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Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language title: author: publisher: isbn10 | asin: print isbn13: ebook isbn13: language: subject publication date: lcc: ddc: subject:
Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language Advances in Semiotics Danesi, Marcel. Indiana University Press 0253316073 9780253316073 9780585202945 English Vico, Giambattista,--1668-1744--Contributions in the origin of language, Language and languages--Origin, Metaphor. 1993 P116.D36 1993eb 195 Vico, Giambattista,--1668-1744--Contributions in the origin of language, Language and languages--Origin, Metaphor.
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Advances in Semiotics Thomas A. Sebeok, General Editor
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Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language Marcel Danesi INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON & INDIANAPOLIS
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© 1993 by Marcel Danesi All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Danesi, Marcel, date Vico, metaphor, and the origin of language / Marcel Danesi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-31607-3 1. Vico, Giambattista, 16681744Contributions in the origin of language. 2. Language and languagesOrigin. 3. Metaphor. I. Title. P116.D36 1993 195dc20 92-30604 1 2 3 4 5 97 96 95 94 93
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Contents Preface I. Glottogenetic Theories and Research: A Brief Sketch
vii 1 5
Traditional Glottogenetic Theories 14 Scientific Approaches 22 The Shape of Contemporary Glottogenetic Theories 26 The Current State of Knowledge II. The Primitive Mind: A Vichian Reconstruction
30 31
Vico and Anglo-American Science 37 Previous Work on Vico: A Schematic Survey 43 The New Science 46 Basic Vichian Notions 51 The Primitive Mind III. Language and the Imagination: The Vichian Glottogenetic Scenario
60 61
The Vichian Approach 66 Reconstructing the Primal Scene 76 After the Primal Scene IV. The Dawn of Language: The Iconicity and Visual Mimesis Hypotheses
83 84
The Nature of Iconicity 93 The Research on Imagery, Iconicity, and Gesture 100 Iconic Representation V. From Language to Speech: The Audio-Oral Osmosis Hypothesis
105 105
Audio-Oral Osmosis 113 The Ontogenesis of Speech 117
Language and Speech
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Page vi VI. From Percepts to Concepts: The Metaphoricity Hypothesis
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The Nature of Metaphor 131 Metaphor and Concept-Formation 138 Mentation, Narrativity, and Myth VII. The Sociobiological-Computationist Viewpoint: A Vichian Critique
143 143
The Vichian Scenario Revisited 147 Revisiting the Genetic Perspective 155 Computationism References
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Index
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Preface In 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris imposed a ban on all discussions related to the question of the origin of language. A similar prohibition was endorsed by the Philological Society of London a half century later in 1911. Such drastic actions were motivated, no doubt, by the endless speculations, conjectures, and unfounded theories that were being bandied about at the time. For most of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and for the greater part of the twentieth century, language scientists have, in fact, tended to shy away from engaging in any kind of debate related to the seemingly insoluble enigma of the phylogenesis of speech. In the early 1970s, however, interest in this conundrum was rekindled, probably because of the intriguing and suggestive findings that were being accumulated in such interrelated fields of inquiry as archeology, paleography, animal ethology, sociobiology, psychology, neurology, anthropology, semiotics, and linguistics. Language scientists came to see these as tantalizing bits and pieces to the puzzle of language origins. The result of this new awareness was a disciplinary crossfertilization and the birth of a new branch of the language sciences, glottogenetics, known vicariously as glossogenetics (e.g., Grolier 1983; Crystal 1987: 290). Today, the aim of this new domain of scientific inquiry is to do exactly what the Linguistic Society of Paris and the Philological Society of London had dismissed as impracticable: namely, to conduct meaningful research forays into the origin (or origins) of language and to formulate theories on the etiology of speech in the human species. In the words of Landsberg (1988a: vii), glottogenetics has developed, in a very short time, into an interdisciplinary form of investigation that brings together "anthropologists, biologists, archeologists, linguists, prehistorians and inhabitants of adjacent intellectual realms" in the common goal of determining to what extent it is "possible to gather objective and verifiable data about the genesis of human language." Glottogenetics has indeed begun to unravel and put together some of the intriguing pieces to the mystifying puzzle of language origins. The proliferation of anthologies of studies that this science has spawnede.g., Wescott (1974), Harnad, Steklis, and Lancaster (1976), Grolier (1983), Skomale and Polomé (1987), Landsberg (1988a), Gessinger and Rahden (1988), Koch (1989), Raffler-Engel, Wind, and Jonker (1989), Shevoroshkin 1989provides samples of the kinds of fascinating scientific work that this fledg-
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ling field has now made possible. From the outset, however, the gathering together of the bits and pieces has made it saliently obvious that glottogenetics needs a principle, or set of principles, for connecting them in some scientifically plausible way, so that the original glottogenetic "scenario"or "primal scene" as Gans (1981: ix) calls itcan be reconstructed. This has always been the goal of the traditional theories, and, in my view, should continue to be the ultimate target of the new scientific focus. Actually, since the 1970s several very interesting attempts at reconstruction have been made. Sundry book-length discussions by Lieberman (1975, 1984, 1991), Stam (1976), Stross (1976), Gans (1981), Smith (1985), Dewart (1989), and Bickerton (1990), for instance, have put before language scientists a substantial number of detailed and cogently argued "scenarios" for the genesis of language. Any one of these could be profitably selected to shape and guide future research probes into this fascinating terrain. So, the purpose of this book is certainly not to add to the burgeoning stack of logically consistent glottogenetic theories. My specific aim here is to bring to the attention of those working (or just interested) in the field that perhaps the most plausible theoretical framework for synthesizing and assessing the scattered findings now coming out of the diverse scientific domains investigating the evolution of human speech was laid out in the pages of a volume written over two and a half centuries ago. In 1725, nearly a century and a half before the imposition of the Paris Society's interdiction, the Neapolitan rhetorician and philosopher Giambattista Vico (16681744) published a book whose title alone, La scienza nuova, should have guaranteed it a wide audience and a broad range of reactions. But it went virtually unnoticed outside of Naples. The probable reasons for this unfortunate neglect will be discussed in the second chapter of this book. Suffice it to say at this point that perhaps the most important of these is that no English-language version of the New Science (henceforth NS) was available before Thomas G. Bergin and Max Fisch's translation of the third and final 1744 edition in 1948 (second edition 1984). Despite its obvious contemporary flavor and unquestionable relevance to glottogeneticsEdie (1976: 166) goes so far as to call Vico the "first modern philosopher of language"the NS rarely gets even a mention in most current discussions of language phylogenesis. At most, those who are aware of its existence give it a cursory acknowledgment for having highlighted the role of the metaphorical capacity in the first acts of human cognition. Stam (1976: 919), for instance, is one of the few to start off his own glottogenetic account by pointing out that any portrait of human language evolution should include the metaphorical process and what Vico called "poetic logic." Surprisingly, however, he goes on to dismiss any extensive utilization of the insights offered by the NS for the reason that it is bound to leave one ''with many perplexities and paradoxes" (1976: 19). There are, of course, Vico scholars who have looked at some of the important implications that can be gleaned from the NS vis-à-vis the origins of language
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(e.g., Pagliaro 1969; Di Pietro 1976a, 1976b, 1981; Verene 1981; Papini 1984; Rossi 1984; Mooney 1985; Cantelli 1986, 1990). But no one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever attempted to sketch a "Vichian scenario" of language origins in any extensive fashion, so as to give it the exposure and consideration that it merits. In sketching such a scenario, I must alert the reader to the fact that, like any other theory in this domain, it is simply thatguesswork that attempts to recreate what might have happened. But it is also true that, lacking records of the first acts of speech, the most glottogenetics can aim for is a "reconstructed scenario" that can be shown to be compatible with the various kinds of scientific information currently available. The higher the degree of compatibility, the greater the plausibility of the scenario. I must also emphasize that the Vichian scenario to be outlined in the pages that follow was not put forward as such by Vico himself: i.e., the NS is not a treatise on language origin, nor did Vico give this topic more salience than any of the other topics that make up its subject matter. In line with previous exploratory work on this topic (e.g., Danesi 1986, 1987, 1991) I have, in effect, extracted and synthesized statements on, and allusions to, this specific question from the complex and intertwining thematic fabric of the NS. I hope that the way in which I have pieced them together turns out to be both faithful to Vico's intentions and useful to current discussions of language phylogenesis. Thus, it is more accurate to say that the glottogenetic scenario to be sketched here is based onnot recreated fromthe NS. There is no doubt that other Vichian glottogenetic accounts could be envisaged. Indeed, the greatness of the NS lies in the fact that the ideas therein contained can be assembled into myriad configurations to produce viable theoretical frameworks for the study of the origins of the human mind and its products. The glottogenetic scenario to be drafted in this book constitutes one such attempt at assemblage. In line with what Vico appears to be implying, I will henceforward talk about a single "origin" of language, rather than different "origins." Every time he takes his reader back to the first conscious acts of human speech, Vico portrays them as universal tendencies. Even if language were to have originated in different parts of the world and at different times, the patterns of language generation would have been, for Vico, the same throughout the world. My plan is to start with a schematic survey of the main glottogenetic theories advanced before contemporary glottogenetics. Then, I will look briefly at the kinds of techniques glottogenetics puts at the researcher's disposal, at the questions it allows one to ask, and at the kinds of theoretical formulations it now makes possible, so as to establish a frame of reference against which the Vichian scenario that I intend to sketch in subsequent chapters can be assessed. In the second chapter I will start an appraisal of Vico in the context of mainstream Anglo-American cognitive and social science. This is followed by a brief survey of selected studies on
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Vico in English. This leads me logically to a brief discussion of the background to, and the design of, the NS. Then I will look at the notions that Vico developed for reconstructing the primitive mind. Finally, I will attempt a Vichian reconstruction of the mind. In the third chapter, after a succinct discussion of the methodology Vico utilized in the NS to track down the first attempts of humans to speak, I will draft the Vichian glottogenetic scenario. I will end the chapter with a brief consideration of linguistic evolution beyond the primal scene. In the subsequent three chapters, I will assess the plausibility of the three hypotheses upon which this scenario rests by putting them to the litmus test of the current research in the behavioral, cognitive, and social sciences. So the fourth chapter evaluates the iconicity hypothesis, or the view that human consciousness evolved from the brain's capacity to generate mentally transportable images of the world; the fifth examines the transition from gestural to vocal speech, i.e., the hypothesis that the first attempts to express the images present in the brain must have occurred in the form of visual mimesis (limbic modeling of objects and events), and later by audio-oral osmosis (vocal modeling); the sixth assesses the plausibility of tracing the origin of abstract cognition and language to the workings of the metaphorical capacity (the metaphoricity hypothesis)the mental feature that, according to Vico, allowed the first humans to form associations among elements of thought in themselves. The "litmus testing" of the separate components of the scenario allows me to return to it in the final chapter and to reevaluate it in the light of two contrasting viewpointssociobiology and computationism. This book is not intended solely for experts in the field of glottogenetics. My hope is that it will be read by anyone interested in how language originated in our species. For this reason I have avoided technical jargon whenever and wherever possible; or else I have defined any technical term or scientific concept that I felt to be understandable primarily by experts. In this way, I hope that this book will stimulate a broad audience to read Vico's NS firsthanda wish that he never saw fulfilled in his own lifetime. I wish to thank the Office of Research Administration of the University of Toronto for grant number 3-195-127-06 and the Northrop Frye Centre of Victoria University for a similar grant. These have allowed me to take time from my teaching duties at the University of Toronto in order to do the necessary literature search for this book. I would like to thank Professor Thomas A. Sebeok of Indiana University for encouraging me to put my ideas on paper. Finally, I must thank my familyLucia, Danila, and Chrisfor putting up with all the stress and grumpiness that writing a book inevitably causes. This book is dedicated to them.
