BDB 201-202 Dilbilim Temel Kavramları I
What is the origin of language?
Dr. Mustafa Güleç
Ankara Üniversitesi, Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi (DTCF)
Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatları Bölümü,
Hollanda Dili ve Edebiyatı Anabilim Dalı
What is the origin of language?
The view that suggests that mostly culture played a crucial role in the existence of language:
The behaviorist point of view, which was defended by B.F. Skinner suggests that language is not something in any way innate to mankind, but that it must be learned by means of experience (i.e. through trial and error). New born babies must be exposed to it in order to acquire linguistic skills. If they cannot succeed in socializing linguistically, they will at the end be unable to produce language as adults. Skinner’s behaviorist approach asserts that language is simply a behavior sort, which is moulded through reinforcement by other individuals.
He described four verbal operants (factors). A mand (or demand, in command) occurs when children ask for reinforcement. For example, when they call out “Mommy!" because they want their mother. A tact (judgement, perception, discretion) happens when they name or identify objects: saying “Teddy bear!" when they see a toy. The echoic verbal operant comes in when they repeat whatever has been said to them: saying “Happy!" when someone has said “Happy!" to them. The intraverbal operant occurs when answering questions or having conversations where the speaker’s words lead to other words: When a mother begins “Mommy and…" and the baby answers with the word “me!"
Skinner’s views of language were very influential at the first half of the 20th century, but after the second half of the 20th century, a strong critic, which was spoken out mainly by Chomsky began to refute his arguments.
What is the origin of language?
• The view that suggests that mostly genetic factors played a role in the existence of language:
• Noam Chomsky who was a strong opponent of Skinner, suggested that infants possess a language acquisition device (LAD) that preconditions the process of learning and asserted the existence of a Universal Grammar (UG), a set of rules substantiating the transformative-generative theory of language.
• According to Chomsky, studying language purely from the input-output perspective without any insight into its inner factors omits valuable information we can gather about the physiological processes. Besides, there is such a poverty of stimulus in the acquisition of language — a lack of coherent information regularly perceived by babies — how can an infant acquire language without some preexisting genetically determined cognitive abilities?
• We assume for a while that we possess a cognitive apparatus that prepares us for learning language in a structured manner. This would explain the ability all humans have to learn a language from an early age. Six months after birth, a baby begins to babble a lot (deaf babies babble with their hands, mimicking sign language), between 9 and 18 months they can speak in single words, around 18 months they begin to speak in mini-sentences and after 24 months they produce extended sentence structures. After 30 months they start to speak their mother tongue with grammatical and functional structures. This is a more complex situation than Skinner’s "verbal operants" can account for.
• Vocabulary acquisition also progresses rapidly. Babies reach the milestone of 10 words at 13 months, 50 words around 17 months and 310 words around 24 months. After the third year, children tend to learn 10 words a day. Children are therefore hard-wired to become fluent in their native language within five to six years, irrespective of its complexity. For instance, children create plurals and conjugate verbs in a regular manner (“I drawed the cat", “I saw two womans") and have to be corrected by adults. This would lead us to assume the existence of genetically produced fixed structures (generative structures) capable of framing and regulating the acquisition of language.
• This argumentation sounds very plausible. However, unfortunately, this theory is not falsifiable. Chomsky did not come to this conclusion by laboratory experiments, neither did he study the more than 8000 languages in the world to confirm it. He simply inferred it — and critics accuse him of confusing general cognitive abilities in the development of a child with innate abilities to produce language.
What is the origin of language?
• The view that every thing about language is all metaphorical
• Long before Chomsky and Skinner were working on language, Nietzsche was thinking about the nature of language.
According to him, human mind creates a simulation of the world and language surfaces through our fundamental drive for metaphors, which leads to the creation of words that shape concepts. Studying language and its origin from a modern scientific angle obfuscates the insight that there is no clear correlation between a word and what exists outside of us.
Consider gender in languages: “key" is feminine in French and masculine in German and it has no gender at all in Turkish.
