Two opposing accounts of early language evolution, the compositional and the holistic, have become the subject of lively debate. It has been argued that an evolving compositional protolanguage would not be useful for communication until it reached a certain level of grammatical complexity. This paper offers a new, discourse-oriented perspective on the debate. It argues that discourse should be viewed, not as a level of language structure ‘beyond the sentence’, but as sequenced communicative behaviour, typically but not uniquely involving language. This provides for continuity from exchanges making use of simple communicative resources such as single words and gestures to those making use of complex grammatical conventions. Supporting evidence comes from child language and from original experiments with adults using constrained language systems. The paper shows that the utility of emerging compositional language is not dependent on some critical level of complexity, and so defends the compositional account.
2018. Grammaticalization and Bodily Action: Do They Go Together?. Research on Language and Social Interaction 51:1 ► pp. 26 ff.
Park, Gibeom & Jun Tani
2015. Development of compositional and contextual communicable congruence in robots by using dynamic neural network models. Neural Networks 72 ► pp. 109 ff.
Wilson, Bart J. & Samuel R. Harris
2015. Language and Cooperation in Hominin Scavenging. SSRN Electronic Journal
Wilson, Bart J. & Samuel R. Harris
2017. Language and cooperation in hominin scavenging. Evolution and Human Behavior 38:3 ► pp. 376 ff.
Luuk, Erkki & Hendrik Luuk
2014. The evolution of syntax: Signs, concatenation and embedding. Cognitive Systems Research 27 ► pp. 1 ff.
Tomlinson, Gary
2013. Evolutionary Studies in the Humanities: The Case of Music. Critical Inquiry 39:4 ► pp. 647 ff.
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