Join the dots: A musical interlude in the evolution of language?

Tallerman, Maggie

doi:10.1017/s0022226713000017

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…Botha, 2009;Tallerman, 2008;Wray, 1998). For critiques of the musical protolanguage hypothesis see Steklis and Raleigh (1973) and Tallerman (2013).…”

Section: Musical Protolanguagementioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution

2017

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The study of language evolution, and human cognitive evolution more generally, has often been ridiculed as unscientific, but in fact it differs little from many other disciplines that investigate past events, such as geology or cosmology. Well-crafted models of language evolution make numerous testable hypotheses, and if the principles of strong inference (simultaneous testing of multiple plausible hypotheses) are adopted, there is an increasing amount of relevant data allowing empirical evaluation of such models. The articles in this special issue provide a concise overview of current models of language evolution, emphasizing the testable predictions that they make, along with overviews of the many sources of data available to test them (emphasizing comparative, neural, and genetic data). The key challenge facing the study of language evolution is not a lack of data, but rather a weak commitment to hypothesistesting approaches and strong inference, exacerbated by the broad and highly interdisciplinary nature of the relevant data. This introduction offers an overview of the field, and a summary of what needed to evolve to provide our species with language-ready brains. It then briefly discusses different contemporary models of language evolution, followed by an overview of different sources of data to test these models. I conclude with my own multistage model of how different components of language could have evolved.

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“…Botha, 2009;Tallerman, 2008;Wray, 1998). For critiques of the musical protolanguage hypothesis see Steklis and Raleigh (1973) and Tallerman (2013).…”

Section: Musical Protolanguagementioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution

2017

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“…One of my major contentions is that the evolution of phonemic combinatoriality is a feature that should be placed upstream of the divide between speech and music, comprising a key property of the joint musilanguage precursor (see Figure 6 below). This conforms with Fitch's ( 2010 ) claim that proto-language was a system of “bare phonology.” Tallerman ( 2013 ) takes issue with the concept of “phonology” being applied to anything other than meaningful words and thus true language, although I would point out that proto-language models do not present any kind of specification of the phonetic properties of their proto-words (Bickerton, 1995 ; Jackendoff, 1999 ). Hence, there was most likely a proto-phonology in place before language evolved.…”

Section: “Musilanguage” As a Joint Prosodic Precursormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The combination of words to form phrases and sentences brings us to the domain of syntax, without question the most contentious issue in the study of language evolution (Berwick, 2011 ; Tallerman, 2013 ). In the previous section, I talked about a “combinatorial triad” for the phonological aspects of speech and music.…”

Section: Syntax Evolution and The “Prosodic Scaffold”mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Joint Prosodic Origin of Language and Music

Brown

2017

Front. Psychol.

102

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Vocal theories of the origin of language rarely make a case for the precursor functions that underlay the evolution of speech. The vocal expression of emotion is unquestionably the best candidate for such a precursor, although most evolutionary models of both language and speech ignore emotion and prosody altogether. I present here a model for a joint prosodic precursor of language and music in which ritualized group-level vocalizations served as the ancestral state. This precursor combined not only affective and intonational aspects of prosody, but also holistic and combinatorial mechanisms of phrase generation. From this common stage, there was a bifurcation to form language and music as separate, though homologous, specializations. This separation of language and music was accompanied by their (re)unification in songs with words.

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“…Paleoneurology points to the Middle Pleistocene as a birthtime of language ( Quam et al, 2017 ). Since musical rhythm and melodic contours rely on fine vocal control, their addition to TO must have followed the accumulation of extensive lexic vocabulary within a phonological organization of language ( Tallerman, 2013 ). This ties the emergence of multifactorial TO (which is hardly possible without engaging melodic contour and rhythm) to Homo sapiens and the Upper Paleolithic, as indicated by the proliferation of bone “flutes.” During 1995–2009, over 120 bone pipes were recovered across Europe, dated 36–30 kya and concentrated up to 3 “flutes” per cave ( Conard et al, 2009 ).…”

Section: The Timeframe Of Tonal Organization Obtaining Full Semioticamentioning

confidence: 99%

The Pastoral Origin of Semiotically Functional Tonal Organization of Music

Nikolsky

2020

Front. Psychol.

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This paper presents a new line of inquiry into when and how music as a semiotic system was born. Eleven principal expressive aspects of music each contains specific structural patterns whose configuration signifies a certain affective state. This distinguishes the tonal organization of music from the phonetic and prosodic organization of natural languages and animal communication. The question of music’s origin can therefore be answered by establishing the point in human history at which all eleven expressive aspects might have been abstracted from the instinct-driven primate calls and used to express human psycho-emotional states. Etic analysis of acoustic parameters is the prime means of cross-examination of the typical patterns of expression of the basic emotions in human music versus animal vocal communication. A new method of such analysis is proposed here. Formation of such expressive aspects as meter, tempo, melodic intervals, and articulation can be explained by the influence of bipedal locomotion, breathing cycle, and heartbeat, long before Homo sapiens. However, two aspects, rhythm and melodic contour, most crucial for music as we know it, lack proxies in the Paleolithic lifestyle. The available ethnographic and developmental data leads one to believe that rhythmic and directional patterns of melody became involved in conveying emotion-related information in the process of frequent switching from one call-type to another within the limited repertory of calls. Such calls are usually adopted for the ongoing caretaking of human youngsters and domestic animals. The efficacy of rhythm and pitch contour in affective communication must have been spontaneously discovered in new important cultural activities. The most likely scenario for music to have become fully semiotically functional and to have spread wide enough to avoid extinctions is the formation of cross-specific communication between humans and domesticated animals during the Neolithic demographic explosion and the subsequent cultural revolution. Changes in distance during such communication must have promoted the integration between different expressive aspects and generated the basic musical grammar. The model of such communication can be found in the surviving tradition of Scandinavian pastoral music - kulning. This article discusses the most likely ways in which such music evolved.

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Join the dots: A musical interlude in the evolution of language?

Cited by 8 publications

References 73 publications

Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution

Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution

A Joint Prosodic Origin of Language and Music

The Pastoral Origin of Semiotically Functional Tonal Organization of Music

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