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    Comments on David McNeill's Book (2012) How Language Began
    Comments on David McNeill's Book (2012) How Language Began
    Comments on David McNeill's Book (2012) How Language Began
    Ebook63 pages32 minutes

    Comments on David McNeill's Book (2012) How Language Began

    By Razie Mah

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    About this ebook

    David McNeill spent years in the Departments of Psychology and Linguistics, exploring the nature of human speech and gesture. Gesture coincides with speech. The gestures are holistic and imagistic. Speech is detailed and propositional. Clearly, these two real elements are contiguous in contemporary talk.
    The question is why?
    If this behavior expresses evolved traits, then how did talk evolve?
    This is one of the topics addressed in the masterwork, The Human Niche. What explains the evolution of talk? The answer? Talk is an adaptation exploiting the niche of triadic relations.
    This hypothesis stands on close reading of four works on human evolution, two from the anthropological and two from the linguistic points of view.
    McNeill's work lies outside this base, since it directly addresses the evolution of talk, rather than language, as defined by Saussure.
    For many years, the linguistics lab at the University of Chicago has documented the coincidence of gesture and speech, within the milieu of speech-alone talk. The gestures are engaging. The speech is descriptive. Curiously, the hands convey aspects of the story that speech strains to provide. Stories? Yes, volunteers are filmed as they tell the story of an animated cartoon, featuring Sylvester, the cat, Tweety, the bird, and the old lady who owns the bird. The cartoons are hilarious.
    So, McNeill has a distinct point of view when he formulates how talk evolved. Yet, he does not have the simple tool of the category-based nested form. McNeill proposes a hypothesis and strives to establish it. In these comments, McNeill's hypothesis is re-articulated in the relational structure of the category-based nested form, resulting in a picture of human evolution that complements the hypothesis presented in The Human Niche.
    Humans evolved to exploit the realness of triadic relations.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRazie Mah
    Release dateJul 8, 2018
    ISBN9781942824503
    Comments on David McNeill's Book (2012) How Language Began
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    Razie Mah

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      Comments on David McNeill's Book (2012) How Language Began - Razie Mah

      Comments on David McNeill's Book (2012) How Language Began

      By Razie Mah

      Published for Smashwords.com

      2018

      Abstract

      This work comments on a book by psychologist and linguist David McNeill, now emeritus at the University of Chicago. The edition at hand is How Language Began: Gesture and Speech in Human Evolution (Cambridge University Press, UK, 2012). These comments re-articulate McNeill's argument using category-based nested forms and the evolutionary hypothesis presented in The Human Niche. The result is a surprising re-configuration of McNeill's claims.

      Single quotes and italics are used to group words together.

      Prerequisites include A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form, A Primer on Sensible and Social Construction and The Human Niche (and related commentaries).

      Table of Contents

      Why this book?

      How Does the Growth Point Evolve?

      What is the Growth Point?

      Once Again, How Does the Growth Point Evolve?

      What about the Fossil Record?

      Chapters 4 and 5 Compose an Interlude

      The Science of Catchments and Growth Points

      Why this book?

      0001 This book is the capstone of a sequence of books by David McNeill, including Hand and Mind (1992), Language and Gesture (2000) and Gesture and Thought (2005).

      My interest is more than academic. I aim to show that McNeill's argument fits an evolutionary narrative that exists outside of his imagination.

      0002 For example, McNeill writes that he challenges the popular gesture-first scenario of language evolution.

      Why?

      For decades, the University of Chicago's language and psychology lab has studied the way people talk.

      Stop by for a chat, if you don't mind being recorded on video.

      McNeill's lab discovered that speech-alone talk engages both voice and body. The voice speaks. The body gestures. The voice utters language. The body, especially the arms and hands, images a story that coincides with the voice.

      0003 McNeill concludes that language consists in speech and gesture. Speech corresponds to Saussure's parole (the French word for talk). Yet, gesture does not correspond to langue (the French word for what is going on in your mind when talking). Instead, gesture conveys social engagement.

      Almost all theorists accounting for the evolution of language attempt to explain Saussure's definition of language as an arbitrary relation between parole and langue. Not so McNeill.

      For McNeill, language is the coincidence of speech as talk (speechparole) and gesture as engagement (gestureengagement). He claims that this coincidence cannot be explained by gesture-first theorists.

      I beg to differ.

      Introduction

      0004 McNeill knows that the results of his language laboratory have not appeared on the radar of most linguists. Most linguists understand language in terms of Saussure's definition. Parole goes with talk. Langue goes with thought.

      At present, all civilizations practice speech-alone talk. Today, parole is encountered as speech-alone talk, which I label voiceparole.

      0005 However, Bill Stokoe established (in the 1960s) that deaf sign languages,

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