The Natural Origin of Language: The Structural Inter-Relation of Language, Visual Perception and Action

By Robin Allott

The Natural Origin Of Language

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jan 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469144719

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Copyright © 2012 by Robin Allott.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I  Language—Arbitrary Or Innate

CHAPTER II  Language Vision and Action

CHAPTER III  Speech Sounds and Units of Vision and Action

CHAPTER IV  Words Visual Shapes and Actions

CHAPTER V  Sentences Visual Scenes and Complex Actions

CHAPTER VI  Comparative Application of the Hypothesis

CHAPTER VII  Language, Perception and Action: Philosophical Issues

CONCLUSION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

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Introductions should be short. They are often last written and last read (if they are read at all). But having an introduction is one of the universal conventions observed by authors—often a kind of self-indulgence, an opportunity to appeal to the considerateness of the reader, to try to anticipate criticism or reluctance to embark on the solid matter of the book itself. Some authors use it, at inordinate length (see Hegel, see Kant) to foreshadow the main content of the work, to claim novelty or certainty for what is proposed (see Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or the Principia Mathematica) or to explain the author’s personal motives for the choice of subject, the importance of the matter; others, with more justification, use it both to acknowledge intellectual debts, to pay tribute to precursors and to recognise the unavoidable limits of the author’s personal knowledge of quite distinct fields of philosophical or scientific study. The more far-reaching the theoretical view presented in a book, the more need there is to concede the speculative and tentative nature of what is proposed, the extent to which, on specialised topics, there is a risk of misunderstanding, or error, or simply of not having kept up to date with a vast and rapidly growing literature. At single points every philosophical treatise may be pricked (for it cannot be armed at all points like a mathematical one—Kant’s comment on the Critique of Pure Reason (which he was convinced was in total unassailable) applies with even greater force to a work such as the present which attempts to bring together evidence and theories from many so far unrelated disciplines and form them into a coherent whole, drawing on linguistics, the physiology of perception, neurology, psychology and the philosophy of language and perception.

The starting-point for the book is the straightforward question: Where do these words come from? What is the source of the unbroken stream or river of language, which we all experience, both in talking to others and in formulating our own thoughts? The answer proposed (for which the whole volume is one long, cumulative argument) is that words, the fabric of language, are not arbitrary, a conventional cultural product of human ingenuity, but derive directly from, evolutionarily and physiologically, and are integrated with, perception and action, the other main components of total human behaviour. In asserting this, the book directly challenges the foundation assumption of modern linguistics that language is arbitrary and words are arbitrary. But science in the past has only progressed through challenging the unchallengeable. Kuhn, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has illustrated how normal it is for new directions in science to start from questioning assumptions which no one of the scientific community of the time would venture to question. Though it is not claimed that the theory advanced here is of the same scientific importance, Kuhn records that Copernicus was called mad because he. proclaimed that the earth moved and his ideas made few converts for almost a century after his death; that the opponents of Newton said that his theories, with their reliance on innate forces, would return science to the Dark Ages, that Kelvin never accepted electromagnetism, Priestley never accepted the theory of oxygen (rather than that of phlogiston); many naturalists refused to accept Darwin’s assertion that animal species had developed one from another or that such marvellously adapted organs as the eye and hand of man were products of a process that moved steadily from primitive beginnings rather than the product of distinct creation. The belief of linguists, and following them of philosophers and psychologists, in the arbitrariness of language is as unquestioning and undemonstrated as ever was the belief of earlier astronomers in the stationary earth or of earlier physicists in an all-pervasive ether. Kuhn comments that an apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time and for the emerging community of the relatively new science of linguistics, the belief in the arbitrariness of the word is itself the arbitrary element of the kind Kuhn describes.

A few years ago, it would have been necessary to apologise for even venturing to discuss the origin of language, never mind for suggesting that words are not arbitrary, but such an apology is no longer necessary. The origin of language, so extensively discussed in the 18th century and earlier, is once again a living and respectable subject for scientists with many different types of expertise. The new interest in the origin of language was perhaps most clearly marked by the wide-ranging conference organised in 1975 by the New York Academy of Sciences precisely on this subject, but a great deal of other work is now in progress bearing on the origin and development of language both in the individual human being and in the human race. Though linguists more than a century ago officially rejected any further discussion of the origin of language within the framework of linguistics and though. professional linguists still take this position, this has not prevented neurologists, psychologists, anthropologists and many others from pursuing their researches. As Roger Brown commented in his book Words and Things (writing as a psychologist), the subjects he discussed (the character of primitive language, the relations between language and thought, the nature of meaning) were a set of real chestnuts, most of them either given up for dead, or demonstrated to be pseudo-questions or proscribed by scholarly societies… but there is a lot of new evidence on these matters… and no one today would suggest that the topics should be given up for dead.