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One Glottogenetic Theories and Research: A Brief Sketch The evolution of language is coterminous with the evolution of Homo. Language is a modeling device available to humans alone. (Sebeok 1985a: 366) Since the dawn of recorded history, human beings have had an abiding fascination with the origins of thingsthe universe, life, themselves. This is reflected, for instance, in the fact that virtually all of the world's cultures have composed myths to explain their roots. But nowhere has this need to know been more manifest than in humanity's quest to understand why and how the capacity to speak originated. Language has always been universally felt to constitute the feature that, more than any other, sets humans apart from the other species. Thus, it is easy to see why the subject of its origin and evolution has always received, and continues to receive, so much keen attention. Two decades ago, a bibliography compiled by Hewes (1974) contained some ten thousand entries on this topic published from antiquity to the present century. Behind this acute interest one can easily discern the conviction that if we were ever able to solve the enigma of glottogenesis, then we would possess a vital clue to the mystery of life itself. Throughout the centuries the debate on language as the distinguishing attribute of humanity has often focused on whether it was a gift from a divine source or a unique accomplishment of the human mind. The former has been, of course, the traditional view held by most religious. The latter has been the point of view espoused by Western science and secular philosophy, and it traces its roots to ancient Greece, where the term for "speech"logosdesignated not only articulate discourse but also the rational faculty underlying and inhering in speech. As Harris and Talbot (1989: ix) have remarked, for the Greeks it was logos that differentiated
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"humanity from all living species," and it was logos that provided "the basis for the Classical definition of the human being as the rational animal." As Roger Brown (1986: 435) has aptly put it, "most early contributions to the origins question were transparently motivated by a desire to establish the essential nature of man as either Godlike or animal-like." Paradoxically, the debate pitting a strictly religious against a purely rational account of glottogenesis could have crystallized only within the context of a highly rational and advanced culture, as was the ancient Greek one. But there really is no compelling reason to view these two perspectives as necessarily incompatible or mutually exclusive. In the model of the human mind that Vico proposed, which will be described in the next chapter, they can be seen to emanate from different levels of human cognitionthe "theological-metaphorical'' and the "human-rational." Each of these mental Gestalts endeavors to gain an understanding of things in its own particular way. Needless to say, the human-rational approach, which seeks to unravel how language was generated (or invented) by the human mind, is the only viable one that a corresponding rational science of glottogenetics can pursue. However, attempts to explain why language and mind are intrinsic to human nature cannot so easily ignore the religious perspective. The seemingly self-evident premise inherent in the Greek viewpointthat language is a human inventionis itself an "invention" of the rational mind. The clever and persuasive "thought experiments" that the Greeks initiated to support the invention theory are transparent products of highly imaginative minds. The main form that these arguments have always taken, from the time of the Greeks onward, is that of logically contrived hypothetical scenarios that aim to draw their audience toward a single inescapable conclusionthat language is an invention of humans alone. The following, which is a paraphrase of one of the oldest and most ingenious ever imagined, illustrates how effective these can be in making their case a convincing one: Picture two married couples who belong to the most highly advanced culture imaginable. Each of the four people have achieved the highest degree of intelligence possible with respect to all the other denizens of their culture. The four are in a boat in the middle of the ocean. Both of the females are pregnant, and it so happens that they give birth at exactly the same instant to two healthy babies. As soon as the babies see the light of day, the four adults fall overboard and drown. This means that the neonates, who were born of the best possible "genetic material," have not had any contact whatsoever with other human beings. Fortuitously, the boat reaches the shore of an island on which no other human being has set foot. The babies are mistaken as cubs by a pack of wolves. The wolves proceed to take the human neonates into their care and to nurture them as they would any cub. Untouched by human beings and culture, will these "human" neonates develop speech spontaneously in the same way that they would develop a
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physical organ? Or would their progeny have to reinvent speech tabula rasa over many centuries of serendipitous happenstances? Remarkably, this cleverly designed scenario elicits some rather fundamental philosophical questions. Will the two neonates grow up to be quadrupeds as their "adoptive parents" or bipeds as their biological parents? Will they develop the capacity to perceive themselves as being qualitatively different from the wolves? The aim of the unknown author of this scenario was evidently to support the invention, or cultural, theory of language: Without culture there is no language; it would simply have to be invented all over again. But it is instructive to note that our own inventive minds can, paradoxically, enlist such a logically contrived argumentation to support any conceivable theory, not just the invention one: One can argue that the children would have to be "given," or "infused with," the language faculty by some divine entity (the religious perspective). One could also maintain that the children's biological nature would have eventually generated speech as a product of adaptive changes to genetic structure. A culture, according to this interpretation, only acts as a "constraint" for the specific kind of language that develops in children (the genetic theory). And, in line with the original goal of the scenario, one could reason that the children's progeny would eventually have invented speech; and that along with speech they would establish the necessary conditionscultureto make its transmission possible (the invention theory). Two putative "test cases" for assessing such theories turned up in the 1970s. It goes without saying that these stimulated widespread interest in the scientific community and extensive coverage by the print and broadcast media. In 1970 a thirteenyear-old child named Genie was found in a room where she had been living alone since the age of fourteen months (Curtiss 1977). The child could not speak. Then, in 1976 a boy was found in the forests of Burundi in central Africa. He had been living with monkeys; he walked on his hands and feet and climbed trees like an ape. And, needless to say, he couldn't speak (e.g., Classen 1991). Neither child has, in fact, been able to learn how to speak like humans who have had the benefit of a normal upbringing. Whatever scientific or philosophical conclusions one might wish to extrapolate from such unusual cases, they have made one thing saliently obvious: why humans speak at all remains a complete mystery. Both Genie and the Burundi boy survived without it, relying on more basic biological propensities for survival. Language seems to inhere simultaneously in biological and cultural reality. The traditional glottogenetic theories have assumed that language is an
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invention. On the whole, they have been formulated as attempts to explain how the inventive process leading to language might have unfolded. However, in the last few decades somenotably the linguist Noam Chomsky (1976, 1986)have rejected this ageold argument in favor of the view that language is a kind of physical organ that is as innate as, say, flight is to a bird. So, for Chomsky, language came about in ways that are explainable as, for instance, our ability to use our eyes and our noses for sense perception. This is why attempts to teach language to the higher primates, who do not have such a language organ, have turned out to be unsuccessful, even though they seem to have developed a sophisticated form of manual signing (e.g., Premack 1976; Savage-Rumbaugh 1986). It goes without saying that there really is no way to prove whether language is a culture-dependent inventive process or a biological endowment. In all likelihood the "truth" lies somewhere in between these two extreme perspectives. The Vichian scenario is impossible to locate within a strictly religious, invention, or genetic frame. It spans all three. It posits, first of all, that the brain's innate capacity to generate images is the biological prerequisite for the mind. So, in a certain sense it is a kind of genetic theory, albeit a radically different one from current genetic theories. The crucial feature of the Vichian scenario is the imagination, which is an epiphenomenal concomitant of the brain's imaging capacity undergirding "creativity" in the human organism. This aspect of the Vichian perspective is, therefore, compatible with invention theories of glottogenesis, given that the imagination is the source of the inventive capacity in humans. But it is different in considering both language and culture as products of the imagination. Vico also states throughout the NS that it will never be possible, given our nature, to understand why we are the way we are. In line with the religious way of thinking, therefore, Vico argues that we exist unwittingly within a larger scheme of things. Actually, most of the traditional glottogenetic theories have implicitly assumed the biology-culturedivine nexus. But they have never been able to make a coherent interconnection among these three. It is the genetic paradigm that makes biology the primary trigger for language in the human organism. Culture is seen by genetic theorists as furnishing the original context for the generation of language and, subsequently, as providing the channel for its continuity and development. I am, of course, aware that substantive arguments have been put foward to support a strictly genetic theory of language phylogenesis. Given its significance as an alternative to both the traditional and the Vichian perspectives, I will therefore give it ample consideration in this book. In this chapter, I will simply describe it as one of the current glottogenetic theories. In the second chapter I will compare it to the Vichian model of mind. Then, in the final chapter of this book, I will examine it critically. My main purpose in this chapter is to set the stage for the Vichian scenario to be sketched in the third chapter. So, I will review the traditional
