Empirical And Conceptual Problems

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Empirical And Conceptual Problems With
Protolanguage By Joseph Poulshock, Doctoral
Student, University of Edinburgh Department 0f
Theoretical Applied Linguistics Language
Evolution and Computation Unit,
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• Conceptual Problems with Protolanguage
• The definition is too demanding. There are
  degrees of syntactic ordering in all four of the
  subsets of protolanguage. The delimitation of
  protolanguage as--words and that is all--is too
  narrow and needs redefinition.
• Regarding ape language, Kako (1999) claims Kanzi
  demonstrates some understanding of discrete
  combinatorics, category-based rules, and argument
  structure. Kanzi has successfully comprehended
  sentences where single word meanings and prior
  knowledge are insufficient for interpretation and
  where the roles in a sentence were
  interchangeable. Thus, he needed to rely at
  least partly on syntax.
• For children under two, Aitchison (1989)
  summarizes research stating that two-word-stage
  utterances are syntactic, so that the
  actor-action relationship is consistently actor
  first.
• Syntax in pidgin and feral languages also express
  varying degrees of syntax.

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• Conceptual Problems...
• Each subset is actually different, at least in
  some small ways.
• Each one may actually differ in grammatical and
  lexical complexity. Thus, it is possible to
  group them as less complex (children and ape
  languages) and more complex (feral and pidgin
  languages).
• Example "Genie have yellow material at school"
  (Bickerton, 1990117).
• The under-two category is arbitrary, for it
  varies with children, and thus should possibly be
  changed to the two-word stage category.
• Protolanguage as living fossil is allegory--not
  actuality.
• There are alternative versions of protolanguage,
  so besides being allegorical, it is not yet clear
  which version of the concept is most salient.
• Lastly, the lurch between protolanguage and what
  I call plenalanguage is still rather large, so it
  seems that more intermediate stages need to be
  proposed.

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Empirical Problems with Protolanguage Modern
structures may vary extensively their original
structure, and thus "are often not very
informative about their origin" (Stearns and
Hoekstra 2000 281), and this problem needs
further exploration in evolutionary linguistics.
The principle of recapitulating phylogeny from
ontogeny can be helpful, and the way children
learn languages may provide insights into
language origins, but we cannot over-rely on this
method. No language fossils exist. This
minimizes our ability to make inferences about
protolanguage from the fossil record. However,
the high physical and biochemical homology
between chimps and humans, allows us to make some
comparison-based inferences.
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Empirical Problems... Repeating linguistic
evolutionary events in experiments is difficult
because "we do not know, or cannot create, the
appropriate starting conditions" (Stearns and
Hoekstra 2000 281). However, hunter-gather
cultures and primate social life offer suggestive
correlations into the origins of language and
culture. Conclusion Protolangauge is an important
concept in evolution of language. Bickerton's
version offers some explanatory power, but
scholars need to resolve and counterbalance the
aforementioned conceptual and empirical problems
in order for research on the subject to progress.