Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Language: A Darwinian Adaptation?
- Part I The Evolution of Cooperative Communication
- 1 Introduction: The Evolution of Cooperative Communication
- 2 Comprehension, Production and Conventionalisation in the Origins of Language
- 3 Cooperation, Competition and the Evolution of Prelinguistic Communication
- 4 Language and Hominid Politics
- 5 Secret Language Use at Female Initiation: Bounding Gossiping Communities
- 6 Play as Precursor of Phonology and Syntax
- Part II The Emergence of Phonetic Structure
- Part III The Emergence of Syntax
- Epilogue
- Author Index
- Subject Index
6 - Play as Precursor of Phonology and Syntax
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Language: A Darwinian Adaptation?
- Part I The Evolution of Cooperative Communication
- 1 Introduction: The Evolution of Cooperative Communication
- 2 Comprehension, Production and Conventionalisation in the Origins of Language
- 3 Cooperation, Competition and the Evolution of Prelinguistic Communication
- 4 Language and Hominid Politics
- 5 Secret Language Use at Female Initiation: Bounding Gossiping Communities
- 6 Play as Precursor of Phonology and Syntax
- Part II The Emergence of Phonetic Structure
- Part III The Emergence of Syntax
- Epilogue
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
The theme of language as play suggests inquiries into non-cognitive uses of language such as that found in riddles, jingles, or tongue twisters – and beyond this into the poetic and ritual function of language, as well as into parallels between language and ritual, language and music, and language and dance. It also provides an explanation for the obvious fact that so much in language is non-optimal for purposes of communicating cognitive information.
Morris Halle (1975: 528)Primate vocalisations are irrepressible, context-bound indices of emotional states, in some cases conveying additional information about the sender's condition, status and/or local environment. Speech has a quite different function: it permits communication of information concerning a shared, conceptual environment – a world of intangibles independent of currently perceptible reality.
A suite of formal discontinuities are bound up with this fundamental functional contrast. Whereas primate vocalisations are not easily faked, human speech signals are cognitively controlled, linked arbitrarily to their referents and ‘displaced’ – hence immune from contextual corroboration (Burling 1993). The meanings of primate gestures/calls are evaluated on an analog, ‘more/less’ scale; speech signals are digitally processed (Burling 1993). When combined, primate signals and associated meanings blend and grade into one another; the basic elements of speech are discrete/particulate (Abler 1989; Studdert-Kennedy 1998). Primate recipients evaluate details of signalling performance; in speech, the focus is on underlying intentions, with listeners compensating for deficiencies in performance (Grice 1969; Sperber and Wilson 1986).
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- Information
- The Evolutionary Emergence of LanguageSocial Function and the Origins of Linguistic Form, pp. 99 - 120Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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