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glottogenetic theories first. Then I will quickly scan the current state of knowledge in the field, pausing briefly to look at the "facts on file" that contemporary glottogenetic research has organized into a coherent body of scientific knowledge. Traditional Glottogenetic Theories The lengths to which some have gone to throw light on the question of language origin are quite extraordinary. It is reported by the Greek historian Herodotus that in the seventh century B.C. the Egyptian king Psamtik (663-610 B.C.) devised perhaps the earliest of the so-called experiments aimed at determining the "mother tongue" of humanity. His experiment is told by Herodotus as follows (in Crystal 1987: 288): He gave two new-born babies of ordinary men to a shepherd, to nurture among his flocks after this manner. He charged him that none should utter any speech before them, but they should live by themselves in a solitary habitation; and at the due hours the shepherd should bring goats to them, and give them their fill of milk, and perform the other things needful. Thus Psamtik did and commanded because he desired, when the babes should be past meaningless whimpers, to hear what tongue that they would utter first. After two years the shepherd brought the babies raised in the prescribed manner before Psamtik. The first word uttered by the two sounded like becosthe ancient Phrygian word for "bread." So, Psamtik immediately declared Phrygianan extinct language spoken at the time in an area corresponding to modern northwestern Turkeyto be the Ursprache of humanity. Whether or not this "experiment" ever took place at all is an open historical question. But even if it had, it certainly would not have proven anything. The babbling sounds made by Psamtik's childrenas likely as not in imitation of each otherwere interpreted, or more accurately, misinterpreted, as constituting the word becos by the shepherd and Psamtik, probably in much the same way as parents commonly misinterpret the first sounds made by their children as genuine words. Reports of Psamtik's so-called experiment spawned similar ventures in later times and places. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (11941250), for instance, is said to have instructed several foster mothers and nurses to suckle, bathe, and wash selected children, without ever speaking to them. Frederick's objective was to see if the children would speak the tongue of their parents or Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or Arabic first. It is said that James IV of Scotland (14731513) may have conducted a similar experiment. He apparently isolated a deaf and dumb woman, gave her two neonates to raise, and provided her with all the things pertaining to nourishment and care. By depriving the two children of a language envi-
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ronment, James's intention, like that of Psamtik and Frederick, was to determine which language they would speak first when they came of age. Today we look upon these "experiments" as oddities of history. We see them as bearing witness to the extent to which human beings have gone to solve the riddle of language origin. However, although the "method" they employed to pursue their objective was clearly preposterous and bizarre, the premise that was inherent in itthat language ontogenesis reenacts language phylogenesis in a chronologically condensed wayis, arguably, a plausible one. As a matter of fact, traditional glottogenetic theories have always been implicitly shaped by it; and several current scientific approaches have adopted it as a working principle. Vico made it a basic tool of his reconstructive method. The first case of a "wolf child" was recorded in 1344. Since then nearly fifty cases have been reported of children, including Genie and the Burundi child in this century, who have been raised in the wild by animals or kept away from social contact and survived (Crystal 1987: 289). Needless to say, these have lent no support whatsoever to Psamtik's conclusions. The picture that has emerged from these reports is a revealing one. None of the culturally deprived children could speak or understand speech. The most extensively studied of these is the case of Genie (Curtiss 1977). As already mentioned, Genie was raised in conditions of extreme neglect and isolation. She was found to be severely disturbed and without speech, having received practically no exposure to language between the ages of two and puberty. Attempts to impart language to her have not produced very satisfactory results. While she has been able to develop a rudimentary capacity to understand simple verbal messages and to communicate her basic needs, she has not shown any signs of the ability to use language that is in any way comparable to how individuals with a normal upbringing use their native tongue. Her speech has been likened to that of aphasics (people who have suffered a partial or total loss of speech due to a brain lesion). Jespersen's Typology Reasoning phylogenetically on the analogy of language ontogenesis, therefore, constitutes the oldest form of speculation on how language might have originated. It can easily be seen to lie at the conceptual core of each of the five main traditional theories identified by the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen (1922): Bow-Wow Theory. This posits that speech arose through the imitation of soundsa universal characteristic of child language development. The main evidence used to support such a theory is the presence of onomatopoeic words in the core vocabularies of the world's languages. Pooh-Pooh Theory. This claims that speech originated out of the instinctive sounds and grunts our hominid ancestors made in response to pain,
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anger, love, and other affective states. The main evidence used by proponents of this theory is the presence of interjections in the world's languages. Ding-Dong Theory. This postulates that speech grew out of the instinctive oral responses the first hominids must have produced in consonance with environmental events. For advocates of this theory, these responses, or "oral gestures," constituted our first words. For example, a word such as mama is seen to reflect the movement of the lips as the mouth of the infant approaches the mother's breast, and therefore to indicate how such a word would have originated in the species. Yo-He-Ho Theory. This views language as a concomitant product of the need our primitive ancestors must have felt to communicate with each other as they worked together in groups. Their "communal grunts," which over time developed into chant-like utterances, became the audio-oral substance out of which language took its shape. The use of prosodic features in children and in the world's languagesespecially rhythmis said to be a remnant of this protoform of verbal communication. La-La Theory. This is Jespersen's own theory that language emerged as a consequence of the sounds our human ancestors made in response to love, play, and other socio-affective states. These eventually developed into song and poetic feelingthe protoforms of language. Jespersen's typology makes it obvious why in 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris decided to prohibit all discussions of the origins of language. Given the lack of direct evidence, drafting a plausible theory of how language started in the human organism was seen to constitute an exercise in interesting, but unfounded, speculation. The earliest deciphered written records are only six thousand years old, while anthropologists trace the existence of the human species to at least one million years ago. For the sake of argument, the five theories identified by Jespersen can be conflated into three general types: echoic (or onomatopoeic), gestural, and pragmo-communicative. These share the design feature that a single factor is considered to be the spark for language. Echoic Theories Echoic theories are the product of the fertile imagination of the ancient Greeks (Stam 1976). They can be seen to encompass Jespersen's bow-wow, pooh-pooh and la-la theories. The proponents of such theories argue that there is a natural connection between the forms of language and the essence of things. Speech, therefore, is said to have sprung from the attempts of the first sentient hominids to imitate sounds and/or react instinctively and affectively to fluctuations in the perceived environment. Such theories suggest that audio-oral osmosisthe tendency of organisms to assimilate
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and reproduce unconsciously any sound detected in the surrounding environmentwas the factor that led to the genesis of language. This means that a vocal sound uttered in imitation of a natural sound, or in response to some emotional state, became associated at an early stage with the natural or emotional referent. Such theories can therefore also be referred to as "languagethrough-the-ear" theories, since they imply that the audio-oral channel was the predominant one in glottogenesis. The supporters of echoic theories point to the presence of onomatopoeic words and/or interjections in the world's languages, claiming that their core vocabularies are echoic in origin. Stross (1976: 21) incapsulates the essential perspective of such theories in the following way: Humans and birds especially seem to have rather well developed abilities to imitate many environmental sounds, especially sounds made by other animals, and this ability could well have been very useful to protohominids for luring game. Could sounds used by protohominids to lure game or mimic sounds of nature come to represent the game or other objects in nature in the minds of these prelinguistic humans? These theories now enjoy little support in toto. They reveal their most serious shortcoming in their inability to account for the development of nonoral language in deaf human beings and in the higher primates, both of whom lack the anatomical prerequisites for audio-oral osmosis. In other words they fail to establish an evolutionary link between the first echoic utterances and language as a faculty of the human mind that can exist without vocal articulation. But despite this weakness, echoic theories cannot be dismissed entirely. After all, there really is no way to determine whether or not onomatopoeia played a much more pivotal creative role in prehistoric times than it does today. Onomatopoeia is an example of what linguists call sound symbolismthe instinctive ability of human beings to create forms that have some kind of close relation to their referents. These forms reflect, or symbolize, properties of their referents through osmosis. It is certainly not at all unreasonable to suggest that the onomatopoeic ability might have had a much more important cognitive function for our hominid ancestors. An example of the productivity of sound symbolism can still be seen in Japanese, for instance, which has twice as many onomatopoeic words as English (Kakehi, Mito, Hayase, Tsuzuki, and Young 1981). Onomatopoeia is used in this language to represent many of the audible sounds associated with the actions of people, animals, and things. Japanese also makes extensive use of "manner-imitation," or the representation of the way one feels about the objects and events in the environment in which sound plays no part. Reduplicationsrepetitions of consonants and vowels twice in immediate succession as in English ding-dong, splish-splash, etc.constitute a characteristic feature of everyday conversation in Japanese: chirin-chirin "tinkle," tobo-tobo "plod,'' beta-beta "stick to," fura-fura "roam," etc.
