrines of divine creation received a serious blow with the advent of Darwinās theory of evolution in the mid-nineteenth century, according to which evolution consists of a series of random mutations, of which only the fittest for survival are preserved (note that, attractive as it is, Darwinism dangerously approaches tautology, since if only the fittest survives, then whatever survives must by definition be the fittest). The hypothetical reconstruction within biology of earlier states in the development of man has stimulated important recent research on the possible language abilities of primitive man.
The phonetician Philip Lieberman has constructed an argument for the non-existence of language as we know it in Neanderthal man, a relatively recent relation of modern man in the evolutionary scale. He notes that in both chimpanzees and newborn humans certain anatomically possible sounds do not occur, and he suggests that this may be due to their lack of an appropriate neural mechanism for decoding speech sounds as speech sounds. This lack can also be correlated with important differences in pharyngeal structure between chimpanzees and newborn humans, on the one hand, and adult humans, on the other (which makes production of the three most basic sounds in human speech ā [a], roughly as in bar, [i], as in bee, and [u], as in boo ā anatomically impossible for the former), since evolution proceeds in a unitary manner, embracing both the structure of organisms (bodily and cerebral) and their behaviour, and the only function of the pharyngeal cavities specific to humans appears to relate to speech production, while chimpanzees preserve structures which are better adapted to the prevention of choking by inhalation of food. Using complex reconstruction techniques aided by computer technology, Lieberman hypothesises that, because of parallels between the pharyngeal structures of Neanderthal man and chimpanzees and newborn humans, the first also did not possess the appropriate neural mechanisms and thus lacked the linguistic abilities of his modern counterpart. The question now is whether all this constitutes evidence for the discontinuity theory first embodied in the biblical account, one implication of which is that language is unique to man. Before we attempt to answer this, however, we must look at the nature of language itself.
1.2 Rules and creativity
Philosophers often select language as the cornerstone of the divide between man and other living creatures. Thus for Descartes ([1637] 1970, p. 42) āit is a very remarkable thing that there are no men so dull and stupid, not even lunatics, that they cannot arrange various words and form a sentence to make their thoughts understood; but no other animal, however perfect or well bred, can do the likeā, a fact that āis evidence that brutes not only have a smaller degree of reason than man, but are wholly lacking in itā. The presence of language in a non-human species would indeed be inconceivable for a Cartesian. Note, however, that so far we have not provided a definition of language, and therefore, strictly speaking, the question of its species-specificity has been begged, a problem which characterises much metaphysical speculation on language within philosophy. It is precisely one of the purposes of this book to construct a rigorous and explicit characterisation of what language is, and in what follows we shall proceed to the enumeration of a series of properties that can be attributed to human language and all together can be said to define it.
Language, like the information which is expressed by it, must be unpredictable (i.e. it cannot be obviously related to environmental factors or to internal states) and appropriate to the situation (note, moreover, that there is a conceivably infinite number of these, and this makes language unbounded), and if it were possible to program a computer in such a way that it produced a continuous stream of well-formed utterances in a language, we would not want to say that the computer was communicating or, indeed, using language in any straightforward sense. The American linguists Charles Hockett and Noam Chomsky, among others, regard such a property, or creativity, as one of the most crucial properties of human language, and Chomsky (1976, p. 40) states along Cartesian lines that āthe capacity for free, appropriate, and creative use of language as an expression of thought, with the means provided by the language faculty, is ā¦ a distinctive feature of the human species, having no significant analogue elsewhereā.
Note that the word ācreativityā has a special use here. Chomsky draws a distinction between ārule-governedā and ārule-changingā creativity. The latter corresponds to the everyday idea of creativity, as when we talk about an artist or a scientist being creative, while the former operates within the constraints of a set of rules, making a potentially infinite use of these finite means, as happens, for instance, with the game of chess. It is important to realise that rules of the type we are dealing with here (constitutive rules) must be kept separate from the more common regulative rules. These relate to the regulation of an activity which exists independently of the rules themselves (e.g. the rules of etiquette regulate social behaviour), while constitutive rules actually constitute (as well as regulate) the activity ā chess would be meaningless without its rules. The distinction between constitutive and regulative rules is crucial to our understanding of what language is. Typical forms learnt at school may include prescriptions such as ādonāt split your infinitivesā or ādonāt end a sentence with a prepositionā. Perceptive critics have not been slow to point out that prescriptive grammarians often violate their own precepts, and a number of such regulative rules are now manifestly out of line with predominant usage (for instance, the rule governing the forms who and whom). As a discipline, linguistics is quite unconcerned with prescribing to the users what to do or not to do. Rather, it purports to describe the reality of language as it is ā linguistics is a descriptive science, not a prescriptive activity.
