Christine Kenneally
The First Word
The search for the origins of language
Viking 2007

154 If you have language you have structure
Although many components of language have some kind of analogue in animal communication, our close relatives typically lack highly structured signals.

Human language involves two types of structures. In the first, elements from a finite set of meaningless sounds are combined into meaningful words and parts of words, known as morphemes. Linguists call this phonology.

In the second type of structure, words and morphemes are combined into phrases. This is what linguists call syntax. In 1960 the linguist Charles Hockett said that the relationship between the two types of combinatory rules was one of the major design features of human language; he called it duality of patterning.

161 …It may be that before our ancestors became adept at understanding and producing the complications of modern grammar, they learned to compute social relationships just like the baboon understanding of social rank - and their combination. Seyfarth stresses that this language of thought is not the same as human language, but he adds that it is adaptive in its own right and as a possible foundation for something that might turn into language.

164… In contemporary syntax there are two main approaches to accounting for all the structural rules that human languages use to build meaning:
the Chomskyan approach and the „parallel architecture“ approach.

In the Comskyan approach, the list of words in the language - its lexicon - and the syntactic rules that arrange those words are treated as separate entities. The syntactic rules are considered the core computational device with which most of language is generated. Accordingly, people still talk about universal grammar, or UG, as a language specific set of rules or parameters belonging to a language-specific mental mechanism. Jackendoff calls this kind of approach „syntactocentrism“, meaning that syntax is regarded as the fundamental element of language.

In contrast, he says, „in a number of different quarters, another approach has been emerging in distinction to Chomsky’s“. In this view of accounting for structuring language, words and phrases are as important as the rules that combine them, and the idea of pure syntax is downplayed.

Instead of being objects, words are best thought of as interfaces. A word lies at the intersection of a number of systems - the sound of the word (phonology), syntactic structure (the structure that the word can licence or appear in), and meaning (some of which may be specific to language, and some of which may be a more general kind of meaning). The more general component of the word's meaning may have some equivalents to the common cognitive platform that humans share with other species.

165 It is significant that Jackendoff now proposes that it's time to move away from the pure focus on syntactic structure and the idea of syntactic core to language.

Rather than think of syntax as a set of computational algorithms, Jackendoff and Pinker call it a „sophisticated accounting system“ for tracking the various layers of relationship and meaning that can be encoded into speech and then decoded by a listener. To their mind syntax is „a solution to the basic problem of language“, which is that meaning is multidimensional but can be expressed only and linear fashion, because speech unfolds sequentially, as does writing. This way of looking at language and syntax is more consistent with the idea of language evolution and the view of evolution as a „tinkerer“.

167 Jackendoff has developed an approach for recovering ancient elements of language that would take us back into the past. He believes that language itself carries fossils of earlier forms, allowing us to reverse engineer it back to an evolutionarily simpler state. Jackendoff was inspired by Derek Bickerton, one of the first linguists to develop the concept that before our current form of language, we must have communicated with the proto-language, a simpler step on the way to model worlds and syntax.

Jackendoff said: „The idea behind it that there was a stage of proto-language preceding the stage of modern language that could have served as an effective communication system without the rest of language. What Bickerton‘s version of proto-language has that no other animal communication system has is some kind of phonology, so that you can build a large vocabulary. In addition it has the symbolic use of words, and it concatenates words to convey meanings that combined the meanings of individual words. What it doesn't have to have is modern syntax.

Even to achieve this level of proto-language, you must have two or three very important innovations in place. „The construction based a view of language“, Jackendoff explained, „makes it natural to conceive of syntax as having evolved subsequent to two other important aspects of language: the symbolic use of utterances and the evolution of phonological structure as a way of digitising words for reliability and massive expansion of vocabulary“. Once you have that, the rest can follow.

In his book „The Symbolic Species“ Terrence Deacon proposes that various platforms of understanding are necessary for an animal to use utterances symbolically. He invokes three types of reference described by Charles Peirce – iconic reference, indexical reference, and symbolic reference.

Crucially, these distinctions are not inherent in any object or event in the world, but rather the descriptions of the kinds of interpretations that can be made about objects or events.

Icons (or making an iconic interpretation) are the simplest type of reference. If an object is iconic, there is a similarity between it and something else. Landscape paintings, Deacon points out, are iconic of the landscape they depict.

Indexes are a step more complicated than icons because they are built from iconic relationships. With an indexical interpretation, there is some kind of correlation, often causal, between an object or an event and something else.
A skunk smell may indicate that the skunk is nearby. „Most forms of animal communication“, writes Deacon, „have this quality, from pheromonal odors (that indicate an animal's physiological state or proximity) to alarm calls (that indicate the presence of a dangerous predater).

A symbol, in turn, is more complicated than an index, because it involves some kind of convention or system that guides the way we link one thing to another.
A wedding ring is a symbol of marriage, writes Deacon, just as „e“ is a symbol of a sound that we use in speech.

Complicated reference is thus created by layering simpler forms of reference together. Much animal communication makes extensive use of iconic and indexical reference, but only human language is rooted in the unusual and complicated relationships that exist with symbolic reference.

The jump to symbolic reference from indexical reference is not straightforward, argues Deacon. Symbols do not exist by themselves; they exist only in the context of other symbols and, crucially, in the relationships between them.

Boe: Saussure - Dans la langue il n'y a que des différences

Making a symbolic interpretation involves simultaneously understanding where the symbol, be it a wedding ring or a word, exists with respect to other symbols in its set (in the case of a word, knowing which other words it can be combined with and which it can't) and understanding the way it refers to objects or meaning in the world.

Only because we understand symbolic reference and the ways that words must be combined with other words can we create modern human language with all its various structural possibilities. Even though the symbolic reference is highly unusual in the nonhuman world, it's not impossible for some animals to comprehend it.

Christine Kenneally