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Language "This" = [i] "That/You" = [a] / [u] Chinook -i-uKlamath keho-, haTsimshian gwiigwaGuaraní tyé tuvicha Maya li' la', lo' Binga ti ta Fur in illa Didinga ici ica Tamil idi adi Thai nii nan Burmese dii thoo Table 1. Swadesh's Illustration of Coincidences in Sound Symbolism. It should not be at all surprising, therefore, to find that the linguist Morris Swadesh, who was a pioneer in the study of sound symbolism, came to develop a deep interest in glottogeneris near the end of his life (Swadesh 1971). Swadesh drew attention to such suggestive features as, for instance, the fact that many of the world's languages used [i]-type vowels to express "nearness," in contrast to [a]- and [u]-type vowels to express the opposite notion of "distance." Table 1 contains some of Swadesh's examples of how different languages express the complementary deictic ("pointing" or "demonstrative") notions this (nearness) and that/you (distance). Such coincidences suggest that the notion of nearness is represented unconsciously by the relative nearness of the lips in the articulation of [i]; while the complementary notion of distance is represented by the relative openness of the lips in the pronunciation of the [a] and [u] sounds. Research of this type has, in fact, established that there is a basic propensity in languages to employ sound symbolism as a creative strategy. And the research in developmental psycholinguistics has made it abundantly clear that it is a universal feature of childhood speech to imitate sounds. But it is not possible to draw definitive conclusions about the origin of language from sound symbolism alone. Similarly, those who trace speech to affective oral responses (pooh-pooh and la-la theorists) are, in all probabil-
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ity, correct only in shedding light on one aspect, or stage, of language phylogenesis. The use of interjections, intonation contours, and other so-called prosodic devices to express emotional states is a universal feature of human speech. Loudness, for example, is used generally to convey a state of anger. Similarly, speakers of different languages typically increase their rate of speech to express urgency. And whispering seems universally to add "conspiratorial" connotations to verbal messages. Perhaps the most persuasive version of pooh-pooh theory ever put forward was the one formulated in the nineteenth century by F. Max Müller (1861). Müller proposed that our first words developed from instinctive expressive sounds uttered in response to some emotional eventanger, surprise, pain, pleasure, relief, etc. Residues of this tendency, he claimed, can be found in all the world's languages. In English, for example, we commonly utter such interjections as Huh? Ouch! Wow! etc. in response to different affective situations. But, although it can be argued that this kind of expressive modality probably played a much more crucial role in the first speech acts of humanity, there is no reason to believe that it alone set the process of glottogenesis in motion. Moreover, like other echoic theories, it fails to explain the development of gesture languages and the presence of gesture as a subsystem of human vocal communication. To sum up, it can be said that the traditional language-through-the-ear theories have, by themselves, not been able to sketch a primal scene that is acceptable in its entirely. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that they have drawn attention to the role that audio-oral osmosis must have played in a corner of this scene. Audio-oral osmosis is still an operative strategy in the speech dimension of verbal communication. But the faculty of language in its totality could not have developed exclusively from a biologically programmed osmotic response system. Even lacking the anatomical prerequisites for audio-oral osmosis, human beings can and do develop language by means of gesture. The role that can be assigned to language-through-the-ear theories in a Vichian account of glottogenesis will be discussed in chapter 3. Then in chapter 5 the discussion will focus on how audio-oral osmosis can be related etiologically to gesture (visual mimesis). Gestural Theories Gestural theories are probably as old as echoic ones. Essentially, they posit that the use of the body, and especially of the hands, to refer to objects and beings in the environment was the protoform of communication and language. Stross (1976: 22) puts the main features of a gestural scenario into a nutshell as follows: It is easy to imagine bipedal animals gesturing to attract attention or pointing out a particular object with a wave of the hand. Perhaps you can even visualize a group of prelinguistic humans imitating the shapes of things with hand
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gestures or pointing to parts of the body. Association of the gesture with the thing indicated would then have to be extended to situations in which the object was not present. The transfer of this form of representationvisual mimesisto the subsequently dominant audio-oral channel is explained by gestural theorists in terms of an imitation and substitution process by which visual mimetic units are transferred osmotically to the vocal apparatus. The version of gesture theory that has become a point of departure for all subsequent ones was formulated by Jean Jacques Rousseau in the middle part of the eighteenth century (see Rousseau 1966). This French philosopher became intrigued by the question of the origin of language while seeking to understand what he called the "noble savage." Rousseau proposed that the "cries of nature" that protohumans must have shared with the animals and the mimetic gestures that they must have concomitantly used led to the invention of audio-oral language. He explained the evolutionary transition as follows: When the accompanying gestures proved to be too cumbersome, their corresponding cries were there to replace them completely. It is interesting to note that Rousseau, like Vico and Jespersen, likened the first purely vocal instances of language to poetry (Rousseau 1966: 12): As man's first motions for speaking were of the passions, his first expressions were tropes. Figurative language was the first to be born. Proper meaning was discovered last. One calls things by their true name only when one sees them in their true form. At first only poetry was spoken; there was no hint of reasoning until much later. In his account, which can be designated a "language-through-the-eye" theory, Rousseau proposed what certainly must have been a radical idea for his erathat metaphor was not a mere stylistic variant for a more basic literal mode of expression, but rather a cognitive remnant of a previous, and hence more fundamental, stage in the evolution of the rational, or logical, mind. Rousseau considered the first metaphorical utterances to be the mental counterparts of physical gestures. However, he did not provide an explanation to link the metaphorical capacity to the development of ratiocination and abstract thought. A century later, Richard Paget attempted to fill in the obvious evolutionary gap that previous gesture theories had left by relating visual mimesis to audio-oral osmosis in terms of what has come to be known as mouth-gesture theory. Paget put forward the idea that manual gestures were copied unconsciously by positions and movements of the lips and tongue. The continual apposition of gestures and vocal movements led eventually to the replacement of the former by the latter. Called vicariously ta-ta theory, the following passage (1930: 24) shows how Paget attempted to account for the shift from visual mimesis to audio-oral osmosis:
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Human speech arose out of a generalized unconscious pantomimic gesture languagemade by the limbs as a whole (including the tongue and lips)which became specialized in gestures of the organs of articulation, owing to the hands becoming continually occupied with the use of tools. The gestures of the organs of articulation were recognized by the hearer because the hearer unconsciously reproduced in his mind the actual gesture which had produced the sound. But even though such scenarios do indeed explain in a plausible way how gestures may have become sounds, and although they have more recently been shown to be compatible with brain and vocal tract evolution (Hewes 1973), they ignore a whole range of rudimentary questions: What feature of the mind made the transition from visual mimesis to audio-oral osmosis possible? Why has gesture survived as a communicative subsystem? How did abstract language develop out of the oral substitutes for gestures? As Stross aptly remarks (1976: 23), the problem with gestural theories is that they "have no more plausible explanations for the mental jump from expressive to referential communication than do proponents of the other early theories." Like echoic theories, therefore, language-through-the-eye theories seem incapable of depicting the primal scene in a completely satisfactory way. Rather, they throw light on another corner of this scene, highlighting visual mimesis as a more fundamental cognitive system than audio-oral osmosis. And, indeed, even in modern humans visual mimesis can be seen to take precedence over audio-oral osmosis in both language ontogenesis and in situations where vocal communication is impossible. Children invariably develop some form of gestural communication before audio-oral speech; and gesturing is the communicative mode we instinctively resort to with a speaker of a different language. The part that gesture plays in a Vichian glottogenetic scenario will be taken up in chapters 3 and 4. Pragmo-Communicative Theories Both echoic and gestural theories fail to address in any serious fashion the possibility that speech arose out of an evolutionary need to cooperate with others. This, however, is the crux of pragmo-communicative theories (Jespersen's yo-he-ho theories). These can therefore be alternatively called "language-as-need" theories. They paint a scenario in which the rhythmic chants of the members of the first hominid societies represented the activities the group members performed as they worked cooperatively together. As the Russian neurologist Luria (1970: 80) explains: "There is every reason to believe that speech originated in productive activity and arose in the form of abbreviated activities which represented work activities." The following synthesis by Stross (1976: 22) constitutes a useful characterization of such theories:
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Groups of early humans, straining with the intense and common effort necessary to move a fallen log or other such occupation, came to emit spontaneous grunts which were partly consonantal and which would eventually be used to signal common exertion in much the same way that today we use "heave" or "pull" in group lifting or pulling efforts. Eventually the grunts used for coordinating the efforts of many persons in a rhythmic way came to be associated with the work performed and then to stand for the work itself in symbolic communication. Some pragmo-communicative accounts (e.g., Noiré 1917) are similar to echoic ones in linking language to an osmotic process that must have operated in response to fluctuations in environmental events. More recent versions, however, posit that the connection between these two dimensions is arbitrary or conventional. In 1927 Grace de Laguna put forward what is perhaps the most cogent version of pragmo-communicative theory to date. She stressed that the work-related chants of protohumans served the function of coordinating social activities. De Laguna emphasized that this kind of speech differed from animal cries, or osmotic responses, in that it was evoked by referents that were only of indirect emotional interest to the first speakers. Speech processes, consequently, must have been tied to the need felt by the members of early hominid cultures to call attention to the specific properties of objects and events in their immediate environment. De Laguna suggested that these first "predicative" utterances must have been very similar to the first words of childrenthe socalled holophrases, or one-word utterances, that children invariably utter around their first year of life (e.g., Titone and Danesi 1985: 6375). Both depend on perceived context and therefore are capable of functioning alone for communicative purposes without the aid of other sentence forms, for the simple reason that they refer to the immediate context in which they are uttered. As the referents identified by primordial holophrases became more and more frequent and diversified, multiword utterances started to emerge. This eventually led to the formation of sentences and ultimately to the emergence of language as context-free symbolic behavior. A similar pragmo-communicative scenario can be found in the work of the psychologist Géza Révész (1956). Like De Laguna, Révész posited the need for contact and cooperation among the members of early cultures as the primary factor that set in motion the cognitive processes that generated language. As social needs increased, Révész suggested, so did the means for communicating them. Pragmo-communicative theories posit that language could not have developed without a social context to set the process of glottogenesis in motion. But, like echoic and gestural theories, they skirt around a fundamental question: What mental feature could have sparked the process by which work-related chants were transformed into symbolic verbal behavior? Language-asneed theories, like most pragmatic accounts of lan-
