Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution

Abstract

Ideophones stand out as promising constructions to be considered as linguistic “fossils”. Allegedly, this is due to some of their distinctive features, including their sound-symbolic nature, ample use of reduplication, reliance on the simplest combinatorial processes, attachment to emotional content, and presumed bootstrapping effects on language acquisition. These features might exhibit some continuity with primate communication systems, including the co-occurrence with gestures. Because the nature and complexity of ideophones in modern languages can vary significantly from culture to culture, in this paper, we focus on their links with cross-modality, and ultimately, on how they are processed by the brain and how our brain evolved. We embed our analysis in the framework of the human self-domestication hypothesis, according to which human evolution was characterized by a gradual decrease in reactive aggression, which had an impact on our cognitive and behavioural features. Our framework implicates the cortico-striatal brain networks, whose enhanced connectivity is a mechanism for both the suppression of reactive aggression, and for cross-modality and language processing more generally. In conclusion, even though present-day ideophones can certainly show many new complexities, some of their most basic features can be reconstructed as approximations of early (but not archaic), creative uses of language.