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THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE AS PURPOSIVE BEHAVIOR
Author(s) -
Glasersfeld Ernst
Publication year - 1976
Publication title -
annals of the new york academy of sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.712
H-Index - 248
eISSN - 1749-6632
pISSN - 0077-8923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1976.tb25487.x
Subject(s) - atlanta , citation , annals , library science , center (category theory) , psychology , sociology , history , computer science , classics , chemistry , archaeology , metropolitan area , crystallography
We have come to this meeting to discuss Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech. The two conjunctions in the title indicate that we are dealing with ;I composite subject. The items in each pair are certainly related, but they are also different. At the risk of being considered a nit-picker, I shall pursue these differences for a moment. Formulating them has helped me a great deal to clear my head and will, 1 hope, justify some of the things 1 am going to say later. To begin, we may say that there could hardly have been an evolution of speech, or language, if there had not been an origin. We can even generalize and say that there is no evolution without an origin. When we think in terms of the theory of evolution, we tend to focus on the way it functions, and then it seems quite natural that it must have been operative from the very beginning. Yet, it is fairly clear that for something to evolve, something must be there-and this something would be called the source, or the origin, of everything that evolved from it. 1 a m not making this point in order to stir a metaphysical wasp’s nest. I a m making it because I believe it has to be made if we are to understand one another. “The origin of speech” refers to a n item, a n event, o r a state of affairs, which we consider to have been the starting point for the “evolution of speech.” When we say “speech,” we inevitably have in mind vocal sounds that have a certain function-not just incidental vocal noises that are produced in a haphazard way. Yet, to have an evolution of speech, a species must have been producing haphazard vocal noises, the raw material, as it were, that could then acquire the function of speech. This raw material is a t the origin, and the subsequent changes, transformations, and additions that eventually brought it to what we now call “speech,” is its evolution. We could, of course, also investigate how that species came to produce haphazard vocal noises; but if we included that study under the heading ”evolution of speech,” we should have to include the study of how that species came to have the physiological structures that happen to produce noise, and so on, I’m afraid, right back to a study of how anything came to be alive. A theorist, as Hebb once suggested,’ is in one way like a bricklayer: if he wants to get on with his building, he has to accept bricks as bricks. If he becomes interested in the structure of bricks and how they are made, he ceases to be a bricklayer. So much for the distinction between origin and evolution. With the two terms of the second pair in our title, things may not go so smoothly. For a considerable time, linguists have implicitly and even explicitly equated ‘‘language’’ with “speech.” They did so quite naturally because “language” had always implied human language, and human language was presumed to have manifested itself in speech long before it found other channels, such as hieroglyphs and alphabets. But there is another, less ingenuous reason. The bulk of linguistic research, having chosen to follow Bloomfield-rather than Sapir, his teacherdeveloped a militant disregard for the function of the phenomenon it was studying.