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guage ontogenesis, simply describe the probable contextual conditions from which the process of language genesis may have derived its momentum. They do not explain the process itself. I am inclined to agree with Chomsky (1990: 57) when he says that communication "is no specific function of natural language; humans have other modes of communication, and there seems no reason to single out communication among the many uses to which language is put." In the next chapter I will discuss Vico's suggestion that the imagination was the mental feature that made language, and other semiosic ("sign-generating") systems, possible. In general, the traditional echoic, gestural, and pragmo-communicative accounts of glottogenesis are weakened by the same flaw. They seek out a single factorsound imitation, a response to an affective state, the need for social contact and cooperationto explain a complex phenomenon. In all likelihood the "truth" resides partially in each one of these. In the last few decades some interesting attempts have been made to look for ways to combine several factors in order to reconstruct the first speech acts in a more plausible scientific fashion. In 1959, for instance, A. S. Diamond presented a large corpus of data to argue that language originated from the primitive verb roots that our early ancestors must have used to request assistance from their group members. Unlike previous pragmocommunicative theories, Diamond did not stop there. He used the data he had collected to reconstruct the "protoverbs" which must have represented the first commands referring to common bodily actions like breaking, killing, cutting, etc. As evolutionary changes took place, Diamond suggested, nouns and adjectives were added to this verbal base to generate language as we know it today. Although Diamond did indeed present a well-documented case that integrated two factorssocial need and bodily actionshe did not go into any detail as to how they came to be represented by osmosis in the audio-oral channel. Moreover, like all other pragmo-communicative accounts, Diamond simply assumed that protohominid groups invented speech to ensure their survival through social cohesion and cooperation. He did not consider the possibility that primitive group-formations, or protocultures, might themselves have been made possible by the same mental feature that generated language. Like many other theorists, he assumed that language developed from culture. He did not entertain the possibility that language and culture may have developed in tandem. Scientific Approaches If nothing else, Diamond's work showed, perhaps for the first time ever, that a scientific approach to the question of language origin was possible. The fact that he used a large data-base to support his theory was a sure sign that a "scientific" glottogenetics was just around the corner. A little
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more than a decade later, Morris Swadesh's posthumous 1971 volume, The Origin and Diversification of Language, came forward to kindle a widespread renewal of interest in the study of language phylogenesisa line of inquiry that had been thought impracticable since the 1911 ban imposed by the Philological Society of London. Swadesh's volume was seen to constitute a clear example of how the enigma of language could be approached in a systematic and data-based way. Swadesh's Example Swadesh divided the development of language into four primary periods which corresponded to the Eolithic (the dawn stone age), Paleolithic (the old stone age), Neolithic (the new stone age), and the recent, or Historical, period spanning the last ten thousand years. Within these time frames Swadesh located different modalities of linguistic evolution: The Eoglottic period began about three million years ago during the time when Australopithecus inhabited the woodlands and savannas of Africa. During this period our hominid ancestors probably possessed a simple system of animal-like cries and some root words. The latter were formed through sound symbolismthe imitative process by which the mouth unconsciously copied the shapes and sounds of beings, objects, and events present in the immediate environment. The content of messages during this period was limited to pure expressivity and indexicality (demonstration). The Paleoglottic period witnessed the growth in complexity and range of sound symbolism, root vocabulary, and contextindependent message content in hominid speech. The Neoglottic age saw the emergence of a few independent roots with more or less fixed meanings. Word inflections were marked by phonemic changesdistinctive sound unitsthat signaled differences in the shape, intensity, proximity, gender, etc. of their referents. During the Historical period language as we know it today established itself as the dominant feature of human mentality. Local languages gave rise to the classical languages of the early civilizations and, in turn, to the world languages. Swadesh also suggested that all languages in the world today derived from one source during the Paleolithic period when Neanderthals were still around. This scenario was challenged on several counts. But Swadesh's modus operandi showed, once and for all, that a scientific approach to the age-old question of glottogenesis was conceivable. Using data from archeology and anthropology, together with a detailed knowledge of language change and reconstruction, Swadesh demonstrated how a plausible primal
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scene could be drafted and how the transition to contemporary language behavior could be envisaged. In contrast to the philosophical discussions and speculations characteristic of the traditional accounts, Swadesh's work laid the foundation for a truly scientific approach to the study of the genesis and evolution of language. Reconstructionism Swadesh's method was the logical outcome of a rather long-standing tradition in linguisticsthe reconstruction of protolanguages. It is therefore historically more accurate to trace the epistemological ancestry of contemporary glottogenetics to the comparative reconstruction movement of the previous century. So, I will now take a quick look at nineteenth-century comparativism and then discuss briefly the most recent attempts to reconstruct the forms of humanity's so-called mother tongue (Skomale and Polomé 1987; Shevoroshkin 1990; Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1990). At the end of the eighteenth century language scientists began to compare groups of related languages in order to make hypotheses about their common ancestor or protolanguage. By the nineteenth century these scientists had amassed sufficient evidence to suggest that there was once a single language from which most of the modern Eurasian languages had evolved. They called this language Proto-Indo-European (PIE), hypothesizing that it was spoken long before the first civilizations around 3,500 B.C. and that it had split up into different languages in the subsequent millennium. The formation of languages from one source came to be known as "diversification." Shortly thereafter, linguists started to apply the same reconstruction techniques to other language families. The motivating idea behind such efforts was that it would be possible eventually to piece together the Ursprache through the reconstruction of various protolanguages. The early comparativists came up with the concept of family tree to explain historical relationships. Figure 1 is an example of the family tree representing the origin of the Germanic languages. This concept provided, in turn, a useful terminology for relating languages to each other: e.g., a "parent" language did not live on after a "daughter" language was born and the "branches" of the tree showed how languages were related genetically and chronologically. In essence, the family-tree concept allowed linguists to compare systematically a series of languages in order to establish a historical relationship among them. First, a set of formal similarities and differences among the languages were identified. From these an attempt was made to reconstruct an earlier, unattested stage. Comparativism led eventually to two main ways of classifying languages: genetic, which was the one arrived at through the method of reconstruction, and typological, which was based on a comparison of the formal similarities among languages. The earliest typological schema was the one proposed by August von Schlegel (1849). According to Schlegel languages could be
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Figure 1. The Proto-Germanic Family Tree. From C. F. Hockett, The origin of speech, Scientific American 203 (1960), 8896. Copyright © 1960 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Figure 2. Reconstructing the PIE word for ''father" (see Crystal 1987: 23). grouped after the manner in which they constructed their words (morphology). He identified four morphological types: isolating languages (whose words were invariable), inflecting languages (whose words were formed by inflection), agglutinating languages (whose words were built from sequences of units), and incorporating languages (whose words were constructed in a combination of ways). The work on PIE has remained the most useful one for glottogenetics, for the simple reason that knowledge about this protolanguage is detailed and extensive (Renfrew 1988; Mallory 1989). Already in the previous century, linguists had a pretty good idea of what PIE sounded like. Figure 2 shows the reconstruction of the PIE word for "father," *p ter (the asterisk indicates a reconstructed, but unattested, form). PIE had words for animals, plants, parts of the body, tools, weapons, and various abstract notions. It is this stock of reconstructed lexical items that has helped contemporary glottogeneticists paint a fairly good picture of the semantic range of one of the first vocabularies utilized by human beings. As a matter of fact, the work on PIE may have been the initial spark that ignited a renewed scientific interest in the study of language origin in the present century. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Ferdinand de Saussurewho is more famous as the "father" of modern linguistics (Saussure 1916)proposed to resolve various anomalies in the reconstructed PIE vowel system by postulating the previous existence of some kind of laryngeal sound that must have caused the changes in the length and quality of adjacent vowels to occur in PIE's linguistic descendants. Saussure's suggestion was based purely on reconstructive reasoning. At first his hypothesis was considered neat, but ultimately artificial. However, in 1927 when the cuneiform tablets of Hittitean ancient Indo-European language of Asia Minor spoken in the second millennium B.C.were dug up by archeologists in Turkey, they revealed the presence of an [h] sound that occurred in places within words where Saussure had predicted the laryngeals should be.
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This was a remarkable event indeed. A prediction necessitated by reconstructive deduction turned out to be true! Reassured by such a serendipitous archeological discovery, historical linguists turned their attention intensely toward reconstruction, with an emphasis on making it even more scientifically precise. Swadesh (1951, 1959), for instance, devised a mathematical approach to reconstruction which came to be known as glottochronology or lexicostatistics. With this technique he wanted to estimate the length of time that had elapsed since two languages deemed to be related began to diverge into independent codes (time depth). In this way, he reasoned, glottochronology could become a powerful tool for reconstructing our linguistic prehistory. Swadesh's method consisted in putting together a word list, or core vocabulary, that he assumed to have universal validity. His list contained words such as bird, dog, skin, blood, bone, drink, eat, etc. which referred to notions that he considered to cut across all cultures. He avoided culturally biased words such as the names of plants or animals. A sample vocabulary was then taken from the word list and the number of cognates between the two languages being compared was counted, allowing for phonetic changes and variation. The lower the number of cognates, the longer the languages were deemed to have been separated. Two languages which could be shown to have 60% cognate vocabularies would then be thought to have diverged before two which revealed, say, an 80% lexical correspondence. It was actually Robert Lees who came up with a mathematical procedure for estimating time depth in 1953. Lees assumed the rate of loss in basic core vocabularies to be constant. He then was able to calculate that the time depth, t, was equal to the logarithm of the percentage of cognates, c, divided by twice the logarithm of the percentage of cognates retained after a millennium of separation, r: t = log c/2 log r Critiques of this method were voiced soon after it was devised (Hoijer 1956; Rea 1958; Hymes 1960). It was argued that it is virtually impossible to construct word lists that are culturally neutral, that the rate of change may vary from language to language, that the slightest computational error will lead to a high degree of inaccuracy. But despite such potential drawbacks, the value of glottochronology for contemporary glottogenetics is undeniable. It is an approach that stresses the development of precise methods and algorithms for the reconstruction of primitive languages. It makes predictions that can be tested against the template of empirical evidence (see Embleton 1986 for a recent discussion of glottochronology). Shortly after his work on glottochronology Swadesh turned his focus of