• Words can never show a truth, otherwise why would we have so many different languages? There would be only one, the true language that corresponds with reality. As a matter of fact, we have only metaphors for things that have debatable relation with the world outside. Chomsky’s attempt to justify the existence of a “true language" in human mind by means of his Universal Grammar is moot, since language can never be the vessel for the essence of the subject matter. Whereas scientists worry about the truthfulness of statements and things, they are only using socially sanctioned metaphors — i.e.
they are being forced to “lie" according to a fixed convention. (Just like you are being forced to “lie" when your French teacher corrects the gender for the word «key») Nietzsche accepts that our sense perceptions seem to be similar from person to person and are moulded by time and space. However, the same scientific method he questions has led many scientists to believe theories positing that time and space are not truly “real."
• If meaning in language is unstable and its origins are still unknown, will we ever reach true breakthroughs in our knowledge of it? Or are we too deep inside the bubble of language to know more about it? And why are we so emotionally invested in finding out more? Is language itself responsible for our intellectual curiosity, playing games with our inadequacies and forcing us to ask absurd questions?
• Maybe the student who is confronted with the joy and frustration of learning a new language senses the enjoyment and purpose more acutely than any researcher…
What is the origin of language?
• For centuries there had been so much fruitless speculation over the question of how language began that when the Paris Linguistic Society was founded in 1866, its bylaws included a ban on any discussions of it. The early theories are now referred to by the nicknames given to them by language scholars fed up with unsupportable just-so stories. For example, the how-wow theory:
• The idea that speech arose from people imitating the sounds that
things make: How-wow, moaw, baaa, etc. Not likely, since very few
things we talk about have characteristic sounds associated with them,
and very few of our words sound anything at all like what they mean.
What is the origin of language?
• The pooh-pooh theory: the idea that speech comes from the automatic vocal responses to pain, fear, surprise, or other emotions: a laugh, a shriek, a gasp. But plenty of animals make these kinds of sounds too, and they didn't end up with language.
• The ding-dong theory: the idea that speech reflects some mystical resonance or harmony connected with things in the world. Unclear how one would investigate this.
• The yo-he-ho theory: the idea that speech started with the rhythmic chants and grunts people used to coordinate their physical actions when they worked together. There's a pretty big difference between this kind of thing and what we do most of the time with language.
• The ta-ta theory: the idea that speech came from the use of tongue and mouth gestures to mimic manual gestures. For example, saying ta-ta is like waving goodbye with your tongue. But most of the things we talk about do not have characteristic gestures associated with them, much less gestures you can imitate with the tongue and mouth.
• The la-la theory: the idea that speech emerged from the sounds of inspired playfulness, love, poetic sensibility, and song. This one is lovely, and no more or less likely than any of the others.
• (http://mentalfloss.com/article/48631/6-early-theories-about-origin-language)
What is the origin of language?
• Belief in divine creation. Many societies throughout history believed that language is the gift of the gods to humans. The most familiar is found in Genesis 2:20, which tells us that Adam gave names to all living creatures. This belief predicates that humans were created from the start with an innate capacity to use language.
• It can't be proven that language is as old as humans, but it is definitely true that language and human society are inseparable. Wherever humans exist language exists. Every stone age tribe ever encountered has a language equal to English, Latin, or Greek in terms of its expressive potential and grammatical complexity. Technologies may be complex or simple, but language is always complex. Charles Darwin noted this fact when he stated that as far as concerns language, "Shakespeare walks with the Macedonian swineherd, and Plato with the wild savage of Assam." In fact, it sometimes seems that languages spoken by preindustrial societies are much more complex grammatically than languages such as English (example: English has about seven tense forms and three noun genders; Kivunjo, a Bantu language spoken on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, has 14 tenses and about 20 noun classes.) There are no primitive languages, nor are any known to have existed in the past--even among the most remote tribes of stone age hunter-gatherers.
• Nevertheless, it is impossible to prove that the first anatomically modern humans possessed creative language. It is also impossible to disprove the hypothesis that primitive languages might have existed at some point in the distant past of Homo sapiens development.
• (http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test1materials/origin_of_language.htm)
