"The dominant contemporary theory of the origin of language proposes that genetic change produced genetic instructions for building a special module for grammar in the human brain. Before genetic specialization for grammar, people had no grammar at all: no grammatical speech, no parsing for grammar, no concept of grammar. To be sure, they communicated (birds and bees communicate) but their communication was totally ungrammatical. It was not language."
Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (140)
In The Literary Mind, Mark Turner explains a theory held by many scholars (including Noam Chomsky and Paul Bloom) that the development of language is genetic. The idea is that each child is born with special instructions in their genes that code for an autonomous grammar module. When a baby is learning language, then, it is really just learning which parts of its language module to leave on and which parts to turn off.
Mark Turner comes right out and says "I think this theory of the historical origin of language is wrong."
Dr. Petersen brought up Turner's proposal in the seed post about language, that language came about as a result of story. I was looking at what he had to say and I think it's kind of interesting!
So, first I want to share an analogy that Mark Turner made up to illustrate his idea:
The Community That Developed Martial Arts
Once upon a time there was a community of people that have trained themselves in Martial Arts. Every person in this community could do that community's special version of Marital Arts.... Every. Single. One. The people didn't acquire their skill genetically-- it's not like you could be born with the muscle control, balance, vision, and work required to master their Art. But, once you learned, it seemed natural and with even more practice, it almost seemed inevitable!
If the community was structured in such a way that people who were better at martial arts had certain reproductive advantage, then the community provides an environment of EVOLUTIONARY ADAPTIVENESS for the genetic change: the "martial arts" trait is adaptive. Discovering the child's little genetic structure that helps it be better could then lead to a "genetic arms race". After its discovery, each increment of genetic specialization would give the person who possesses it special reproductive advantage in the community.
The thing is, the community developed their Martial Arts without genetic specialization for Martial Artistry. So genetics doesn't play a role in the further development and refinement of their art.
The Community That Developed Rudimentary Grammar
Before we start this story you have to be a little familiar with Turner's lingo:
- parable= the mental capacities/cognitive mechanisms independent of grammar that all human beings have
- grammar=the whole system and structure of language
- parable+story= grammar [story has the structure with objects, characters, events, movements, viewpoints, etc. that parable takes and gives to it voice [signs in the case of sign language] Parable takes the structure from story, projects it onto voice, and grammar (the whole system and structure of language) is created. "Sentences come from stories by way of parable."
Once upon a time there was a community of people that used parable to create their own grammatical structure for vocal sound. Everyone developed story, projection, learned to channel their grunts and clicks, is trained by their parents, and learns to bring in grammar through parable.
A baby is born in this community with a special genetic structure that helps it to project story onto voice. It is a baby though, and obviously everyone else in the community is better at their rudimentary grammar than it. They devote their time and energy to teaching this new member of the community their art, but the child has a secret edge.
If the community was structured in such a way that people who had an easier time with grammar had certain reproductive advantage, then the community provides an environment of EVOLUTIONARY ADAPTIVENESS for the genetic change: the "grammar" trait is adaptive. Discovering the child's little genetic structure that helps it be better could then lead to a "genetic arms race". After its discovery, each increment of genetic specialization would give the person who possesses it special reproductive advantage in the community.
The thing is, the community developed their Grammar without genetic specialization for grammar. It rose by parable. So genetics doesn't play a role in the development and refinement of grammar.
How This Ties to Our Group's Focus
These ideas are relevant to our focus on the systems of language. Mark Turner certainly does make a good argument on how we develop language systems: it has nothing to do with the "survival of the most grammatically adept" and everything to do with people coming together and applying universal skills to one cause. Just like none of us were born masters of Martial Arts (no genetic specialization for martial arts exists--"the competence is assembled by directing preexisting capacities of muscle control, balance, walking, vision, and so on, combined with arduous work to acquire it"[Turner, 142].) none of us were born with an autonomous grammar module. We learn to bring together story, we learn to control our arbitrary gurgles and moans, we structure our noises to convey stories and with a little help from our parents we learn to do it in one way and BOOM! We become masters of our own community's language system!
