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Paul J Kriha wrote:
[snip]
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
>> It's the thesis of one of the language-origins theorists (is it
>> Robin Dunbar?) that it's where language originated -- "Grooming,
>> Gossip, and Language" I think is the title.
>
> I googled, I saw, I found.
> It seems you've got both the title and the name of the author
> absolutely spot on.
>
>> It does seem that more talking is about human interaction than about
>> exchanging information.
I would say it's being generous to Dunbar to call his ideas "language
origins". He doesn't really deal with the "How?" of language origins
but more like the "Why was it adaptive?" and "Why do we have it?"
reasons. (Probably because he's mainly an anthropologist who hasn't
had a linguistics background.)
His "gossip = social grooming" hypothesis could be applied to any form
of communication; there is nothing in the idea that specifies that the
language used should be the way that the fully-syntactic languages we
know and love are. In essence, as long as the system can replace the
'grooming' of non-human primates and deal with the increases in social
group size, then it'll fit his scenario.
If you read his 1996 book-length treatment of his hypothesis, there is
a stack of social stuff and studies on social-cognitive aspects of primates
to support the adaptiveness of human language but it barely even touches
on how this useful adaptation developed (animal calls? uniquely human?
he doesn't really say too much there).
Being more of an anthropologist than a linguist, he's also done a lot of
other, related, things on social cohesion and primate sociality, but none
of which is really what you would want to call 'linguistic' in nature.
Off the top of my head, I also recall that he's edited several volumes on
cultural origins and primate culture, and done several studies with Dan
Nettle showing how language is the ideal "social identity" marker, giving
yet another adaptive benefit for the existence of language but never
attempting to explain how it came to be in first place. He's also written
a pop-science book about human origins, _The Human Story_, which is fairly
entertaining and an easy bedtime read.
--
johnF
"Moreover, when in heat, cows are commonly tormented by erotic images and
act out the sexual act with such evidence as to simulate the position of
the male." -- _The Origins and Nature of Language_. Giorgio Fano (1962)
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