by C R Hallpike
…a new set of behaviors begins to emerge that are not dyadic, like these early behaviours, but are triadic in the sense that they involve a co-ordination of their interactions with objects and people, resulting in a referential triangle of child, adult, and the object or event to which they share attention.… Most prototypically, it is at this age that infants for the first time begin to flexibly and reliably look where adults are looking (gaze following), to engage with them in relatively extended bouts of social interaction mediated by an object (joint engagement), to use adults as social reference points (social referencing), and to act on objects the way adults are acting on them (imitative learning). (Tomasello 2000: 62)
In particular, it is at this time that children start declaratively pointing to or holding up objects to gain the attention of adults not to themselves but to outside objects. “Declaratives are of special importance because they indicate especially clearly that the child does not just want some result to happen, but really desires to share attention with an adult” (ibid., 63).
On the other hand, by contrast:
Chimpanzee gestures are essentially imperative, designed to bring reward or advantage to the gesturer. That is, the chimp is requesting something, rather than making a statement. Studies of the use of signs by chimpanzees and bonobos in their interactions with humans have shown that 96-98 percent of their signs are imperative, with the remaining 2-4 percent serving no apparent function…. In marked contrast, human language includes declarative statements as well as imperative ones. We talk in order to share information, rather than merely request something for ourselves. (Corballis 2011: 163)
Chimpanzees are also very poor at auditory imitation and not much better at imitating what they see (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch 2002: 1575). Tomasello has shown that it is the unique qualities of human social interaction that provide an essential basis for the creation of language as a collective representation. Human cultural learning is made possible:
…by a single very special form of social cognition, namely, the ability of individual organisms to understand con-specifics as beings like themselves who have intentional and mental lives like their own. This understanding enables individuals to imagine themselves ‘in the mental shoes’ of some other person, so that they can learn not just from the other but through the other. This understanding of others as intentional beings like the self is crucial in human cultural learning because cultural artifacts and social practices—exemplified prototypically by the use of tools and linguistic symbols—invariably point beyond themselves to other outside entities: tools point to the problems they are designed to solve and linguistic symbols point to the communicative situations they are designed to represent. Therefore, to socially learn the conventional use of a tool or a symbol, children must come to understand why, to what outside end the other person is using the tool or symbol, that is to say, they must come to understand the intentional significance of the tool use or symbolic practice—what it is “for”, what “we”, the users of the this tool or symbol, do with it. (Tomasello 2000: 5-6)
Again, “teaching is a form of altruism, founded on a motive to help, in which individuals donate information to others for their use” (Tomasello 2009: xiv), and humans actively teach each other things without regard to kinship. Even before speech develops, infants will try to provide information to adult strangers who need it by pointing, but apes do not understand this type of informative pointing at all. They do sometimes point at humans, but only to indicate that they want something for themselves; on the other hand, “Confronted with pointing, [human] infants appear to ask themselves ‘why does she think that my attending to that cup will be helpful or relevant to me ?’” (ibid., 18).
Infants also have an innate grasp of rules, in the sense of readily understanding that things should be done in a certain way, and try to enforce this. Children therefore legislate norms by themselves, regardless of parental instruction, even when not immediately involved in an activity, so that, observing a solitary game, they will condemn a puppet who is introduced and then disobeys the rules. The notion of the ideal way of how a game ought to be played follows directly from watching an adult, and children don’t need to see the adult corrected. So rules are not just instrumental guides to the children’s own effective action, but “are supra-individual entities that carry social force independently of such instrumental considerations” (ibid., 38).
Pattern-recognition, in which humans are specially adept, is also another crucial aspect of language acquisition, particularly during the sensori-motor stage of development. Evans (2014: 120) summarises these as:
The ability to relate similar objects and events, resulting in the formation of perceptual and conceptual categories for objects and events. Category formation aids recognition of events and objects.