To read more about Mark Turner's theory check out The Literary Mind
To read more about Mark Turner's theory check out The Literary Mind
In Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary introduction he says that being able to speak and have a language is a godly attribute. He goes through this reasoning process to where he gets to that conclusion. I left the dictionary at home and I can't find it anywhere on the web, if anyone can please send me the link. It's interesting how people now can completely blow God off and come up with some "scientific" theory instead.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really great way to put things into perspective as far as understanding a system of language. Great analogy/story to describe things.
ReplyDeleteA lot of times we often think that certain groups of people may be genetically more able to perform some type of function or something of that nature, whether this is true is a few cases or not, it definitely doesn't apply to language or learning ones native language.
Interesting to think how different your life could be if you learned a different language other than english as your native tongue.
And I continue to disagree... (sorry this is long)
ReplyDeleteThe thing about the martial arts analogy is that there is *totally* a genetic basis for the ability to do martial arts. Think of the far, far back ancestor of a human, which probably looked vaguely like a chimpanzee. Could you teach it the human version of martial arts, even if you could manage to communicate with it? I sincerely doubt it. Its joints are set up differently, its limbs are longer, it does not think through problems in the same way a human would.
People did not develop martial arts in a vacuum. People have bodies, and they have been using them to fight things since far before formal martial arts were invented. Martial arts developed exactly because we already had the genetic specialty in us from hundreds and thousands of years trying to find animals to eat and trying to keep from being eaten. Martial arts were just a better way to utilize that already inborn ability to learn how to move quickly and precisely. Genetics are not the ability, they are the potential to gain the ability.
And so it is with language. A system of grammar is *very* evolutionarily useful. A group of ancient pre-people who developed the ability to categorize words into grammatical functions would be able to communicate more complicated thoughts to each other. They would have this advantage of communication when they got in a fight with their neighboring tribe of pre-people. They would be better able to kill their enemies, steal their women, and bear more children with this wondrous ability to express ideas with more than one word. And these people after many thousands and millions of years became ingrained to like storytelling, because the ones who told stories were the ones who stayed alive. The ones who said "Tribe, there are lions coming to eat us." or "Yesterday Grundo did a bad thing. He is bad for our tribe. We should kill him." We invented story, like martial arts, as a refining and perfecting of potential that we gained from needing to survive in a harsh environment
So, I guess in the end it does come back to how you define a "story." If a story is anything that involves a subject and a verb, then yes, storytelling obviously came exactly when grammar did, but when ancient people were developing language, I honestly doubt they were developing it for the express purpose of telling stories around the camp fire.
wow thanks for your comments! Murphy, I think it's interesting how you brought the fact that language really is a blessing from God in our lives, and Diane I like that you didn't take mark Turner's ideas lying down!
ReplyDeleteBeing able to see connections to make the uncontrollable, controllable, is an interesting thought here. Humans can't have direct control over genetics, but at the same time we kind of do through what we emphasize in society. To me it feels kind of like the idea of encapsulation in programming. You want to make the values of certain variables out of reach for people running your program, so instead of making those variables public you make them private and create "getter" methods to retrieve the information but not change it. So in this way we can change the surrounding of the variable in order to somewhat control an encapsulated part of the world.
ReplyDeleteI like Kody's comment: "A lot of times we often think that certain groups of people may be genetically more able to perform some type of function or something of that nature, whether this is true is a few cases or not, it definitely doesn't apply to language or learning ones native language."
ReplyDeleteLanguage is something that isn't something that certain groups of people are better at. It is something that is somewhat innate (or the need to communicate or preserve information is, rather) and it is in the culture in which we are raised that determines our language. Like Murphy stated- I also think that having a language is a Godly attribute. After all, that is how he communicates with us-either written or oral language.