From metonymy to syntax in the communication of events

Jean-Louis Dessalles | TELECOM ParisTech

A modular analysis of spontaneous language use provides support for the existence of an identifiable step in language evolution, protolanguage. Our suggestion is that a grammarless form of expression would have evolved to signal unexpected events, a behavior still prevalent in our species. Words could not be so specific as to refer to whole, non-recurring, situations. They referred to elements such as objects or locations, and the communicated event was inferred metonymically. Compositionality was achieved, without syntax, through multi-metonymy, as words referring to elements of the same situation were concatenated into proto-utterances.

Keywords: metonymy, relevance, compositionality, protolanguage, pragmatics, evolution

Published online: 07 March 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.9.1.05des

Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Arbib, Michael A., Brad Gasser & Victor Barrès

2014. Language is handy but is it embodied?. Neuropsychologia 55 ► pp. 57 ff.

Dessalles, Jean-Louis

2016. L’émergence du sens au cours de l’évolution. Langages N° 201:1 ► pp. 129 ff.

Luuk, Erkki

2013. The structure and evolution of symbol. New Ideas in Psychology 31:2 ► pp. 87 ff.

Luuk, Erkki & Hendrik Luuk

2014. The evolution of syntax: Signs, concatenation and embedding. Cognitive Systems Research 27 ► pp. 1 ff.

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