A legitimate function of an Introduction, it has already been said, is to acknowledge intellectual debts. Roger Brown would certainly be one of the creditors, not only for his discussion of sound symbolism but also for the mass of interesting evidence on the development of language in children presented in A First Language. Others to whom the ideas in this book owe a clear debt include both authors whose ideas anticipate or coincide with those presented and authors whose discussion of language has stimulated ideas which have gone to form the theory, not necessarily because they are in harmony but because opposing ideas were presented fully and seriously enough to require attention. This latter category would include, inevitably, Chomsky (his development of transformational grammar has clearly brought linguistics to a point of crisis), Whorf (though this book totally disagrees with his assertion of the priority of language over perception) and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein has been an especially powerful influence because, at one time or another, he adopted such diverse views on the nature of language, and supported the opposing views with such ingenuity and vigour The rightness of the early Wittgenstein (on the view presented here) is precisely balanced by the wrongness of the later Wittgenstein. In his Notebooks of 1914-1916 (before he forced his ideas into the straitjacket of the Tractatus) his observations that Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it, that names themselves are connected; in this way the whole images the situation like a tableau vivant, The name compresses its whole complex reference into one and Words are like the film on deep water—would have fitted well into the theory presented here, had he not subsequently equally sharply asserted the arbitrary and conventional nature of language and the uselessness of seeking any philosophical enlightenment from it. The same category of authors, those stimulating by disagreement, would have to include Locke. Despite his denial of the possibility of innate ideas and his assertion of the arbitrariness of words, Locke’s recognition of language as the great instrument and common tie of society and his careful discussion of the relation of words and knowledge have provided material used later in the book. Amongst linguists proper, Saussure and Sapir have been influential, in expressing so clearly ideas with which the present theory disagrees.

The positive debts can be referred to more briefly because evidence of them is apparent at many points in the book. Most important of all have been the ideas of Karl Lashley as a neurologist on the structural relation between speech, vision and action; his view that the rudiments of every human behavioural mechanism will be found far down in the evolutionary scale, that the problems of syntax and of the organisation of language are characteristic of almost all other cerebral activity, that temporal integration is found similarly in language, vision and action, and that spatial and temporal order appear to be almost completely interchangeable in cerebral action (with integration carried out hierarchically at a series of levels), are the direct foundation for the central argument presented in this book. One might repeat here his observation that the study of comparative grammar is not the most direct approach to the physiology of the cerebral cortex yet speech is the only window through which the physiologist can view cerebral life… language presents in a most striking form the integrative functions that are characteristic of the cerebral cortex. Other important sources have been Lenneberg’s pioneering Biological Foundations of Language with its discussion of children’s acquisition of language as a maturational process within a critical period, Richard Gregory’s stimulating ideas on the ‘grammar of vision’ and his speculation that language and vision are indeed based on common ground and the basic problems of both must be solved together. Last but far from least, Konrad Lorenz’s broad approach to the development and integration of animal and human behaviour as well as his study of the vitally important process of ‘imprinting’, that is, genetically-programmed neurological development, making it possible for the cerebral structures of the animal (or human being) to be modified, after birth, to match the specific environment, social or physical, to which the individual is in fact exposed.

