Origins of Human Communication
نویسنده
چکیده
Over the last years an ever-increasing number of works has turned attention to the topic of the human language evolution from several points of view (e.g., Burling, 2005; Corballis, 2002; Christiansen & Chater, 2008; Christiansen & Kirby, 2003; Deacon, 1997; Dunbar, 1996; Fitch, 2010; Knight et al., 2000; Pinker & Bloom, 1990; Tallerman, 2005; Wildgen, 2004). The common thread connecting these even different approaches is the research of the distinctive traits that enabled language appearance. It is however possible to distinguish between about two cornerstones of the thinking behind this enterprise: on the one hand, a group of scientists emphasizes the features that make language a unique ability of Homo sapiens and that cannot be interpreted in terms of skills shared with closely related animals; on the other hand, referring to a strictly Darwinian tradition, some scholars state that the essence of human language has to be investigated starting from the abilities which underlie both animal and human communication. Noam Chomsky, the leading figure of the former discontinuist perspective, has highlighted the centrality of a specific component – Universal Grammar (UG) – at the core of the language faculty which represents a unique sudden endowment of our species completely autonomous from other cognitive systems. By virtue of this specialty inherent human beings, looking at the nonlinguistic devices that are in common with other species appears totally worthless within an account of human language (Chomsky, 1988, 1996): the latter, in such a definition, is a human-only system. On the contrary, the continuist perspective stresses the relationship between communication and other cognitive skills rejecting the idea that human language might have arisen from a single unexpected break in the
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