[Xmca-l] Re: Michael C. Corballis

[Andy Blunden]

Oddly, Amazon delivered the book to me yesterday and I am 
currently on p.5. Fortunately, Corballis provides a synopsis 
of his book at the end, which I sneak-previewed last night.

The interesting thing to me is his claim, similar to that of 
Merlin Donald, which goes like this.

It would be absurd to suggest that proto-humans discovered 
that they had this unique and wonderful vocal apparatus and 
decided to use it for speech. Clearly_there was rudimentary 
language before speech was humanly possible_. In 
development, a behaviour is always present before the 
physiological adaptations which facilitate it come into 
being. I.e, proto-humans found themselves in circumstances 
where it made sense to develop interpersonal, voluntary 
communication, and to begin with they used what they had - 
the ability to mime and gesture, make facial expressions and 
vocalisations (all of which BTW can reference non-present 
entities and situations) This is an activity which further 
produces the conditions for its own development. Eventually, 
over millions of years, the vocal apparatus evolved under 
strong selection pressure due to the practice of non-speech 
communication as an integral part of their evolutionary 
niche. In other words, rudimentary wordless speech gradually 
became modern speech, along with all the accompanying facial 
expressions and hand movements.

It just seems to me that, as you suggest, collective 
activity must have been a part of those conditions fostering 
communication (something found in our nearest evolutionary 
cousins who also have the elements of rudimentary speech)  - 
as was increasing tool-using, tool-making, tool-giving and 
tool-instructing.

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 16/11/2018 12:58 pm, Arturo Escandon wrote:
> Dear Andy,
>
> Michael Tomasello has made similar claims, grounding the 
> surge of articulated language on innate co-operativism and 
> collective activity.
>
> https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-handbook-of-child-language/90B84B8F3BB2D32E9FA9E2DFAF4D2BEB
>
> Best
>
> Arturo
>
>
> -- 
> Sent from Gmail Mobile
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