The chapter headings indicate in a summary way the ‘articulation and concatenation of the whole system’, the systematic development of the hypothesis from chapter to chapter, starting from the elementary units of speech, vision and action and progressing to the interrelation of sentence, visual scene and complex action. However, whether the theory seems probable. well argued and convincing depends not on the outline but on the detailed presentation and argument both in each chapter individually and in all the chapters taken together as mutually supporting each other. How readily the new view presented will be given a hearing, or accepted, is subject not only to the usual and often scientifically justified suspicion of the unorthodox—Locke remarks that new opinions are always suspected and usually opposed without any other reason but because they are not already common—but also to two special considerations, first that there is a powerful community of professional linguists whose careers and work have been founded on an assumption totally incompatible with the basis of the present hypothesis and secondly that there is no existing community of scientists or philosophers whose interests range as widely as the assumptions and evidence presented in this book require. We live in an age of specialists and sub-specialists. Even philosophers. who once took all life and all knowledge as their field now are often specialists only in philosophy in a narrow sense, in one corner of philosophy. There are no general ‘natural philosophers’ in the academic community, though there are psychologists, sociolinguists, neurolinguists, physiologists, whose specialisms ultimately can only be comprehensible as part of a total science of human nature. Perhaps the nearest successors to the ‘ancient philosopher’ who took the whole of nature as his study are to be found, as Monod suggests, among the biologists, or the sociobiologists—or amongst the exponents of artificial intelligence techniques. The most an author presenting a theory as wide-ranging as the present one can look for is that it should be treated on its merits, not dismissed out of hand. A theory of this kind must persuade; it cannot be cast in the form of a logical or mathematical proof. Hume, the great sceptic, at one point remarked that a true sceptic will be diffident of his philosophical doubt. All that the author of the present work would hope for is that those reading it will be prepared, provisionally, to be diffident of their certainties—and particularly of the certainty so generally prevailing that words and language must be arbitrary and cannot be natural.

CHAPTER I

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Language—Arbitrary Or Innate

The generally accepted view of those who study language professionally is that language is an arbitrary, cultural construct; language, on this view, is learnt by listening to speakers of the language of the particular community into which an infant is born; the words used in the language as well as the particular grammar or syntax of the language have developed historically as a social product and been handed down by tradition.

At first sight, it might seem a highly academic question whether or not language is arbitrary, of interest only to linguisticians, etymologists and so on. But to say that language is arbitrary and a purely cultural product is to assert that there is no basis for relating language to other aspects of human biology, to evolution as shown in the development of brain structure and the physiological differences between men and animals. It would be a strange result if the manifestation of the major and many would say absolutely crucial human ability, the ability to speak and understand language, should on this view turn out to be something which cannot be explained and for which, in principle, no explanation can even be attempted.

‘Arbitrary’ means chance, unmotivated, without purpose—and those who view languages as wholly arbitrary structures are saying that they are the product of chance, guided by no objective, that the availability of words and the structures of any language are completely purposeless. Yet at the same time all would recognise that language is the fundamental instrument for human communities, the essential medium of communication, the precise and powerful tool of thought, the basis for scientific and technological progress. If such a miraculous instrument is arbitrary in origin, function and structure, then one can only fall back on a belief in myth to explain it. The ancient Egyptians believed that the word was given to mankind by the god Ptah. They at least recognised the real problem, that language must have had some origin.

One wonders why academic students of language professionally have been so attached to what at first sight would seem a disastrous foundation for any science, the belief that the form and underlying structure of the subject of study is arbitrary, irrational, chance. Perhaps a cynical view, and a partial one, would be that one important effect of arbitrariness as the starting assumption for language study is to delimit an exclusive field of research for the linguists, to post a large ‘No Entry’ sign to the domain of linguistics and to tell others, psychologists, physiologists, neurologists, that they will be wasting their time if they try to apply their theories and technical procedures to language. Fortunately some of these other scientists have not been deterred, for example, Karl Lashley, Eric Lenneberg, Roger Brown, and in another quite new discipline, that of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, pioneering work is being done, untrammelled by the traditional restraints of linguistics.

The debate whether language is natural or artificial, purposeful or arbitrary, an evolutionary or a conventional product, is an extremely ancient one, indeed perhaps the most ancient dispute of philosophers centuries before the study of language became a subject for specialists. Nearly 2,400 years ago, Plato in his dialogue Cratylus had Socrates discuss the contention that a word applied to an object (the object’s name) was not just whatever people agreed to call the thing but resulted from a kind of ‘inherent correctness’(1), which linked the nature of the object and the speech-sounds used to name it. Centuries later, Lucretius in De Rerum Natura dealt with language and dismissed as ridiculous the idea that any individual could have been in a position to give names to things in such a way as to persuade others to accept and use the names he prescribed(2). Much later again, Wilhelm von Humboldt(3), one of the most profound and stimulating writers on language in the modern era, contended that there was a natural basis for words, that language naturally selects for particular objects speech sounds which partly independently and partly in comparison with others produce an impression on the ear similar to that which the object makes on the mind. This natural process had, in his view, exercised a prevailing, and perhaps even an exclusive, influence on primitive word formation.