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attention to the question of language origin (Swadesh 1971), which was guided in large part by the knowledge he had gained about core vocabularies. Nostratic and Proto-World The modern reconstruction movement (e.g., Greenberg 1987; Shevoroshkin 1989, 1990) grows out of nineteenth-century comparativism and Swadesh's methods and ideas. Modern comparativists have now reconstructed many protolanguages. By going further and further down the branches toward the "trunk" or "roots" of the protolinguistic tree they have been better and better able to formulate viable hypotheses about what one of the first protolanguages spoken by humanswhich they have designated ''Nostratic" (from Latin noster "ours")might have been like. Actually, the idea of a common linguistic ancestor was bandied about within traditional reconstructionist circles. Pedersen (1931: 338) suggested the term Nostratian languages as "a comprehensive designation for the families of languages which are related to Indo-European." The value of the current work on Nostratic lies in the fact that it has focused efforts to reconstruct the probable Ursprache of humankind, which has been called, appropriately enough, "proto-World." Shevoroshkin (1990: 22) paints the following picture of the enthusiasmsome would say hysteriathat this kind of work has generated: Spoken 14,000 years ago, it [Nostratic] links the Indo-European protolanguage with language families encompassing the Near East and northern Asia. But now a group of scholars believe they have taken the final step. By painstaking comparison of Nostratic with the ancestral languages of Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia and the Americas, they believe they have partially reconstructed human language as it was first uttered 100,000 years ago. Nearly two thousand words of Nostratic have now been reconstructed (Ross 1991: 142; Bomhard 1992)mainly concrete items referring to body parts and natural objects. If these words turn out to be verifiable, then they will shed a great deal of anthropological light on the lives of early hominids. They suggest, for instance, that our ancestors were mainly hunters and gatherers, that they dwelled in villages in times of bounty, that they used twigs covered with mud to build their abodes, but that they had virtually no knowledge of agriculture. Incidentally, some of these facts have been confirmed by recent archeological findings. And it is positively mind-boggling to think that archeologists have been discovering many of the thingsbones, remnants of dwellings, etc.that linguists have indicated should exist! Aided by computer technology, comparativists can now scan thousands of words. Almost instantaneously, they can establish lexical cognation among many languages and generate precise algorithms for mapping pho-
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netic correspondences among them. It is this technology that has encouraged some linguists to attempt a reconstruction of protoWorld, which according to most estimates originated about one hundred thousand years ago: A comparison of cognates for the word tooth, such as Congo-Saharan nigi, the Austro-Asiatic gini, the Sino-Caucasian gin, and the Nostratic variants nigi and gini (predecessors of the English nag and gnaw), indicates that the proto-World terms were nigi and gini. Similarly, the English tell originates from the proto-World terms tal, and later dal, meaning tongue. (Shevoroshkin 1990: 26) For the first time ever in the debate on language origin, it is now possible to have before us a kind of protolexicon of human language that can be assessed, debated, modified, and used to generate hypotheses about the primal scene. As Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1990: 110) have recently put it, it is quite remarkable to note that linguistics "can reach more deeply into the human past than the most ancient records." It should, however, be pointed out that not all comparativists are in agreement with the findings coming out of the attempts to reconstruct Nostratic and proto-World. As Ross (1991: 143) observes, some traditional comparativists maintain that "Nostraticists compare poorly sifted data and accept as cognates words from different languages that might owe their resemblances to chance or simple linguistic borrowing." The Nostraticists reply "that they minimize chance resemblances by seeking complex sound correspondences and that they rule out borrowing by examining words that are particularly unlikely to be borrowed." Such academic quibbling is probably inevitable. Overall, one cannot help but agree with Ross (1991) when he points out that the value of the work on Nostratic and proto-World lies in having made the monogenesis of language a scientifically plausible and testable hypothesis. It has also helped shed some valuable light on important anthropological questions: Indeed, the appearance of language may define modern Homo sapiens and explain why our species apparently did not interbreed with contemporaries like the Neanderthals. It is a horrifying scenario: the hominids without language would have seemed subhuman. (Ross 1991: 147) The Interdisciplinary Net of Glottogenetics In addition to the employment of very precise and technologically advanced reconstruction techniques, current glottogenetics has become enmeshed in an "interdisciplinary net" that interlaces biology, anthropology, psychology, archeology, psychology, semiotics, neurology, and other cognate fields in a common search for humanity's linguistic origins. It now asks such pertinent questions as: How can the fossil record of early hominids be used to investigate language origin? What does the paleographic
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analysis of the first cave drawings tell us? Glottogenetics is now in a position to ask questions which were inconceivable before its linkage with cognate domains of inquiry. Let us consider a specific example. The plaster casts of skulls which paleontologists have used to reconstruct hominid brains have revealed that both our Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon ancestors (pre-30,000 b.c.) had brains of similar size to ours (e.g., Lieberman 1972). This kind of finding can be used to establish that Homo sapiens had the same physiological "hardware" for speech that children have. Crystal (1987: 290) offers the following commentary on this type of research: Linguists and anatomists have compared the reconstructed vocal tract of a Neanderthal skull with those of a newborn and an adult modern man. The newborn and the Neanderthal vocal tracts are remarkably similar. Neanderthal man would have been able to utter only a few front consonant-like sounds and centralized vowel-like sounds, and may have been unable to make a contrast between nasal and oral sounds. If nothing else, this line of research suggests that the comparison of phylogenesis to ontogenesisthe assumption implicit in the traditional glottogenetic theoriesis not at all an implausible notion. The first words of Homo sapiens (sapiens) were probably very similar to the first words that children attempt to produce. On the other hand, the utterances of Cro-Magnons, who had a skeletal structure that is very close to that of the modern adult human, were probably much closer to the simple sentences that we produce in common conversations. The paleoanatomical study of hominid vocal tracts has also suggested that speech was developed at the expense of a physiological system intended primarily for breathing and eatingmodern humans can choke from food lodged in the larynx, monkeys cannot. From an evolutionary perspective, this can only be explained if we posit that the emergence of language was an extensionnot an adaptive modificationof bodily functions. This notion, incidentally, is a central one in the Vichian scenario to be sketched in this book. The Shape of Contemporary Glottogenetic Theories The utilization of the findings coming out of the cognate human sciences (archeology, paleography, psychology, etc.) has therefore made it possible for the first time ever in the debate on language origin to formulate very specific scientific questions and to draft a very specific agenda of related research. A detailed survey and assessment of this agenda would be rather extensive. Therefore, the kind of scientific discourse that glottogenetics has started to make possible can only be mentioned here with little or no commentary.
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The New Scientific Discourse In 1976, Brian Stross was among the first to realize that the emerging scientific focus in glottogenetics was an auspicious one. He immediately saw that it made possible a systematic search for answers to the questions of why, where, and how. On the basis of the evidence available to him at the time, Stross reasoned that language must have existed by the Middle or Upper Paleolithic period, but that its genesis probably went back a million years to the earliest times of Homo erectus in the Near East. He also suggested that "bipedalism, tools, and brain development played important and interrelated roles in the evolution of language" (Stross 1976: 41). In the same year, James Stam (1976) provided the embryonic science of glottogenetics with its first modern extensive historiography. Another historical account has been provided by the more recent book written by G. A. Wells in 1987, The Origin of Language: Aspects of the Discussion from Condillac to Wundt. In 1981, Eric Gans put forward a formal theory of representation for the origin of language. But his theory seems not to have had much impact on glottogenetic research. In my view this is unfortunate, since Gans's theory posits that our need to represent reality was a concomitant of the continuity between mind and matter. Gans's account certainly deserves more attention than it has received. If one language scientist were to be singled out as having contributed more than any other to the storehouse of scientific knowledge on glottogenesis, it is undoubtedly Philip Lieberman, who, as far as I can reckon, started work on this subject in the early seventies (e.g., 1972). In three major volumes (1975, 1984, 1991), Lieberman has intelligently extracted relevant data and insights from linguistics, archeology, paleoneurology, developmental psychology, animal ethology, etc., and synthesized them in such a way as to throw valuable light on several crucial aspects related to the genesis and evolution of speech. His main argument has always been that human language is a product of evolutionary change. But unlike genetic theorists (e.g., Smith 1985; Bickerton 1990), he is not so sure that some aspects of language may not be shared by other species. In his most recent work, Lieberman (1991) argues persuasively that the unique brain structures developed to make language possible also enhanced our cognitive ability to derive abstract concepts and to plan complex activities. He disputes the Chomskyan postulate of a localized neural "language organ," opting instead for general neural structures that shape the cognitive behavior of humans as well as of other animals. But these are unique in providing for a limited set of language-specific substructures that define the verbal mode of transmitting information. He also suggests that the process of glottogenesis must have started one hundred thousand years agothe same conclusion arrived at in an independent fashion, and through a dif-
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ferent methodological route, by Swadesh and the modern reconstructionists. Lieberman reaches this conclusion on the basis of the discovery of human remains unearthed recently in a cave known by the name of Jebel Qazfeh in Israel. Because of the ritualistic way in which these were buried, archeologists have dated them back approximately one hundred thousand years. Lieberman posits that these humans must have had language because an examination of two of the skulls using the method of endocranial casting shows that they enclosed brains that were endowed with the language areas that have been identified by neuroscientists as forming the neural substrate for speech and syntax. Endocranial casting is the method used by paleoneurologists to reconstruct the brain that a fossil skull must have contained by comparing the characteristics of the skull to what is known about the relation between brain anatomy and function. A quick scan of the contents of several anthologies of studies published in the single decade of the 1980s conveys some idea of how broad a field glottogenetics has been mapping out for itself in its quest to get a better scientific overview of the primal scene. The perspectives brought to bear on this question now include neurobiology (e.g., Jerison 1988; Molfese and Molfese 1988), primate communication (e.g., Thom 1983; Wind 1983; Steklis 1988), visual and gestural communication (e.g., Fischer 1988; Hewes 1988), perceptual psychology (e.g., Lock 1988; Warren 1988), fossil studies (e.g., Bichakjian 1988; Wind 1988; Gibson 1988; Krantz 1988), linguistic archeology, paleography and reconstruction (e.g., Fónagy 1988; Landsberg 1988b; Levin 1988; Raffler-Engel 1988; Winter 1988), anthropology (e.g., Montagu 1983), linguistic theory (e.g., Pulleybank 1983; Martinet 1983; Parisi 1983; Vandamme 1983), and developmental psycholinguistics (e.g., Martinet 1983). Eric de Grolier (1983: 53642) has identified ten main issues raised by the research which in turn have come to constitute the agenda that glottogenetics has now set for itself. I have paraphrased them here because I believe that Vico's scenario provides meaningful insights on several of them: 1. Is it possible to indicate an approximate date for the starting point of language? 2. Are there objective data to support a monogenetic or a polygenetic theory of language origin? 3. Is it possible to distinguish successive stages in the development of phonology, grammar, and semantics? 4. What role did abstract thought play in glottogenesis? 5. Is it possible to show a connection between language and the first myths and cave drawings? 6. Is there an etiological connection between gesture and vocal language?
