Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Preliminaries
- Part II Correlate windows
- Part III Analogue windows
- 5 Incipient pidgins and creoles
- 6 Homesign systems and emergent sign languages
- 7 Modern motherese
- 8 Hunter-gatherers’ use of language
- 9 Language acquisition
- Part IV Abduction windows
- Part V Epilogue
- Notes
- References
- Index
9 - Language acquisition
from Part III - Analogue windows
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Preliminaries
- Part II Correlate windows
- Part III Analogue windows
- 5 Incipient pidgins and creoles
- 6 Homesign systems and emergent sign languages
- 7 Modern motherese
- 8 Hunter-gatherers’ use of language
- 9 Language acquisition
- Part IV Abduction windows
- Part V Epilogue
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
‘Extracting phyletic information from ontogeny’
The title of this section – a phrase borrowed from Stephen Jay Gould (1977: 212) – nicely captures what the acquisition window on language evolution is about. On Gould's account, the idea that a parallel exists between the stages of ontogeny and phylogeny is an ancient one. This idea has, in his view, been among the most important themes in the history of biology since Aristotle's time. It has also formed the basis of a range of theories on the evolution of language, a phenomenon about which no direct evidence exists. In response to the lack of fossil evidence, Kathleen Gibson, for instance, maintains that
an analysis of modern language development [in children] is one of the few potential means of gaining clues to the linguistic capacities of earlier humans. (Gibson 1999: 408)
Jim Hurford (2012: 590) goes even further when he states that ‘language acquisition [is] the most promising guide to what happened in language evolution’. He accordingly bases his gradualist theory of the origin of syntax primarily on evidence derived from language acquisition.
In preceding chapters, we have already looked briefly at inferences drawn by two scholars about language evolution from data about language acquisition. Thus, Chapter 5 deals with early work by Derek Bickerton (1990: 110ff.) in which he portrays the language of children under two as a ‘linguistic fossil’ that provides evidence for the properties of protolanguage as a stage in the evolution of language. In his words:
The evidence of childrens’ speech could thus be treated as consistent with the hypothesis that the ontogenetic development of language partially replicates its phylogenetic development. The speech of under-twos would then resemble a stage in the development of the hominid line between remote, speechless ancestors and ancestors with languages much like those of today. (Bickerton 1990: 115)
Chapter 7, in turn, considers cursorily Dean Falk's (2009: 106–8) use of the acquisition window. She holds, it may be recalled, that the way in which modern motherese aids contemporary babies in acquiring their language recapitulates to some extent the way in which prehistoric motherese facilitated the emergence of protolanguage and language.
The theories of language evolution proposed by Gibson, Hurford, Bickerton and Falk by no means exhaust the stock of those that attempt to extract phyletic information from linguistic ontogeny.
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- Information
- Language EvolutionThe Windows Approach, pp. 161 - 194Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016