However, the conventional wisdom for the last 100 years or so has been very different. The principle of the arbitrariness of language has ruled virtually without challenge. The foundation of the modern science of linguistics has been Saussure’s proclamation of ‘the arbitrariness of the sign’ by which has been meant that one can, one should, look for no relation of any kind between the sound-structure of the word and its meaning. The idea that the word is arbitrary goes back before Saussure (Locke was perhaps the most powerful and influential adherent of the view) but Saussure(4), as the father of modern linguistics, gave his overwhelming authority to arbitrariness as the foundation assumption for the new science. Whilst some of the many linguists who follow him are prepared to recognise that in some minor respects elements of the lexicon may not be totally arbitrary, for example, admitting that there are onomatopoeic words like ‘cuckoo’ (though some would say that even words like these are conventionalised), linguisticians generally are no more prepared to consider that language is a natural product than pre-Darwinian zoologists could accept the natural origin of the different species. Not only do many assume without question that words are arbitrary forms but they would also argue that language as a whole is a construct, a cultural tool, and that the arbitrariness extends to every feature of the grammar and syntax of particular languages.

Because the issue is so fundamental, not only for linguists in general but also for the thesis presented in this book, it may serve to bring out very sharply the current views by quoting directly from a number of writers, demonstrating the unanimity of the chorus, not only of linguists but also of philosophers and others who have touched on the subject:

Saussure(5): Language is a convention and the nature of the sign that is agreed upon does not matter… Because the sign is arbitrary, it follows no law other than that of tradition, and because it is based upon tradition, it is arbitrary. ‘Arbitrary’ . . . should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker… I mean that it is unmotivated i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified. Only differences that make it possible to distinguish this word from all others… carry significance… since one vocal image is no better suited than the next for what it is commissioned to express… . ‘Arbitrary’ and ‘differential’ are two correlative qualities… Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others… . The arbitrary nature of the sign explains in turn why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system—by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value… . A particular language-state is always the product of historical forces and these forces explain why the sign is unchangeable i.e. why it resists any arbitrary substitution… . The community itself cannot control as much as a single word; it is bound to the existing language… . No longer can language be identified with a contract pure and simple.

Hockett(6): Arbitrariness The relation between a meaningful element in language and its denotation is independent of any physical and geometrical resemblance between the two… or, as we say, the semantic relation is arbitrary rather than iconic.

Sapir(7): Onomatopoeic words are just as truly creations of the human mind, flights of the human fancy, as anything else in language.

Bloomfield(8): What we call ‘horse’, the Germans call ‘pferd’, the Frenchman ‘cheval’, the Cree Indian ‘misatim’ and so on; one set of sounds is as unreasonable as any other.

Firth(9): Words are acquired habits. With the doubtful exception of certain sibilant consonants, there would appear to be no inherent phonaesthetic value in any speech sounds. It is all a matter of habit.

Yuen Ren Chao(10): Language is a conventional system of habitual vocal behaviour. Before the establishment of a convention, any word could mean anything.

Englefield(11): The fact that languages are arbitrary is sufficient evidence that they were invented. In any language there are conventional ways of combining words to express the relations between ideas. There is no systematic correspondence between the forms of language and its meanings.

Hormann(12): What meaning is conditioned to which sign is basically quite arbitrary and therefore there is an element of randomness or absence of logical necessity in the relationship of sign and object signified.

Miller & Johnson-Laird(13): The absence of direct, tangible connections between physical objects and the acoustic patterns used as names for them is a foundation assumption for studies of linguistic meaning.

Tax(14): Cultural behavior has a quality of arbitrariness. It does not flow through the genes and is therefore not anchored in the individual. This is seen most clearly in the arbitrariness of the symbols of language.

Gregory(15): Just because words differ between languages, and because languages are so recent and change so rapidly, it is quite clear that our knowledge of the names of things cannot be innate. It cannot be built into the nervous system. Words and names cannot be inherited.

Wittgenstein(16): I want you to remember that words have these meanings which we have given them and we give them meanings by explanations. A word has the meaning someone has given it.