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7. What role did sound symbolism play in the first speech acts? 8. What can be learned from studying the development of language during childhood? 9. Are there any statistical methods, such as glottochronology, which can help glottogenetics reconstruct the first words? 10. What can be learned from studying linguistic universals about the genesis of speech? The Genetic Perspective I will conclude this schematic survey of current glottogenetic science by briefly introducing the ideas of Noam Chomsky (1976, 1986) and of those who are in basic agreement with them (e.g., Smith 1985; Bickerton 1990). For Chomsky, the crucial aspect of language is that it is innate, and that it could not have emerged suddenly without some previous genetic event moulding together an array of traits that had evolved for other purposes. In a nutshell, Chomsky's "genetic" perspective consists in viewing language as a kind of physical organ whose specific grammatical "parameters" are constrained by the culture into which the child is born. Derek Bickerton (1981, 1990) has put forward the most extensive treatment of the genetic perspective to date. He suggests that language is to be viewed as an evolutionary byproduct of brain development and genetic mutation. When certain neural structures allowed protohumans to extract meaning from their perceptions of the world, they led to the development of the ability to represent the world by means of gestures and sounds. This produced a primitive language without syntax. Traces of this presyntactic language, Bickerton submits, are to be found in the gesture code employed by apes that have been taught sign language and in the language patterns displayed by "wolf children" like Genie (Curtiss 1977). The jump to syntactic language, according to Bickerton, was an inevitable result of evolution. Like any of the organic changes produced by our inbuilt genetic adaptation structures, language-as-syntax was manufactured by these structures to enhance our capacity to survive. There is nothing in any animal communication system that even vaguely corresponds to syntactic language. The genetic scenarios painted by Chomskyan-type reasoning are intriguing ones indeed. They portray language as our most successful adaptation strategy that can now be passed on culturally, having become as automatic to humans as, say, spinning a web has to spiders. Evolution is not reversible. Such scenarios, which are highly compatible with thinking in sociobiology (e.g., Wilson 1975, 1979, 1984; Dawkins 1976, 1987), can be seen to be modern extensions of Darwinian theory. They put forward the idea that language is a physical organ that emerged in order to improve our chances at survival. This organ automatically equips humans by the age of two with the ability to use the rules of a universal grammar to
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develop the specific languages that cultures require of them. But these scenarios raise several fundamental questions which have not as yet been addressed. Lieberman (1991), for instance, argues that the concept of a genetically determined universal grammar denies an essential feature of being humanthe variability that characterizes all genetic inheritances. Moreover, one can ask what feature of this organ generated syntax and the conceptual domains it makes possible? And more fundamentally: Is syntax all there is to human language? The innateness controversy raises some very deep issues on the nature of language and humanity. Is language an artifact arising from the unique creative capacities of some more fundamental mental endowment that cannot be explained solely in deterministic evolutionary terms? Or is it an inherited, species-specific traita kind of mental organthat was produced by our genes simply to enhance our survival as a species? It is interesting to note that the Canadian linguist Richard Albert Wilson was already arguing in 1937 that the Darwinian organic view of language resulted from a fallacyfrom Darwin's identification of the psychological subfaculties of animals with those of humans. This led Darwin, in Wilson's opinion, to apply the term "language" fallaciously to animals and human beings alike. The Vichian scenario to be assembled in the remainder of this book posits that the mind is an extension of the body. But it traces this extension to a creative faculty of the mind that genetic theories cannot possibly explainthe imagination. So, in a superficial way it appears to be compatible with the genetic perspective; but in actual fact it is fundamentally different. The Current State of Knowledge Before delineating and assessing Vico's wonderfully simple, yet deeply insightful, views on how language originated through the workings of the imagination, it is useful to have at hand a schematic outline of the "facts on file" that glottogenesis has been accumulating. The When Swadesh's (1971) estimate that context-independent, abstract language was no more than one hundred thousand years old, and therefore a product of late Paleolithic hominids (Homo sapiens sapiens) is still largely uncontested. As a matter of fact, the current evidence seems strongly to support Swadesh's claim. As mentioned above, Philip Lieberman (1975, 1984, 1991) has studied the vocal tract of Paleolithic Neanderthals and has shown it to be similar in structure to that of children. By the method of endocranial casting he measured Neanderthal skulls and mandibles and compared them to their modern adult and child counterparts. He found that the
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Figure 3. Lateral View of Homo sapiens, Modern Adult, Modern Child Skulls. Reprinted with the permission of Macmillan Publishing Company from On the Origins of Language by Philip Lieberman. Copyright © 1975 by Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc. newborn skull has many features in common with the Neanderthal one: both are elongated from front to back and flattened from top to bottom; their mandibles are similar in shape; and both lack the chin of the modern adult (see fig. 3). It can thus be hypothesized that Homo sapiens (sapiens) had the anatomical prerequisites for uttering the same kinds of sounds and holophrases that characterize the first attempts of children to convey messages through their vocal apparatus. This implies that they must have had a brain with a neural substrate capacity for language. Thus it is highly likely that these late-Paleolithic hominids were the first true speakers. Swadesh's hypothesis and Lieberman's reconstruction are also supported, as we have seen,
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by the current research on protolanguages. So, there now seems to be wide acceptance of the theory that a fully developed capacity for articulate speech was in place one hundred thousand years ago in Homo sapiens sapiens. Swadesh and others have also pointed out that the ability to communicate in other ways, especially through gesture, may have originated even further back in time in Homo habilis some two million years ago (see Cartmill, Pilbeam, and Isaac 1986 for a survey of relevant developments in paleoanthropology). Endocranial analyses of Homo habilisdiscovered in 1964show that this hominid had an enlarged brain (600800 cm3) with a left hemisphere (which in modern humans is the seat of language). Clearly, the "language" vs. "speech" dichotomy is a particularly crucial one for glottogenetic research. Speech is a physiological phenomenon. It involves the intentional use of the organs of articulation and of the physical apparatus that contains them. Language, on the other hand, is a mental phenomenon. It consists of signs and structured relations among them. Language generally manifests itself through the speech medium; but it can also be expressed through other media, such as the visualgraphic and the gestural ones. One can have language without speech (as do individuals with impaired vocal organs), because it exists in the mind. But one cannot have speech without language, because speech depends on the neurologically defined categories of language for its physical transmission. Language could have existed in Homo habilis without speech. As Sebeok (1991: 94) has aptly observed: Language at its inception was not used for exterior communication, but only as an interior modeling device. Members of early hominid species communicated with each other by nonverbal means, in the manner of all other primates. Homo erectus (11.5 million years ago) had an even larger brain (8001,300 cm3). This hominid undoubtedly had language, but probably not speech. However, as Swadesh speculated, Homo erectus may have developed the capacity to utter the first speech syllables in some osmotic fashion. The emergence of full speech is traceable to Homo sapiens (starting about five hundred thousand years ago), and specifically to Homo sapiens sapiens (forty thousand years ago). The What The intriguing work of the traditional and the modern reconstructionists provides us with what might be called the "raw data" for assessing glottogenetic theories. In having reconstructed the probable words of the early speakers, they have furnished the items against which we can test hypotheses about visual mimesis, audio-oral osmosis, and, as will be dis-
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cussed in subsequent chapters, the metaphorical content of early verbalized thoughts. The work of reconstructionists seems to support a monogenetic theory of language. This implies that one language was the mother tongue of humanity and that it gradually differentiated into the various languages of the world as a result of migration. Although he never addressed it directly, I believe that Vico would have considered the monogenesis vs. polygenesis question to be an irrelevant one. Since Vico traced the origin of language to the working of the human imagination, and since he considered the imagination to be a universal feature of human mentality, it would not have mattered to him if language were to have originated in one area of the world or in several areas. For Vico, the pattern of generation would have been the same all over the world. It is this pattern that I will attempt to reconstruct in subsequent chapters.
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Two The Primitive Mind: A Vichian Reconstruction Where and how in evolution could all this wonderful tapestry of inner experience have evolved? How can we derive this inwardness out of mere matter? Jaynes 1976:3 The new scientific framework within which the investigation of language origin and evolution is being conducted is concomitantly leading to a better understanding of what language is and of how it works. Researchers from diverse paths of inquiry are digging up different kinds of information which glottogenetic theorists are piercing together to construct interesting new models and theories of language and speech. In my opinion the time is now ripe for glottogenetics to take a step back in time to 1744 when Giambattista Vico published his third and final edition of the NS. In this fascinating book, Vico put forward the proposition that language originated through the workings of the imaginationthe unique faculty that allowed humans to transform the world of sensory experience into a world of mental reflection. The imagination made it possible for protohumans to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste literally ''inside their heads." The primordial imagination arose from the brain's ability to produce and retain images of the beings, objects, and events that the senses had captured. It is an epiphenomenal byproduct of brain activity that bestowed upon human beings the speciesspecific ability to organize the images recorded by the brain into meaningful, or better, "meaning-making" structures. In so doing, it generated the human mind. As I hope to show in the remainder of this book, this journey back to Vico will be an instructive visitation for the fledgling science of glottogenetics. It is my view that the Vichian perspective is especially capable of providing a
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unique framework for synthesizing the empirical findings that glottogenetics and its cognate sciences have been amassing. This chapter is divided into five main sections: In the first one I will discuss "Vichian science" in the context of mainstream Anglo-American behavioral, cognitive, and social science. In the second section I will schematically survey previous and current work on Vico in English that is germane to the topic of glottogenesis. In the third section I will look at the background to, and the design of, the NS. In the fourth section I will define and explain the basic notions Vico proposed in the NS to reconstruct the primitive mind. I will conclude the chapter with a reconstruction of this mind. Vico and Anglo-American Science As Bergin and Fisch (1984: xxxi) point out in their introductory remarks to their translation of the NS, if there was a primary objective that Vico attempted to pursue in his book, it was to develop "a theory of knowledge according to which we can know, or have scienza of, only what we ourselves make and do." The verum-factum principle, by which we can only know what we ourselves have made, is in fact the crucial theoretical notion on which any Vichian science of the mind is to be implanted. In my opinion, the kind of research program that a Vichian science implies would allow us to get a meaningful close-up look at the processes by which the mind generated (and continues to generate) our symbolic structures, including language and culture. Although it is not a scientific "textbook" in the usual sense of the term, the NS is nevertheless a treatise that any contemporary science of the mind would do well to consult, given the relevant insights it contains on the interrelation among thought, language, and culture. It was Bergin and Fisch's translation of the NS in 1948 that introduced Vico to an Anglo-American audience. One of the reasons why Vico is still not widely known within traditional scientific circles on the North American continent is because the NS was translated by an Italianist (Bergin) and a philosopher (Fisch). Consequently, it may not have been perceived by most cognitive and social scientists as being pertinent to their fields of inquiry. So, before dealing with the notions that Vico developed to reconstruct the mind of the first humans, it is necessary to consider some of the reasons for the neglect of Vico by mainstream Anglo-American sciencea situation which is changing and bound to change even more, as traditional approaches to the study of the mind start to "catch up with Vico," in the words of the psychologist Robert Haskell (1987a: 70). In my view, there are three main reasons why Vico has been largely neglected by Anglo-American science. First, shortly after his death there emerged a "myth" of Vico that has always adversely affected how he is