1.3 Animal communication and the ādesign featuresā of language
The findings of the ethologist Karl von Frisch, among others, in the field of communication systems of the honey-bee may be interpreted as casting some degree of doubt on the supposed human-specificity of language creativity. Honey-bees live in highly structured societies, and efficiency of communication is essential for the survival of the colony. Most important in their daily life is the recruitment by the scouting forager of other fellow workers for purposes of food collection. Important elements in the communication of information about a discovered food source are the environmental scents carried by the foraging bees on their return to the hive, the taste of the nectar regurgitated on arrival and the release of an attraction pheromone (i.e. a behaviour-triggering chemical) coupled with vigorous motion of the wings. An additional and most remarkable communication system specific to bees is dancing. In the simpler variety of the dance (round dance) the bee describes a narrow circle on the comb, now in one direction, now in the other ā odour and taste of the source are directly transmitted to other bees, in close contact with the dancer by their outstretched feelers, while information on the quality of the source is conveyed through the amount of energy spent in the dance. Round dances are useful when the food source is located within a short distance of the hive (some 15 metres), but bees can travel several kilometres to a source and directional information becomes imperative as distance increases. This, the bee transmits by means of a figure-of-eight dance, where a straight run is followed by a semi-circle in one direction and back to the origin of the straight run, another straight run, and a semi-circle in the opposite direction. If the weather is warm the dance is performed on a horizontal surface at the entrance of the hive and the straight run points in the direction of the food source. Otherwise, the dance takes place on the dark vertical surface of the comb, and the solar angle is translated into the gravitational angle, i.e. the angle between the vertical and the straight run on the comb equals the angle between the straight line from the hive to the sun and the straight line from the hive to the food source, as illustrated in Figure 1.1. Table 1.1 summarises the six possibilities for the location of the source in relation to the site of the hive and the position of the sun. This extremely ingenious system allows the honey-bee to locate easily the direction of the food source. In addition, the duration of the straight run and its accompanying buzzing give a direct indication of the distance, apparently computed by the bee on the basis of the amount of energy it uses up in the flight. Finally, the intensity of the waggling that takes place during the straight run (from which derive the alternative names āwaggleā or ātail-waggingā dance) directly correlates with the assessed quality of the source.
Table 1.1 Summary of the Relationship between the Orientation of the Beeās Dance and the Location of the Food Source
Location of Food Source | Direction of Straight Run |
between the hive and the sun | upwards along the vertical |
behind the hive, in a straight line with the sun | downwards along the vertical |
in front of the hive, to the left of the sun | upwards diagonally to the left of the vertical |
in front of the hive, to the right of the sun | upwards diagonally to the right of the vertical |
behind the hive, to the left of the sun | downwards diagonally to the left of the vertical |
behind the hive, to the right of the sun | downwards diagonally to the right of the vertical |
Figure 1.1 Relationship between the angle between sun and food source, and the beeās figure-of-eight dance on a wall.
Source: K. von Frisch [1927], The Dancing Bees (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 135.
The claim that bee dancing possesses creativity does not appear unduly exaggerated, since, at least in theory, an infinite amount of unpredictable and appropriate information can be transmitted, mainly related to the parameters of direction and distance. True, the beeās creativity operates within extremely strong constraints (the idea of verticality, for instance, as conveyed by the English word āupā is inexpressible, not to mention the complex thoughts and feelings present in human philosophy, literature and science), but the crucial question is whether the differences between this sort of creativity and human creativity are just a matter of degree or whether we are dealing with two qualitatively different properties, since quantitative differences of an otherwise identical ability would be consistent with the continuity theory of the origin of human language. On the other hand, despite his claim for the exclusiveness of language creativity to humans, Chomsky explicitly conceives of the possibility that certain things (ideas, concepts, feelings) may well be inexpressible in human language, a situation that would be reminiscent of the fact that there are many things which cannot be expressed in the ālanguageā of the bee.
Alongside creativity, another important and widely accepted property of human language is arbitrariness, i.e. the lack of a natural relation between the object and its name. To accept this characteristic is to oppose the belief of the naturalists, a belief originating in ancient Greek philosophy and amusingly discussed by Plato in Cratylus, that views names as stemming naturally from the properties of their bearers. In the early part of this century the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, commonly regarded as the founder of modern linguistics, laid emphasis on the arbitrary na...