The consensus that emerges from these extracts is very apparent. In summary, according to the authors:

A word has the meaning someone has given it. Words are given meanings by explanations.

Language is arbitrary, conventional and traditional. Words have meaning only as parts of a system, with each word deriving its meaning solely from its difference from the other words in the system.

Differences in the words used by different languages for the same things show the unreasonableness of all the words chosen. Words are no more than ‘flights of fancy’.

Words are acquired habits. Any word could mean any thing. There is no logical necessity in the relation of sign and signified.

There is no geometrical or physical resemblance between word and meaning. Words are arbitrary rather than iconic.

Words cannot be innate or built into the nervous system because languages are a recent evolutionary development and differ so much from each other.

When so many diverse authorities agree so forcefully, it may seem rash to challenge what they say, but fundamental assumptions of any science ought some time to be challenged. Progress in the past in many sciences has come from challenging the unchallenged. One line of attack is to note that not all of those whose opinions are recorded have expressed themselves in exactly the same way. There are inconsistencies and incoherences in the different accounts. Whilst virtually all those who have in more recent times discussed the relation of word and meaning, of language and reality, have described the sounds of words as arbitrary, there have been variations in how they describe what they mean by ‘arbitrary’ and they have used other terms, along with ‘arbitrary’, to present their convictions.

All would agree that ‘arbitrary’ must exclude ‘natural’. Hockett contrasts ‘arbitrary’ and ‘iconic’ as meaning physically or geometrically resembling the referent. Others contrast ‘arbitrary’ and ‘innate’ (Gregory rules out ‘innate’ though he does not expressly say that words are arbitrary). The ancient distinction, going back to classical times, was between language phusei (that is, the product of physical nature> and language thesei (that is, determined by decree, prescription or convention).

Different writers give different accounts of what ‘arbitrary’ means. Saussure and others equate ‘arbitrary and ‘traditional’, ‘arbitrary’ and ‘conventional’, ‘arbitrary’ and ‘social’ or ‘habitual’. Hormann puts ‘arbitrary’ as equivalent to random, lacking logical necessity. For Bloomfield, ‘arbitrary’ means ‘unreasonable’ and for Sapir ‘fanciful’. Englefield treats ‘arbitrary’ and ‘invented’ as equivalent i.e. artificial, a deliberate product of human construction. Tax equates ‘arbitrary’ and ‘cultural’

Whether the accounts given by the various writers are coherent and they are right in treating ‘arbitrary’ and the other terms used as synonymous is doubtful. In common usage, ‘conventional’ ‘social’ ‘traditional’ ‘cultural ‘invented’ ‘artificial’ ‘random’ ‘unreasonable’ ‘illogical’ ‘habitual’ ‘historically-derived’ carry quite different connotations and it is not possible that all the implications of using them as alternative descriptions of the character of language can be correct. For example, it is by no means the case that ‘conventional’ and ‘arbitrary’ can be used interchangeably any more than ‘arbitrary’ and ‘cultural’ or arbitrary’ and ‘social’. Nor can one equate these words with ‘unreasonable’, ‘lacking logical necessity’, ‘artificial’ or ‘invented’ or ‘random’. A system can be artificial without being random or unreasonable; see, for example, the system of the Morse code. A system can be social but constructed in accord with reason, as many important institutions have been. Saussure himself points out elsewhere that most important social institutions have at some point a natural base, so that to say that language is a social construct is not automatically to say that it is in some sense an arbitrary construct.

One suspects that most of those who discuss the nature of language and categorise it as arbitrary are confusing the current appearance of any language, as a collection of words which mostly have no obvious relation to their meaning, with the separate question of the historical origin of the individual words which go to form the present-day collection. It is not enough for Saussure to assert that language is arbitrary or non-natural because it is traditional since this leaves untackled the important question of the origin of the traditional link of word and meaning. It is not possible, without circularity, to argue that in its first origin the particular word was heard in use in speech—the tradition must have started somewhere, somehow. At one point, Saussure asks How would a speaker take it upon himself to associate the idea with a word-image if he had not first come across the association in an act of speaking?(17), but this is a puzzle which he has created for himself, to explain the historical first use of a particular word (we know the answer for some modern neologisms such as the origin of ‘gas’ ‘paraffin’ ‘vaseline’, as discussed by Potter(18)).

