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On the Origin of Language

A Bridge Between Biolinguistics and Biosemiotics

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Abstract

Thomas Sebeok and Noam Chomsky are the acknowledged founding fathers of two research fields which are known respectively as Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics and which have been developed in parallel during the past 50 years. Both fields claim that language has biological roots and must be studied as a natural phenomenon, thus bringing to an end the old divide between nature and culture. In addition to this common goal, there are many other important similarities between them. Their definitions of language, for example, have much in common, despite the use of different terminologies. They both regard language as a faculty, or a modelling system, that appeared rapidly in the history of life and probably evolved as an exaptation from previous animal systems. Both accept that the fundamental characteristic of language is recursion, the ability to generate an unlimited number of structures from a finite set of elements (the property of ‘discrete infinity’). Both accept that human beings are born with a predisposition to acquire language in a few years and without apparent efforts (the innate component of language). In addition to similarities, however, there are also substantial differences between the two fields, and it is an historical fact that Sebeok and Chomsky made no attempt at resolving them. Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics have become two separate disciplines, and yet in the case of language they are studying the same phenomenon, so it should be possible to bring them together. Here it is shown that this is indeed the case. A convergence of the two fields does require a few basic readjustments in each of them, but leads to a unified framework that keeps the best of both disciplines and is in agreement with the experimental evidence. What is particularly important is that such a framework suggests immediately a new approach to the origin of language. More precisely, it suggests that the brain wiring processes that take place in all phases of human ontogenesis (embryonic, foetal, infant and child development) are based on organic codes, and it is the step-by-step appearance of these brain-wiring codes, in a condition that is referred to as cerebra bifida, that holds the key to the origin of language.

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Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Noam Chomsky for suggesting various changes in the first draft of this paper and for discussing them at length. I also wish to thank Natalia Abieva, Stefan Artmann, Prisca Augustyn, Gérard Battail, Paul Cobley, John Collier, Stephen Cowley, Almo Farina, Don Favareau, Kleanthes Grohmann, Sungchul Ji, Anton Markoš, Chris Ottolenghi, Stanley Salthe, Liz Stillwaggon-Swan and Morten Tønnessen for their most appropriate notes. The manuscript of this paper has been circulated to 60 members of the Biosemiotic community and I warmly thank all of them for their comments.

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  1. Dipartimento di Morfologia ed Embriologia, Via Fossato di Mortara 64a, 44121, Ferrara, Italy

    Marcello Barbieri

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Correspondence to Marcello Barbieri.

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Barbieri, M. On the Origin of Language. Biosemiotics 3, 201–223 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9088-7

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