The ability to form sensorimotor schemas based on recurrent perception of action. This is associated with the acquisition of basic sensorimotor skills, and the recognition of actions or events, such as crawling, walking, picking up an object, and so on.
The ability to perform distributional analysis on perceptual and behavioural sequences. This allows infants to identify and recognise recurrent combinations of elements in a sequence and thus identify and recognise sequences.
The ability to create analogies (recognition of similarity) between two or more wholes (including utterances, based on the functional similarity of some of the elements in the wholes.
We have, then, ample evidence for a number of innate dispositions in children that facilitate their acquisition of language: joint attention, social referencing, information sharing, imitative learning, and the grasp of rules, to which should be added skill in pattern recognition and sufficiency of short-term-memory. Children acquire a good, though not complete, mastery of grammar by around the age of 5 or so, which is well before they can fully grasp concrete operational thought, still less formal operations. This is presumably because, unlike the physical world about which they have to construct their own representations, language is not only presented to children ready-made, but is made by beings with the same minds as the children who are learning it.
The earliest language of our ancestors would presumably have resembled that of children in many respects, and Jackendoff and Wittenberg (2014: 68-72) sketch out a plausible model for the early stages of language, which like that of children would have begun as a one-word “grammar”. But while this could not involve syntax it could be greatly enriched by “pragmatics”—real life content. In the case of infants’ speech, “For instance, ‘doggie’ can be used to mean ‘there’s the doggie’, ‘where’s the doggie’, ‘that looks like a doggie’, ‘I want the doggie’, ‘doggie pay attention to me’, and so on” (ibid., 71) depending on what the situation is.
The next step is a two-word grammar, the number two being significant because this introduces a semantic relation between the words. “We speculate that this new semantic relation is the real source of complexity in two-word utterances” (ibid., 68n.3). The two word grammar then develops into a “concatenation grammar” consisting of strings of words of indeterminate length, but still without syntactic categories like nouns and verbs. Simple phrase grammars then follow, in which phrases are distinguished from words in the utterance: “[A]t this point in the hierarchy it starts to become useful to introduce parts of speech (or syntactic categories) to label words and phrases, yielding a part-of-speech simple phrase grammar. In such a grammar, different categories of phrases may specify different categories and orders for the words they contain” (ibid., 69). When it becomes possible to group phrases into higher order phrases, recursion finally becomes possible and syntactical structures develop.
But Jackendoff and Wittenberg point out the crucial role in this process of semantics and what they call “pragmatic enrichment” at the interface between utterance and meaning, which can be applied to much more complex utterances than one-word grammars. “They invoke only linear order and semantic distinctions such as obj
ect vs. action, argument vs. modifier, agent vs. patient, and topic vs. focus. They show how a fairly expressive language could be constituted without syntactic categories and even without phrase structure” (ibid., 77).
This is an appropriate point to review Hockett’s claim, mentioned earlier, that “all languages have about equally complex jobs to do”, which is the exact opposite of the truth. In our society language is employed in a vast diversity of ways through the medium of writing: literature, the natural and social sciences, technology, journalism, law, theology, and philosophy, for example, quite apart from all the occasions of its spoken forms both in the news media and face-to-face. On the other hand, in primitive societies there is, of course, no writing, and conversation is focused on the concrete and practical, so that all language is experienced in the context of daily life. In my experience of the Konso and Tauade uses of language, the telling of stories does not involve any apparent changes in syntax from that found in ordinary conversation. There are few strangers, and everyone shares the same general experience, with little specialisation of labour, apart from considerations of gender and age.
There are, in particular, no schools or formal instruction or lectures from adults; on the contrary, children learn practical tasks in the context of daily life by participating in the activities. Gradually the child is inducted into the full life of an adult. He is almost never told what to do in an explicit, verbal, or abstract manner. He is expected to watch, learning by imitation and repetition. Education is concrete and nonverbal, concerned with practical activity, not abstract generalization. There are never lectures on farming, house-building, or weaving. The child spends all his days watching until at some point he is told to join in the activity. If he makes a mistake, he is simply told to try again (Gay and Cole 1967: 16; see also Fortes 1938 for detailed confirmation of this).