Those who speak of the cultural, social, customary origin of words and language might be reminded of the very relevant comments of Konrad Lorenz: The undeniable fact that cultures are highly complex intellectual systems, resting on a basis of symbols expressive of cultural values, causes us to forget, given as we are to thinking in terms of opposites, that they are natural structures, which have evolved along natural lines(19). Somewhat similarly, Hewes, after quoting the remarks of Tax extracted above on the arbitrary quality of cultural behaviour and language ‘because it does not flow through the genes’, points out that if culture and biology have always been separate domains, we have no way to explain how man’s language capacity has been perfected.(20)

It seems absolutely clear that what is ‘traditional’ ‘social’ or ‘conventional’ can still be wholly or partly natural, or at the minimum natural in origin. After all, there are obvious examples of what one would call ‘conventions’, styles of clothes, cookery recipes, matrimonial systems, methods of composing music, but for these one does not need to look very far to find natural bases or natural constraints on the forms which they take. Equally, one can easily identify obviously natural forms of behaviour upon which conventional, traditional or social elements have been superimposed. Eating is natural but there are conventions about the manner of eating; one chooses to eat in this way rather than that, even though in a sense both ways are equally natural. Even in the case of walking, which Saussure refers to as a clearly natural form of behaviour, there are different manners of walking, including some highly conventionalised ones such as marching, goose-stepping and so on. With the human being, the natural and the social are inextricably mingled in many forms of behaviour—and the essence of the convention or tradition may exactly be the adoption in a community of one particular form of behaviour out of several equally natural possible forms of behaviour. Shaking hands; and rubbing noses are equally natural as forms of contact and greeting, but our community prefers, by tradition, a hand-shake where the New Guineans may prefer a nose-rub.

Set against the range of words, often with imprecise uses, referring to the ‘arbitrary’ character of language are the various words used to express the opposite view. These include ‘natural’ ‘biological’ ‘innate’ ‘genetic’ ‘physical’ ‘nativistic’ ‘instinctive’ ‘evolutionary’ ‘organismic’ ‘motivated’ ‘species-specific’ and so on. It is fair to say that many of these are used with no more precision than the corresponding set of words grouped with ‘arbitrary’. It is often difficult to decide what in a particular context is meant by ‘natural’; all linguists tend to describe particular languages as ‘natural’ languages but this is only to distinguish them from invented universal languages (Esperanto, Interlingua and so on) or from the ideal or formal languages found in logic, philosophy or mathematics. Clearly this use of ‘natural’ implies no departure from the general view that all languages are arbitrary. So ‘natural’ tends to acquire its specific meaning in any context from the express or implied contrast with some opposed word: natural and artificial, natural and learned, natural and invented, natural and cultural and so on.

Given this, it is clearly not enough to assert that language or any aspect of language is ‘natural’ without specifying precisely the manner in which language is natural. ‘Innate’ is a more specific description than natural in so far as it implies that one can relate language in some way to the genetic determinants of human bodily structure and functioning but there is an area of uncertainty about the meaning of ‘innate: something may be specified potentially by innate factors but only realised by interaction between the innate factors and the environment. For example, if one considers the line of research into animal vision by Hubel and Wiesel(21) and others, should one categorise a kitten’s ability to perceive a particular vertical, horizontal or slanted pattern of lines as innate or the learned product of environmental experience? Experiments have shown that at a certain critical period, a kitten’s visual apparatus is malleable and the permanent characteristics of its adult vision depend upon the structuring of the environment to which it is exposed during the critical period. A kitten brought up in an environment without vertical lines will thereafter be unable to perceive them. Is this an innate effect or a learned effect?

Other terms—biological, physiological, evolutionary, species-specific—are not necessarily much clearer in their implications than is the word ‘innate’. To say that some aspect of behaviour is a biologically-based or biologically-determined aspect of a particular species (as language is an aspect of the human species) really tells us very little more than if we say the behaviour aspect is natural, unless we are able to go on to explain in preciser detail the nature of the biological basis in established facts of physiology and neurology.

