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Formulaic Language: A Living Linguistic Fossil for a Holistic Protolanguage

100%
Nicchiarelli S.
Academic Journal of Modern Philology
|
2014
|
vol. 3
67-73
EN
Humans today have the ability to use language. The common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans probably did not. During recent decades evolutionary linguists have attempted to explain how the gap between a non-linguistic ancestor and our linguistic species was bridged. In this direction, it has become common to invoke the notion of a protolanguage as a stable intermediary stage in the evolution of language. A key dispute among the currently-available hypotheses of protolanguage is represented by the distinction between holistic and synthetic accounts: did human protolanguage consist of holistic utterances – later segmented into single words – or did it start with simple units that were added together into more complex structures? The synthetic account is generally recognized as “the standard model,” thus assuming that the earliest forms of a presumed protolanguage were compositional, that is built up from single words, where one word corresponds to one concept. However, recent years have seen the consolidation of the alternative idea: each element of a protolanguage would have been linguistically unanalyzable and referred to a whole situation. This paper presents the case of formulaic language as evidence – a living linguistic fossil – which corroborates arguments in support of a holistic protolanguage account.
2
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A contemporary look at language origins

75%
Wacewicz S.
Avant
|
2016
|
vol. 7
|
issue 2
EN
Why is language unique? How did language come about? When did this happen? These questions, although quite emblematic of the Western intellectual tradition since its ancient beginnings, so far have not found satisfying answers. Indeed, many still question the very possibility of addressing these basic problems of the origins of language with proper scientific rigor (see e.g. Hauser et al. 2014). However, an emerging consensus is that current research in the field of language evolution is in fact bearing fruit, making it at least possible to judge in an informed manner which of these competing scenarios are far more or less probable. In what follows, I guide the reader through some of this research and some of these scenarios; for more details, I refer the reader to a recent book (Żywiczyński & Wacewicz 2015), which is the first monograph that presents this developing field of language evolution research to the Polish reader.
3
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A contemporary look at language origins

75%
Wacewicz S.
Avant
|
2016
|
vol. 7
|
issue 2
EN
Why is language unique? How did language come about? When did this happen? These questions, although quite emblematic of the Western intellectual tradition since its ancient beginnings, so far have not found satisfying answers. Indeed, many still question the very possibility of addressing these basic problems of the origins of language with proper scientific rigor (see e.g. Hauser et al. 2014). However, an emerging consensus is that current research in the field of language evolution is in fact bearing fruit, making it at least possible to judge in an informed manner which of these competing scenarios are far more or less probable. In what follows, I guide the reader through some of this research and some of these scenarios; for more details, I refer the reader to a recent book (Żywiczyński & Wacewicz 2015), which is the first monograph that presents this developing field of language evolution research to the Polish reader.
4
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Die Grenzen der Erkenntnis in der Linguistik: Ontogenese und Phylogenese

63%
Kotin M. L.
Linguistische Treffen in Wrocław
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2018
|
issue 14
17-28
EN
Limits of Knowledge in Linguistics: Ontogenesis and Phylogenesis The limits of knowledge in the analysis of natural human languages are due to both properties of language systems as subject of analysis and properties of the human awareness as instrument of cognition. Though the human awareness can follow its own activities by conceptualizing them in symbolic forms, the pre-phase of linguistic competence cannot be reconstructed. The second problem is connected with the time factor, i.e. the compulsive and decisive influence of time which enforces language change independently of partial causes of concrete language change in question.
DE
Die Erkenntnisgrenzen bei der Analyse natürlicher Sprachen ergeben sich sowohl aus den Eigenschaften der Sprachsysteme als Forschungsgegenstand als auch aus den Eigenschaften des menschlichen Bewusstseins als Erkenntniswerkzeug. Obwohl das menschliche Bewusstsein seine eigene Tätigkeit mittels ihrer Konzeptualisierung in symbolischen Formen verfolgen kann, entzieht sich die Vorphase linguistischer Kompetenz gänzlich einer angemessenen Rekonstruktion. Ein weiteres Problem hängt mit dem Zeitfaktor zusammen, d. h. dem unveräußerlichen und entscheidenden Einfluss der Zeit, welcher den Sprachwandel unabhängig von seinen partiellen Ursachen in einer gegebenen Sprache verursacht.
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