Summary
Rousseau is known for saying that words are necessary in order to establish the use of words. Condillac, it seems,was the first to see that language origin involves a similar paradox. Faced with this situation, I have expounded and elucidated Popper’s hypothesis of a two-step origin of human language — which appears to meet this paradox very well — using evidence from ethological and psychological research. A situational analysis suggests that, on the one hand, spoken language originally resulted from playful improvisation or invention, based upon certain pre-adaptations for communication (proto-language codes) which early man shared in part with other higher primates. Human language, on the other hand, probably evolved further under the influence of a combined selection pressure deriving from certain interacting exosomatic (external) factors. This evolution may have been a consequence of the way in which Homo sapiens’ use of language changed the impact of these factors.
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Petersen, A.F. (1992). On Emergent Pre-Language and Language Evolution and Transcendent Feedback from Language Production on Cognition and Emotion in Early Man. In: Wind, J., Chiarelli, B., Bichakjian, B., Nocentini, A., Jonker, A. (eds) Language Origin: A Multidisciplinary Approach. NATO ASI Series, vol 61. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2039-7_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2039-7_23
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