Reflections on the evolution of language

Comments welcome
George W. Grace
University of Hawaii

Reflections on the evolution of human language:

2. The Emergence of Analytic Processing:

1. A Role for Phonaesthesia?

In Grace 2003 I discussed Robin Dunbar's hypothesis on the kind of advantages that might have started the ancestors of our species on the road to language. His hypothesis describes advantages that might have been gained from an expanded system of vocal communication. It provides a potential answer to one key question: Why us? That is, what was special in the circumstances of our ancestral species that set it on the evolutionary path toward language?

However, the question of why is just one that needs to be answered. Another critical question is how: How did our ancestors go about developing language from its antecedents--a limited inventory of fixed, holistically known, signals. Somehow the inventory of fixed signals was increased and somehow a means of creating ad hoc signals came into being.

The hypothesis that I want to propose here is that one factor may have been something like the contemporary phenomenon sometimes referred to as phonaesthesia. This phenomenon--the occurrence of like phoneme sequences in words which at the same time have some perceivable common thread of meaning--is quite widespread in English and other languages that have been examined. (One often-cited example of phonaesthesia is the English initial gl- in words with meanings suggestive of visibility or luminosity such as glisten, glow, glare, glint, glitter, glimmer, and gleam). Experimental evidence reported in Bergen 2004 has demonstrated the psychological reality of this and other English phonaesthemes.

The Hypothesis
1. It isn't hard to come up with suggestions as to possible sources for phonaesthemes in more recent stages in the evolution of language. Once the signals became vocal, it seems inevitable that as the inventory of signals grew, some signals would have come to be partially alike in pronunciation. This would be true whether or not we want to postulate a phonemic system at that stage (or, for that matter, at any other (1)).

Nativelike pronunciation of a language is ultimately a matter of motor skills. (For example, the amount of acquired skill involved is apparent from the persistence of foreign accents in the speech of persons who have not adequately acquired the skills peculiar to a particular language or dialect, etc.). In order to pronounce even a single word one must coordinate a number of different muscular movements, which must be correctly executed and correctly sequenced. Fluent pronunciation requires "chunking" of coordinated sequences of movements of the speech organs. The pronunciation of each chunk can then be governed by a single conscious instruction--a single subroutine. This subroutine calls for the execution of the coordinated set of muscle movements required for the pronunciation of that particular chunk of sound.

It's still unclear what medium, or combination of media, of expression were used in the earliest stages in the evolution of language. However it would seem that any level of fluency would have required some kind of such subroutines. And as the number of signals grew it must quickly have become impractical to maintain entirely unrelated subroutines for each signal. Beyond a certain point, new signals must have been producible with already-mastered subroutines. This must have led rapidly to a situation where signal A began with the same subroutine as, say, signal D, whereas signals B and C began with a different one, etc. That is, as the repertoire grew, the number of distinct subroutines required must have been held to a manageable level.(2)

2. As the sets of partially like signals increased in size and number, there would surely have emerged subsets where it would have been easy to imagine similarities of meaning that could then be matched with the similarity of form. That is, there would have been the necessary conditions for phonaesthesia.

At the beginning, no doubt, there would have been little agreement from one speaker to the next on which such subsets they had perceived. In fact--particularly in the early stages--these perceptions probably would rarely have risen to the level of conscious awareness in any speaker. Moreover, we should point out that, presumably, these subsets of putatively similar meaning would rarely if ever have included all the signals that shared that particular similarity of form.

The hypothesis that phonaesthesia played a significant role will certainly seem stronger if further research reveals it to be a universal or near-universal feature of human language. However, up until now linguistic science has largely ignored it. There are several probable explanations for this inattention: first, the phenomenon is hard to characterize precisely; second, historical explanations for most known instances have proved to be quite elusive; and (last but not least), the phenomenon doesn’t accord at all well with the assumptions that underlie our current models of language description.

3. Anyway, where such form-meaning analogies were perceived, they might have played some role as mnemonic aids--as reminders of signals. The analogies might also have provided an occasional aid for language learning--i.e., for suggesting interpretations for utterances that hadn’t previously been encountered.

What I'm describing here might be thought of as the earliest glimmerings of awareness of the possibility of signs being motivated and the consequent potential for analytic processing and composition. The analogies might thus have come to provide a feeling for the relative aptness of proposed neologisms. Therefore, to the extent that similar perceptions were shared by multiple speakers, they might have influenced the kind of neologisms that were conceived.

From this point, the hypothesis would hold that the (consciously or unconsciously) perceived phonaesthemes did constitute a basis for the creation of occasional neologisms. Most such neologisms would probably have been unconscious at first, but with conscious instances gradually increasing in frequency. (Of course, it would also have been possible to combine--i. e., utter in sequence--whole signals to produce new signals).

This would have been followed by something like the following sequence: as time passed the possibilities of such recombination came increasingly to be exploited. As this happened, parts suitable for recombination were increasingly isolated and given conventional recognition as potential elements for combination--i.e., approaching or achieving the status of morphemes.

Finally, the elements available for combination and the conventions governing their combination reached the point that they could be called a grammar. Likewise, the frequency of innovation increased to the point that a large proportion of utterances had something ad hoc about them. At this point the analytic processing strategy had taken its place as a full-fledged partner of the holistic.

Caveats

Two questions that I think of that are not answered by this hypothesis are:

1. How was the expansion of the original inventory of signals accomplished before the inventory was large enough for phonaesthesia to have been a factor (or am I wrong about the need for such a critical mass)?

2. How did we come to have distinct parts of speech?