The general principle at work here is that the richer the contextual information of utterances, the less load needs to be placed on syntactical structures to supply meaning:
Our idea is that the simpler grammars in our hierarchy put more responsibility for comprehension on pragmatics and discourse context. For instance, to understand a child’s one-word utterance, one needs to rely heavily on inferences about what the child might have in mind. As the child’s grammar acquires more grammatical devices, it provides more resources for making complex thoughts explicit, reducing the workload on the hearer. One could say that the syntactic complexity of a maturing speaker is gradually easing the semantic and pragmatic burden on the hearer. (Jackendoff and Wittenberg 2014: 66)
6. Some examples of simple languages
To illustrate this extremely important point I shall give some examples from non-literate cultures whose communication was exclusively oral, so that meaning was heavily dependent on real-life contexts. The most celebrated example of a society with a very limited grammar which also lacks recursion is that of the Piraha of the Amazon, as described by Daniel Everett, a professional linguist who originally went there as a missionary. His work has been claimed as a fundamental challenge to Chomsky and initiating a revolution in linguistics, but from what we have seen of developments in linguistics in recent decades, the claims of Universal Grammar, and especially about the central importance of recursion have actually been obsolescent for some time.
The Piraha are a small population of a few hundred hunter-gatherers with a very simple material culture, living in villages on the banks of a tributary of the Amazon, who have been in contact with the Portuguese for more than two hundred years, and with missionaries, but who refuse to become acculturated. Everett describes the occasion when he first realised that the Piraha have no recursion as follows: “[O]ne day Kohoi was making a fishing arrow and needed a nail for the tip. He spoke to his son, Paita: ‘Hey Paita, bring back some nails. Dan bought those very nails. They are the same’” (Everett 2008: 227). Apparently the Piraha language does not have relative clauses that would allow them to say “Bring back the nails that Dan bought” instead. But, despite this limitation in their language, the Piraha can clearly understand the idea that has been expressed by the relative clause here; it is simply that they have to use a circumlocution to express it. The Piraha language also has a very limited grammar in other respects, which can be summarised as, besides no recursion or subordinate clauses:
...no relative pronouns; only single modifiers; only one possessor; no co-ordinates such as “John and Bill came today”; no disjunctions e.g. “either Bob or Bill will come”; only one verb and one adjective in a sentence; no comparatives or superlatives; no counting; no distinction between singular and plural; no quantifiers—some, all, every, none; nouns have no prefixes or suffixes; no colour terms; no passive constructions; word order is not strict; no phatic communication (no greetings or farewells, “please” or “thank you” etc.).
Everett maintains, quite rightly, that culture has a powerful influence on language, and claims that many features of Piraha culture and language can be explained by what he calls the Immediacy of Experience Principle (IEP). With regard to Piraha grammar he says:
Embedded sentences rarely, if ever, are used to make assertions. So the IEP predicts that the Piraha will lack embedded sentences because declarative utterances may contain only assertions. (234-5) It predicts that P will lack coordination because this also involves the general property of recursion. (236) The IEP’s restriction against recursion also correctly predicts that P will lack disjunction, as in Either Bob or Bill will come …because it, like co-ordination, involves putting phrases inside of other phrases—recursion.... [T]he IEP helps to account for the other gaps in the language … such as the absence of numbers and numerals, the absence of color words, the simplicity of the kinship system, and so on. (237)
The IEP is also claimed to explain why the Piraha have no rituals or myths:
This principle states that formulaic language and actions (rituals) that involve reference to non-witnessed events are avoided. So a ritual where the principle character could not claim to have seen what he or she was enacting was prohibited…. [T]he idea behind the principle is that the Pirahas avoid formulaic encoding of values and instead transmit values and information via actions and words that are original in composition with the person acting or speaking [or witnesses or told by a witness]. So traditional oral literature and rituals have no place. (ibid., 84)
The IEP is also said to account for the very simple Piraha kinship system. The kinship terms do not extend beyond the lifetime of any given speaker in their scope and are thus in principle witnessable—[e.g., one’s grandfather can be met, but not one’s great-grandfather] (ibid.,133).
