[lbo-talk] Kenneally, some notes and background

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Wed Jun 10 01:33:05 PDT 2009


I've been reading Christine Kenneally's _The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language_ which is an overview to the debates in the field.... shag

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(Sorry this is so long, but I have all day...)

I spent a fascinating day reading to get an idea of what Kenneally has to say about the origin and evolution of language, I found this essay:

http://powells.com/essays/kenneally.html

Here is an excerpt:

I asked a lecturer how language began. `No one knows,' she said. `And no one asks the question because there's no way to answer it.'

The study of language evolution was formally banned by the Linguistics Society of Paris over a hundred years earlier. The ban was never lifted, and over time it mutated into an uncomfortable taboo. Yet not long after I asked about it, a growing group of men and women began to defy the informal edict against language evolution and wrestle with its many mysteries. The young field of evolutionary linguistics was pretty confused, and a few years back, having begun to write a book about it, I was, too. The biggest problem, naturally, was language...

It only occurred to me towards the end that using language to investigate and explain how language began was like, well, it wasn't like anything. It was a unique and recursive nightmare. I often had the sensation, while merely thinking about this, that my brain was physically straining.

Some of the smartest people around are trying to reconstruct the trajectory of language through time, and the field abounds with wondrous and confronting ideas. A handful of researchers think language is like a virus that infects the minds of humans. It's not a parasite, it's a symbiote - and this makes a deep, personal sense to me. Your brain shapes itself around language, and language also changes to suit you.

So how did it evolve? Language grew unsteadily, but it was strung upon a smooth, unbroken line.

The platforms of language were built over thousands of millennia and we share many of these with very different animals. What we would today recognize as language gathered itself for many tens of thousands of years. Its progress was not continuous - a miniscule step would be taken, then nothing would happen, then another step, maybe a lurch, then nothing again.

As meaning and mental structure clotted together, it did so in the morphing minds of species evolving from one into another. Along our lineage, cold-blooded creatures begat warm-blooded animals, mammals generated primates, and primates tossed us up. Yet all of this tumult and stasis and creeping change has raged around an oblivious line of mothers and their babies.

Piece by piece, through a process of genetic mutation and cultural legacy, they talked and gestured language into existence. No genetic change has ever been too great to break the chain, so when the babies became mothers themselves and had babies of their own, their babies also grew up and passed the legacy on. Eventually one of those mothers had me. Not long ago, I had a baby, too.

As I wrote this book, I watched as my toddler son learned English as a foreign language, or rather, learned language as a foreign language. I knew what language evolution was supposed to look like from the outside, but what does it feel like? At least in this case, as my two-year-old said when I asked what he was doing with a stray toy in a café, `I am making pleasure.' ''

According the author note, Kenneally got her PhD in Linguistics at Cambridge. Here is a video introduction to her book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uglKz9it5mU

A historical-philosophical note. The ban on studying the origin of language took place within a nationalistic war of intellectuals between the English Empirical school, the French Positivist school, and the German philosophy of culture schools. At the core of the debates was the question of the proper foundation for science, particularly what the French called The New Sciences of Man.

So the point is that American sciences including the social sciences inherited their view of the nature of science mostly from the English with some attention to the French, and very little from the Germans. That's a shame because the Germans had a much more integrated view of these fields and their relationship to philosophy, theories of knowledge, and history ...

All that means what? It goes to several different questions about the relationship between a theory of mind, a theory of knowledge, and the basis for developing a theory of language and culture, and all of which will have to be dealt with sooner or later whenever anybody starts to study human language, thought and society.

Two observations. First Kenneally's background is linguistics. I get the idea that linguistics as a technical field is not overly impressed with the social sciences. From her essay and speech, I don't remember any mention of psychology, sociology or anthropology. There are many references to what are more properly considered branches of the life sciences as in animal field studies, cognative science, neuoscience and genetics. So it seems to me there are some important dimensions and work that is missing in Kenneally's broad review.

Anthropologists, psychologists and sociologist have all done a quite a bit of work on human thought, language, and sociey. In fact their theories, schools of thought, and findings comprise a much larger body of work than the johnny come lately biologists.

I suspect what's going on in these omissions is either a conscieous or unconscious presumption of a hierarchy in a theory of knowledge. Crudely the hierarchy puts biology labs and field work on top, and social sciences somewhere lower down. This is one of the legacies of the theoretical primacy of British Empiricism over French Positvism and both firmly committed against any form of Kantianism or Hegelianism...and therefore a distant tained third place goes to constructs like those found in some German theories and studies of society, history and culture.

Here is an interesting historical account of Evolutionary Linguistics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_linguistics

``August Schleicher (1821-1868) and his 'Stammbaumtheorie' are often quoted as the starting point of evolutionary linguistics. Inspired by the natural sciences, especially biology, Schleicher was the first to compare languages to evolving species. [2] He introduced the representation of language families as an evolutionary tree in articles published in 1853. Joseph Jastrow published a gestural theory of the evolution of language in the seventh volume of Science, 1886.[3]

The Stammbaumtheorie proved to be very productive for comparative linguistics, but didn't solve the major problem of evolutionary linguistics: the lack of fossil records. The question of the origin of language was abandoned as unsolvable. Famously, the Société Linguistique de Paris in 1866 refused to admit any further papers on the subject. The field has re-appeared in 1988 in the Linguistic Bibliography, as a subfield of psycholinguistics. A dedicated research conference was first held in 1996. The Studies in the Evolution of Language series has been appearing with Oxford University Press since 2001.''

So, guess where August Schieicher comes from?

``August Schleicher began his career studying theology and Indo-European, especially Slavic languages. Influenced by Hegel, he formed the theory that a language is an organism, with periods of development, maturity, and decline. In 1850 Schleicher completed a monograph systematically describing the languages of Europe...''

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Schleicher

On the other hand, in Kenneally's case these observations about intellectional history might just be an artifact of how she began to investigate the origin and evolution of language. One of those artifacts is the way the idea is constructed, which is in biological terms of evolution. If you start with the concept of biological evolution, it might not occcur to you that either philosophy or the social sciences would have much to say that is approprate.

The more recent studies Kenneally cites all share similar intellectual backgrounds, prejudices, and preconceptions about the nature of their particular `science', which is the conceit that they produce the true hard core stuff in their general field of thought.

Finally, here is a paper on the evolution of the evolutionary linguistics:

http://www.colorado.edu/ling/CRIL/Volume20_Issue1/paper_STEBBINS.pdf



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