INFLUENCE OF HUMAN SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENT ON THE ORIGINS OF LINGUISTIC SYMBOLS AND GRAMMAR
Keywords:
language, symbolic cognition, grammaticality, cultural functionality, continuity hypothesis, critical selective pressureAbstract
Language is a hierarchically organised structure defined by the high level of unit combining possibilities at various levels. What distinguishes human language from animal languages is the ability of linguistic units to preserve old meanings while acquiring the new ones due to the possibility of structural unit distribution. Quite a lot of syntactic operations can reflect the cultural functionality of language conveying the pragmatic effects of linguistic usage. The qualities that make human language unique are: the presence of willingness, semanticity, arbitrariness, discreteness, displacement, independence from stimuli, generativity, patterning duality, reflectiveness, recursion and learnability.
Continuity hypothesis supporters view human language as the natural product of animal language development, while those who advocate discontinuity hypothesis accentuate a clean break from previous communication systems. Although the results of careful observations of the onthological language development of young children may prove to be of great avail for the interpretations of philogenetic language development, it still has not been clarified why, when and how linguistic competence and language itself occurred initially. Yet, several theories assume that the cause lies with the existence of interaction between the morphological changes of human systems of organs and those newly appearing needs of the person in the community who gets to understand the ability to influence the environment. The origin of critical selective pressure initiating the development of arbitrary symbols, symbolic cognition and language may lie in: possible genetic mutations such as the appearance of mirror neurons, bipedalism, diet changes, access to more sorts of tools contributing to the actions performed more efficiently, the growth of human community and the need for social organisation due to the increase of group mobility and their needs.
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