Here I must record my agreement with Sampson in his interview with Everett, when he says “I also wonder why it is important to you to derive diverse properties of Piraha from a single, simple abstract principle such as Immediacy of Experience. This feels like the kind of intellectual move that is attractive to the true believers in innate knowledge of language” (Sampson 2009b: 224). Everett’s ethnography of the Piraha is thin by anthropological standards, but one can make out enough of their social organization and culture to conclude that there are problems with taking the Immediate Experience Principle as some distinctive feature of their culture. By this I mean that if we take into account the comparative literature on hunter-gatherers, and also the findings of cross-cultural developmental psychology the IEP turns out to be a familiar feature of hunter-gatherer culture, albeit developed to an extreme degree, but with which anthropologists are already familiar. Foragers are generally characterized by fluid group organization, individual freedom of movement and group membership, immediate and relatively easy access to resources, immediate consumption, simple division of labour, and relatively direct personal leverage over other individuals (Honigman 1968; Cohen 1985: 99-100). Morris (1991: 266-67) also refers to a normative stress on symmetric relations and egalitarianism, both between parents and children and between the sexes; second, a normative stress on self-sufficiency…
third, a general looseness of social ties so that camps are ‘shapeless, unstructured aggregations’ of related kin, there being no corporate groups of any kind.
It has also been observed by various anthropologists (e.g., Gardner 1966, Morris 1976, 1991) that while the members of hunter-gatherer societies unsurprisingly have a great deal of practical knowledge of their environment, not only are their taxonomic systems limited in scope but they have a relative unconcern with systematisation (Morris 1976: 544). Gardner refers to this as memorate knowledge, that is, knowledge based on personal, concrete experience, and it has been noted as a characteristic of a wide range of hunter-gatherer societies, as well as some shifting cultivators. It extends to social relations as well as to the natural world, and Gardner for example says of the Paliyans, “Just as [they] have problems with natural taxonomy, they manifest difficulty providing models or rules to describe social practices such as residence” (Gardner 1966: 398). We can see that all these features apply quite well to the Piraha.
For example, it should be noted that the Piraha mode of classifying kin is about the simplest possible. All we have are a few categories basically referring to generation, and not even confined to actual kin: baixi = parent, grandparent, or someone to whom one wishes to express submission, e.g., a Brazilian, or a term of affection for the elderly. xahaigi = sibling, male or female, and it can also refer to any Piraha of the same generation. There is also hoagi = son, and kai = daughter (ibid., 86). It is not even certain that there are distinct terms for “mother” and “father”, but Everett is not very clear on this. The lack of number terms is also a good example of this weak classification, but while the Piraha are an extreme case we noted earlier that many hunter-gatherer cultures and also some shifting cultivators may only have words for single, pair, and many. Again, Everett remarks (ibid., 119) that Piraha lacks logical quantifiers like all, each, every , so that the word one might try to translate as “all” really only means something like “large amount”, and so on. But, like so many other features of Piraha culture, this is a typical feature of primitive thought. For us, “some” and “all” are fundamental notions of logic and basic to propositions of inclusion which relate parts to wholes. So “all” denotes the totality of a set A, while “some” denotes “A – x” (where x is greater than 0). In primitive usage, however, we often find that while words are used that ethnographers translate as “all” and “some”, “all” does not denote “all possible members of set A”, but “all those in our experience” or simply “a lot” (see Hallpike 1979: 181-2). In so far as primitive thought is not usually concerned with working out the theoretically maximum number of items in a set, it will therefore tend to use “all” in the Piraha sense of “very many”.