the origin of speech jun 2008

[...]... population In the extreme case, the shift will result in an entirely new species Hence the Wrst part of the original title of Darwin’s book: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) In broad compass, the sequence of events in the history of life forms had two stages, Darwin theorized The Wrst was a stage of formation of living entities out of inorganic materials, a stage of self-sustaining... to the question of the nature of knowledge is still with us and hampers our applying Neodarwinian theory to the understanding of the mind, including the mental underpinnings of speech The Greeks’ relegation of history to a marginal status was perhaps not surprising, given their general ignorance about their own antecedents and about the nature of the world that preceded them But another factor the. .. (1871/1952) and his choice of the word ‘‘Descent’’ rather than ‘‘Ascent’’ in its title: ‘‘Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origins’’ (p 597) The bodily components of the speech production apparatus are hundreds of millions of years old, and therefore none of them initially evolved for speech purposes For example, the respiratory system (basically the lungs), which we use... whether or not they originally evolved for the use they’re now put to Gould and Vrba (1982) have coined the term ‘‘exaptation’’ to describe the particular case in which there is a borrowing of the results of prior adaptations for new uses The concept is of great importance for us because, as already mentioned, nothing in the speech- production apparatus originally evolved for speech purposes So part of. .. book is about what these movement patterns—action patterns— were, and the role they played in the evolution of the mental structures that came to underlie them But Wrst I ask the reader a favor Don’t take the movement patterns of speech for granted They are the key to our understanding the evolution of speech, including the mental patterns that eventually came to underlie its production The alternative... selection They had to be both producible and understandable The mental representations that developed to provide the instructions were inevitably inXuenced in their form by the nature of the patterns In this regard, then, the body inXuenced the evolution of the structure of the mind This contention perhaps becomes more plausible if we note both the Wnal sentence in Darwin’s book The Descent of Man (1871/1952)... could be just there Noam Chomsky, cited by MacFarquhar, 2003, p 71 ‘ The possession of speech, ’’ T H Huxley once remarked, ‘‘is the grand distinctive character of man’’ (1871) And indeed it dwarfs most other evolutionary achievements It involved not just the invention of words but, more remarkable still, the development of the ability to speak them, understand them, and think with them All of these things... tongue moving, either None of my undergraduate students know, until I ask them, which of the two variants of vocal tract constriction they use to make the ‘‘s’’ sound the one with the tongue tip, or the one with the tongue blade The visual equivalent of The intellectual context 5 this would be having to knock on a door to see whether we do it with our Wnger tips or our knuckles In speech, we just hear... focused on the mind–world relationship (i.e., the question of how the mind relates to its input), not on the mind–body relationship (i.e., how the mind controls the body) A central issue in epistemology the study of the nature and grounds of knowledge—has been whether knowledge or mental structure is innate or whether it comes solely from experience of the world—in particular, perceptual experience The dominant... should be deconstructed—in terms of their history of natural selection And in the course of doing this I will try to make it clear that the generative approach to speech simply explains one miracle in terms of another (A brief clariWcation is in order here Most of Chomsky’s work has been done in the Weld of syntax the study of sentence structures—not in phonology the study of sound patterns I will not . view of aspects of speech in the word ‘‘tomato’’ 79 Fig. 3.6 Linguistic structure of the syllable 80 Fig. 5.1 Schematic view of the articulatory component of speech 111 Fig. 7.1 Schematic views of. moving, either. None of my undergraduate students know, until I ask them, which of the two variants of vocal tract constriction they use to make the ‘‘s’’ sound the one with the tongue tip, or the. subsystems of speech: respiratory, phonatory, and articulator y 66 Fig. 3.2 The principal parts of the articulatory system 69 Fig. 3.3 Jackendoff’s characterization of the segmental structure of the