Journal Of Linguistics Review

Assalamu'alaikum readers 😊 i will review jurnal chris knight, he is proffesor anthropology.
And i will review The evolutionary emergence of language: social functions and the origins of linguistic form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Over the course of decades spanning a century, linguists avoided addressing the question of how human linguistic ability might have evolved. The apparent problem was the tendency towards unsupported speculation in the heady period in which evolution first became part of the conceptual framework of human thought. This remained the case until the last decade, even through the Chomskian ‘revolution’, although the centerpiece of the theories promulgated by Noam Chomsky is a hypothetical innate ‘Universal Grammar’ that determines the syntax of all human languages. And syntax was taken to be the defining quality of human linguistic ability. An innate organ of the mind governing syntax must be instantiated in the brain through the expression of genes. Although this amounts to a strong biological claim, the evolution of the putative Universal Grammar was, like most aspects of biology, ignored by virtually all linguists and consigned to fringe groups outside the mainstream of linguistic inquiry.
One of the papers in this volume, that of Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy (‘The distinction between sentences and noun phrases: an impediment to language evolution?’), touches on the proposal that the neural mechanisms involved in speech production may have been the starting point for syntax, a suggestion that has previously been noted and developed. In a meaningful sense, syntax codifies relationships that hold between various aspects of behavior, which in their totality achieve a particular purpose. Lashley (1951) realized that this is the case and suggested that the ‘roots’ of human syntactic ability most likely lie in the neural structures that regulate motor control. The relationship that may hold between the neural mechanisms regulating motor control and syntax is discussed in detail in Kimura (1979) and Lieberman (2000).

Second, the paper contributed by Michael Studdert-Kennedy, ‘Evolutionary implications of the particulate principle: imitation and the dissociation of phonetic form from semantic function’, focuses on the ‘particulate’ nature of speech, citing phonetic transcriptions and alphabetic orthography, downplaying the fact that speech is encoded into syllable-sized units. Given Studdert-Kennedy’s long association with Haskins Laboratories, where many of the seminal studies on speech encoding originated, this omission is difficult to understand. Studdert-Kennedy cites alphabetic systems of orthography as evidence for the psychological reality of particulate phonemes, but he disregards the fact that other successful orthographic systems code entire syllables and words, as is the case for Chinese. And there is much evidence that syllables are primary units in both the production and perception of speech. For example, it is extremely difficult for monolingual speakers of English to produce words that begin with the final [ŋ] of the English word sing. Studdert-Kennedy also claims that meaning plays no role in the process by which children imitate sounds — a most unlikely conclusion. Even dogs pay attention to the meaning of a word: every dog owner knows that dogs quickly learn to respond to words such as ‘out’ or ‘biscuit’. In contrast, consider the third paper focusing on speech, by Marilyn Vihman & Rory A. Depaolis, ‘The role of mimesis in infant language development: evidence for phylogeny’. These authors disagree with Studdert-Kennedy and discuss the role of imitation in the acquisition of speech by children.

Chris Knight, in an interesting contribution on ‘The evolution of cooperative communication’, points to the role of play in the acquisition of language; however, he neglects the body of evidence documented by Greenfield (1991) which argues for a gradual transition from gestures to vocal signals in the course of human language development. Knight instead favors a model that leads to an abrupt saltation from ‘protolanguage’ to the sudden appearance of full human linguistic ability.
In short, the hermetic tradition of linguistic research pervades many of the papers in this volume. Computer simulations can be useful but they must take account of biological facts if they are to provide any insights on the course of evolution. And the broader framework of evolutionary biology must be considered. Studies that take account of the communicative and cognitive behavior of human beings and other species incorporating relevant anatomical, physiological, neurophysiological and genetic data as well as the archaeological record would better illuminate our understanding of the evolution of human language.

REFERENCES
Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species(Facsimile edn. 1964). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.