Emergence of Analytic Processing

Comments welcome
George W. Grace
University of Hawaii

Reflections on the evolution of human language:
2. The emergence of analytic processing

The contributions here are all concerned with how our ancestors could have started with a communication system that presumably consisted of only a limited inventory of fixed, holistically known, signals and developed a language in which utterances can be composed ad hoc. All are speculations about phenomena that might have contributed to (1) the expansion of the inventory of fixed signals and (2) especially, to the emergence of means for creating ad hoc signals.

(I should probably acknowledge that the next four paragraphs are borrowed almost verbatim from the last of the pieces linked below (the summary).

There are, of course, assumptions that underlie these contributions (just as assumptions underlie anything one writes). I'm aware of two main ones here that I should make as explicit as I can.

First, I’m assuming that at our starting point there were discrete, repeatable signals of some kind that were known and used by the ancestral population. More specifically, the assumption is that communication took (or could fairly be interpreted as taking) the form of discrete acts (in other words, antecedents of what we today call “speech acts”), and that these communicative acts depended on discrete signals.

I don’t know of any basis at this point for guessing whether these signals were mainly oral, or gestural, or some combination of the two, or for that matter something else entirely. However, in spite of this uncertainty about the physical nature of the signals at this beginning stage, I’m going to use the term “utterance” to refer to signals appropriate for being used as the vehicle of a single communicative act. Thus, “utterance” here refers to the signal alone, not to the act as a whole. Furthermore, an utterance is repeatable--i.e., it is a type rather than a token.

Second, I’m assuming that what the early utterances evolve into mainly is utterances. In other words, that (as argued most notably in Wray 1998, 2000, 2002) these original holistic utterances evolved mainly into other utterances that were now analyzable rather than into units of a different type such as words and morphemes. The hypothesis is that the evolution proceeded by a gradual analysis of utterances into smaller units that are capable of recombination.

The contributions in question can be accessed using the following links:

1. A Role for Phonaesthesia?

2. A Role for Blends?

3. A Role for "Meaningless Morphemes"?

4. Summary of Suggestions toward a Hypothesis