A comment to a post in Babel's Dawn, "How Language Began", which summarizes the author's view of the origin of language in the development of joint attention on a number of complex dimensions:
This is an excellent and enjoyable overview both of your theory and of
some hundred thousand years of speech. As this post may signal some
change of rhythm, let me take the opportunity to congratulate you for
your blog and thank you for your valuable reflections and for your
diffusion and explanation of other people's work on the subject.
One additional reflection on the "chirruping" phase of language.
Besides the possible expressive, referential, and conative dimensions
of that proto-linguistic speech, one should maybe stress the
phatic/social dimension of human sounds. The distinctive sounds of
human groups may have had an important dimension in stressing in-group
ties, quite apart from any use to signify anything. Or, to put it
otherwise, distinctive combinations of phonetic features, and
characteristic combinations of phonemes, may have given rise to a
number of local proto-languages or forms of speech, signalling group
and sub-group kinship, an essential social function. To put it yet
otherwise, the distinctive sounds, syllables and intonation patterns of
the proto-languages may have directed joint attention to themselves,
and thereby to a common group identity, besides signifying something.
This would seem to be another dimension of joint attention, and one
which might provide a bridge with the "chirruping" abilities of other
species and their own social functions. The development of distinctive
phonemes and syllables, and intonational patterns, would provide
ready-made coinage for a number of additional semiotic functions,
besides the signalling of in-group identity.
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