In considering the well-foundedness of the view of language as arbitrary or natural, there is another kind of difficulty. Apart from imprecision in the use of the word ‘arbitrary’ (as well as in the use of the word ‘natural’) one finds on closer examination that there is a dismaying lack of clarity in the views of linguists as regards the extent to which the thesis of the arbitrariness of language goes. Language is not only words and collections of words; it is also the speech-sounds from which words are formed and the combinations and strings of words which go to form phrases and sentences, the complete stream of spoken language. Are phonetics and syntax as arbitrary, in the view of these linguists, as the lexicon of each and every language? Are the types of sound used for forming words and ranges of words selected for use by different languages equally arbitrary? In the area of grammar (morphology and syntax), are the differing word-orders selected by different languages equally arbitrary, equally part of Sapir’s ‘flights of human fancy’? Are inflectional systems (declensions and conjugations), the existence of concord between nouns, adjectives and verbs, vowel-harmony, agglutinative structures, the product of random forces, the result of deliberate invention or a purposeless weaving of complexity?

Most linguists who have readily, often with very little examination, come to accept the principle that language is arbitrary, because it must be so given the divergences between languages, have not been at all precise about where arbitrariness stops and order in language begins. Even the arch-priest, Saussure, is not altogether consistent. So he says: "a language constitutes a system. In this one respect… a language is not completely arbitrary but is ruled to some extent by logic. The system is a complex mechanism that can be grasped only through reflection. Some signs are absolutely arbitrary; in others we note not its complete absence but the presence of degrees of arbitrariness: the sign may be relatively motivated, for example, ‘vingt’ is relatively less motivated than ‘dix-neuf’ (which by its form refers to other forms) . . . but even in the most favourable cases motivation is never absolute… The mind contrives to introduce a principle of order and regularity into certain parts of the mass of signs, and this is the role of relative motivation. If the mechanism of language were entirely rational, it could be studied independently. Since the mechanism of language is but a partial correction of a system that is by nature chaotic, we adopt the point of view imposed by the very nature of language and study it as it limits arbitrariness (motivation plays a much larger role in German than in English… with respect to Latin, French is characterised by a huge increase in arbitrariness)(22).

Another absolutist writer on the arbitrariness of language, Englefield, argues that in any language there are conventional ways of combining words in order to express the relations between ideas: The fact that there are similarities in the conventions of unrelated languages can be readily explained by the common purpose for which languages were invented, the common features of the human physiology and the common elements in the human environment(23).

The result is rather paradoxical. Though syntax and morphology diverge between languages almost as much as do the particular words used (and in some cases the grammatical divergences are more striking than the divergences in vocabulary), the proponents of the arbitrariness of language are much less positive about the arbitrariness of grammar. Saussure indeed comes close to the point of treating morphology and other grammatical aspects, the derivational and compositional features of language, as compensating rational forces the aim of which is to create a coherent language system precisely so as to reduce the difficulties caused by the initial, irrational arbitrariness of language. Englefield’s reference to the similarities of form between unrelated languages invokes, as explanation, the common features of human physiology, human purposes, the human environment—but if these are real operating forces, they obviously constitute a natural and not an arbitrary basis for the forms which language assumes.

If one uses Saussure’s questionable distinction between absolutely arbitrary and the rather less arbitrary, the suggestion seems to be that grammar and morphology are rather less arbitrary than are the individual words of languages. Certainly, if it is contended that grammar and morphology are equally arbitrary and equally the product of invention, convention or tradition, one marvels how primitive man, throughout the world, decided how to select the grammatical features of his language. Even modern linguists, approaching the subject with refined, sophisticated techniques, find great difficulty in analysing and presenting systematically the syntactic functioning of language. Must one assume that in each tribal group, each embryo language community, there was some primeval super-Chomsky, elaborating the forms which eventually became the comprehensive and subtle systematisations of languages such as Latin and Greek? Should one postulate an early inventor of language who decreed that these words should be adjectives, these should be nouns, and the two types of words should undergo parallel formal changes to show their agreement? Did some proto-Germanic genius ponder on the varying possible uses of the determiners ‘the’ and ‘a’ in the sentence and regularise the practice of the tribe? If the arbitrary origin of individual words is difficult to explain, then the arbitrary origin of grammatical forms is even more of an enigma.

But if, in the light of this argument, we take it that the origin of syntax and morphology was not arbitrary but was in some sense innate or natural even though at this point in time we are not able to explain the manner in which the natural or innate development may have taken place, some awkward questions immediately present themselves.

How, assuming that syntax and morphology are in some sense natural or innate, does one in fact explain the diversity of syntax and morphology between languages? This is a question which Chomsky has approached but not resolved. He postulates a common deep structure underlying all surface structures but he has not attempted to say or speculate what the physiological or neurological status of this deep structure may be, how in fact it could have originated as an evolutionary development or how in fact a relation can be established between a universal innate deep structure (common to all humans) and the diversity of surface syntax which one in fact finds—and to which he would deny any innate status.

How, if grammatical forms and syntax are innate or natural, evolutionary, does this biological system (presumably genetically-programmed) establish an intimate, functioning relationship with what is said to be the incoherent, arbitrary collection of individual speech-sound forms constituting the lexicon of a language? At first sight, the genetically-determined formal aspect of language and the arbitrary substance of language would seem totally incompatible, a mixing of chalk and cheese, like trying to play chess with a collection of random objects.

There is another troublesome aspect of this particular difficulty. Though syntax and lexicon are treated as distinct by traditional grammarians and modern linguists, the distinction is more apparent than real. In reality there is no sharp dividing line between the syntactic function of individual words and their semantic function; what appears as a system of inflections in one language is represented by a set of distinct, isolable words (prepositions, auxiliary verbs) in another, uninflected language. The relation between the content of traditional grammar and the traditional lexicon differs from one language to another; the seamless garment of language in its practical operation is divided up in different ways by the linguists as professional anatomists of language. The result is that language-functions classified as syntactic or grammatical in one language (and so ex hypothesi biologically determined and not arbitrary) are performed in other languages lexically, that is, using words in principle classified as arbitrary and accidental

The discussion so far has, to some extent incidentally, brought out a number of problems that arise from the standard view in linguistics that language is arbitrary The most obvious are how the origin of language should be accounted for if it is arbitrary and how the arbitrary components of language, the words, can be brought into a functioning relationship with the less-arbitrary parts, syntax and morphology, if one takes the less extreme view that language is only partially arbitrary. Beyond these, there is a whole range of other problems, not least of which is the difficulty of explaining the phenomenal speed and completeness with which children learn to speak their mother-tongue in all its complexity and with all the bewildering extent of the available vocabulary.

The point has already been made that to say that the present collection of words in a language and the meanings attached to them are arbitrary does not at all explain how historically those particular words, arbitrary or not, were formed and became attached to those particular meanings. Whilst the current link between word-form and meaning may seem obscure, or as Saussure and those following him would say ‘opaque’, it is a historical enquiry not to be resolved by any fiat of linguistic theory to determine how far, in the past, some link between word and meaning was apparent and how far in the origin of the word-form there was a link between sound and meaning. Etymologists can readily offer examples of words which originally were ‘transparent’ (the source of their meaning was apparent) and which have subsequently through sound or meaning changes become opaque. Insofar as there have been changes in the sounds and meanings of words, it is not clear whether those who treat language as arbitrary also take the view that the processes of language change are equally irrational, arbitrary or random—almost certainly they do not. The comparative philologists of the 19th century and later have shown very clearly how systematic and rule-bound changes in word-forms have been—but how linguists who believe in the essential arbitrariness of all words would reconcile this display of orderliness and rationality in the evolution of language with their wider thinking is an unanswered question.

Of course, a powerful school of linguists (the dominant school in the 19th century) evaded the problem of language origin simply by declaring that it was not worth discussing and not relevant for the science of linguistics(25). To quote Saussure again ( since he was so much the founder and leader of the mainline view of linguists): No society in fact knows or has ever known language other than as a product inherited from preceding generations, and one to be accepted as such. That is why the question of the origin of language is not as important as it is generally assumed to be. The question is not even worth asking; the only real object of linguistics is the normal regular life of an existing idiom.(24)

Despite Saussure’s dogmatic dismissal of the problem, some linguists who consider that language is an arbitrary structure have felt it necessary to attempt an explanation or a historical account of the development of language. In many ways the most interesting and one of the earliest careful explanations was that of Condillac (the summary that follows draws on the useful account given in one of the papers for the 1975 New York conference on language origins and evolution)(25):

Man’s advance in knowledge has been through the deliberate use of arbitrary signs, in the form of language and speech. The crucial element in the origin of human knowledge is the origin of language. There are three types of signs: accidental signs, natural signs (cries, vocal gestures of the same order or other natural expressions of the