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perceived by scientists. Second, the NS was not translated into English until 1948, and so may still not be widely known to an Anglo-American audience. And third, the mindset of cognitive and social science has not, until recently, followed the kind of orientation suggested and exemplified by Vico. The Myth of Vico Although Vico's ideas were never really held in high esteem during his lifetime, soon after his death, as Burke (1985: 1) notes, the NS began to inspire "an extraordinary enthusiasm in the most diverse readers." Many of his readers outside of Italy came to regard Vico as a neglected intellectual giant who had ventured alone into uncharted territories that no one had previously dared to enter. For this reason, they argued, he was bound to have been misunderstood and dismissed by his contemporaries. While all this is certainly true to some extent, such dramatic portrayals, as Burke goes on to suggest, led unfortunately to the crystallization of a "myth of Vico." The negative connotations that are inevitably evoked by this kind of mythicization have always constituted a major obstacle in getting mainstream scientists to take notice of the NS as a serious treatise with implications for their respective fields. Burke (1985: 1011) puts it in the following way: My own view is that these claims and descriptions are somewhat exaggerated, and that they form part of what might reasonably be called the "myth" of Vico in the sense of a stylized interpretation of his career in dramatic termsa tragicomedy of errors or misunderstandings which is put right in the end, although rather too late for the hero. I believe that this interpretation is seriously misleading. It has torn Vico from his context, separating him from the cultural and social milieu in which he developed, the city of Naples in the late seventeenth century. It has also detached Vico from his wider intellectual tradition, that of the humanist republic of letters. The myth was actually debunked by the Italian philosopher and literary critic, Benedetto Croce (1911), at the turn of the present century. But he probably did Vico's reputation more harm than good. Croce was inspired by Vico's ideas. However, he adopted an ambiguous attitude toward Vico, because, as Stone (1983: 70) has observed, "Croce believed that, despite its brilliance, Scienza Nuova contained certain errors and inconsistencies that needed correction." Given the influence that Croce had on Italian philosophy for most of this century, Vico became a forgotten figure in Italy until 1971 when Pietro Piovani founded a Center for Vico Studies in Naples. This Center publishes a journalthe Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichianiand occasional monographs covering all aspects of Vico's thought. Only since the 1970s, therefore, can it be said that the scholarly community in Italy has started to look at Vico more impartially, without putting on Croce's
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biased intellectual spectacles. This has led, particularly in the domain of philosophy, to a plethora of publications on Vico. The Discovery of Vico To the English-speaking world, Vico is a very recent "discovery." It is really only in the last few decades that Vico's uniquely simple, yet profoundly insightful, approach to the study of the mind has been taken into serious consideration by contemporary cognitive and social scientists. This discovery of Vico has been due in large part to the efforts of four Anglo-American scholars: Thomas Bergin, Max Fisch, Giorgio Tagliacozzo, and Donald Verene. Bergin and Fisch made the NS accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time with their 1948 translation. These two scholars had previously translated Vico's autobiography in 1944. "From that point onwards," quips Leon Pompa (1990: x), "interest in English-speaking countries quickened considerably." For the last two decades, Tagliacozzo has been a key figure in getting Vico to be better known among Anglo-American scholars. He has organized international conferences on Vico and founded, in 1974, an Institute for Vico Studies in New York City that publishes the influential journal New Vico Studies. In 1983 the Institute became part of Emory University in Atlanta, under the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. A brief history of the institute and of its publications is in order (paraphrased from Verene and Tagliacozzo 1990: 23). The original idea for an institute goes back to the late 1960s when Tagliacozzo approached a number of American and European scholars in order to put together a volume of original essays to celebrate the tercentenary of Vico's birth. The result was an anthology of 41 essays, edited by Tagliacozzo and White in 1969, which examined the significance of Vico's thought to history, philosophy, and science. Since then the Institute has published five more anthologies (Tagliacozzo and Verene 1976; Tagliacozzo, Mooney, and Verene 1979: Tagliacozzo 1981, 1983c; Verene 1987) and a 100-year bibliography (18841984) of work on Vico in English (Tagliacozzo, Verene, and Rumble 1986). The journal of the institute, New Vico Studies, was founded in 1983 by Tagliacozzo and Verene. The aim of the journal, which comes out once a year, is expressed by its cofounders and coeditors in the first issue (Tagliacozzo and Verene 1983: v): In beginning New Vico Studies we hope to make a place for articles, discussions, reviews, abstracts, and notes that reflect the current state of the study of the thought of Giambattista Vico. We understand the study of Vico to be not only the study of Vico's works but to be inclusive of ideas that are Vichian in nature, ideas that may have some special interest for those involved in Vico's thought. New Vico Studies is one of two annuals dedicated exclusively to Vico. The
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other one, as mentioned above, is the Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani. Both journals have become important research tools, since both publish relevant bibliographies and reviews of work on Vico, of work quoting Vico, and of work that is Vichian in nature. In addition to being actively involved in the institute, Verene published a book in 1981, Vico's Science of the Imagination, which, more than any other English-language book, has inspired a whole generation of Anglo-American scholars and researchers to locate in the NS the theoretical antecedents to many of the intriguing findings and notions being currently discussed in their respective fields. He has recently published an in-depth analysis of Vico's autobiography (1991) and founded a series in 1985, Emory Vico Studies, with the publishing house Peter Lang (e.g., Albano 1985; Kunze 1987; Grassi 1990). This series is also a publication venture of the institute. The Changing Zeitgeist of Anglo-American Science Perhaps the primary reason for the neglect of Vico by Anglo-American science has not so much been the lack of work in English on Vico, but the fact that, as Haskell (1987a) points out, cognitive and social scientists have only recently started to become interested in what Vico was talking about over two and a half centuries ago. Vico's seminal ideas on the nature of signs and on how they must have originated in the human imagination are not only highly compatible with current thinking in the cognitive and social sciences, but they are also highly suggestive of future paths for these fields of inquiry to pursue. The recent work on the role of metaphor in cognition and communication (e.g., Pollio, Barlow, Fine, and Pollio 1977; Ortony 1979b; Honeck and Hoffman 1980; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987; Haskell 1987b; Danesi 198788), for instance, is fundamentally Vichian in nature and scope. The idea that symbolic behavior is an extension of bodily experience, which is starting to receive serious and widespread attention in the sciences, is, as a matter of fact, the unifying principle that Vico utilized to tie together all the thematic threads that he interspersed throughout the NS. Vico argued that the extension of the body into the mind is made possible by the imagination. Two and a half centuries later, some cognitive scientists have finally started to include on their research agendas the serious investigation of this fundamental feature of human thinking. Their research is starting to show how the main products of the human imaginationthe structural and transformational relations among metaphor, affect, imagery, and narrative discoursesustain the whole architecture of cognition, to use Anderson's (1983) appropriate figure of speech. For most of the twentieth century the systematic study of the mind has concentrated on the ways in which the rational part carries out its computational tasksdeduction, inference, problem-solving, etc. Seldom, if ever, have psychologists askedwith the exception perhaps of the so-called Gestalt psy-
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chologistswhere this kind of thinking came from and how it was related to other ways of thinking. This has not always been the case. The first probes into the mind's structure and capacities, which came out of the philosophical ruminations of the ancient Greeks on the nature of knowledge, asked exactly these kinds of questions: What is rational thought? Where does it come from? The Greeks' intense interest in the origin of knowledge and in the nature of cognition in general was expressed not in actual experiments, but in the form of hypothetical scenarios, such as the one that was discussed at the start of the previous chapter, and philosophical paradoxes, such as the ones contrived by Zeno of Elea and his followers. Zeno's approach is instructive, since it shows that a dissonance exists between logical reasoning and the "reality" that is perceived by our senses. His most famous paradox asserts that a runner cannot reach the finish line of a race because, in order to do so, the runner must first traverse half the distance to the line; then half of that distance; then half of that distance; and so on ad infinitum. This leads logically to the conclusion that the runner will never reach the finish line. This clever argument was intended by Zeno to show that sense perception and logical reasoning do not always match. Many centuries later, Vico argued that our minds were predisposed to accept any "reality" manufactured by logical reasoning. Indeed, we could make others easily believe a lie by simply cloaking it in a well-designed logical argument. Aristotle named Zeno the inventor of unscientific dialectal reasoning. Aristotle saw scientific knowledge as resulting instead from the construction of a more complex system of reasoning which works deductively from principles grounded in sense experience and precise observation. This system follows rules of logic that can never lead from true premises to false conclusions. It was Aristotle's theory that came to be adopted and adapted by the Middle Ages, when discussions of the mind became the particular purview of theologians and clerics. The reemergence of the nonreligious perspective during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment reassigned Aristotle's theory of knowledge to the domain of secular philosophy. But this time Aristotelian philosophy was forced to share its interest in cognition with the emerging empirical sciences. Philosophers like Descartes, Locke, and Kant made frequent references to the world of science in their attempts to understand and model human mentality. It is only toward the end of the previous century that the scientific study of the mind severed its connection with Aristotelian philosophy, declaring its autonomy through the development and institutionalization of a rigorous empirical method. This led to the birth of modern psychology as an experimental science. As Flanagan (1984: xi) has aptly remarked, the perception was forged at the time that metaphysics and epistemology were to be viewed as no more than "harmless amusements of fundamentally unrealistic minds," while scientific psychology, on the other hand, was seen as getting "on with
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studying the real thing." Only in the last few decades has philosophy become an ally once again of psychology because, as Gardner (1985: 42) has perceptively pointed out, psychologists have finally come to the realization that they have been pursuing answers for nearly a century to what are essentially the classical problems of philosophy: "The debates of the Greek philosophers, as well as of their successors in the Enlightenment, stand out in many pages of cognitive scientific writing." The artificial dichotomization of philosophy and psychology into separate realms of inquiry now seems to have been a rather lamentable hiatus in the study of mind. An equally artificial distance has been maintained traditionally between cognitive scientists and those who study the great textual creations of humanity. Yet, a little reflection will reveal that the first great fictional dramas of our civilizationthose, for example, of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripidestell us as much, if not more, about the origins and the workings of the mind than do any of the philosophical ponderings of Zeno or Aristotle. Indeed, in their mimetic representations of human thinking and action, these first fictional-mimetic approaches to the mind have probably told us more about ourselves than have highly abstract philosophical theories. With the exception of Freud, Jung, and of psychoanalysts generally, cognitive scientists have tended to maintain an artificial space between themselves and literature. But this too seems to be changing as some cognitive scientists are beginning to utilize the imaginative products of the mind as "windows" of insight into its operations. Jerry Hobbs (1990: 34), for one, has cogently argued in favor of an amalgamation of literary criticism and cognitive science, for the simple reason that "imagining, fiction, and narrative" provide us with a valuable template for viewing how "communicating cognitive agents'' have become "embedded in a world." Hobbs maintains that such a disciplinary partnership would allow both literary critics and cognitive scientists to conduct truly revealing forays into the landscape of cognition. All this is nothing new to those who are familiar with the NS. Vico made the imagination the focal point of his treatise. He saw it as the mental faculty that generated our rational thought, our languages, and ultimately our cultures. He sought access to its workings, not by means of an Aristotelian- or Cartesian-type method of deductive analysis, but through an understanding of the creative productsespecially the first myths and the original meanings of wordsthat the primordial imagination produced. It is interesting to note that the great contemporary psychologist Jerome Bruner (e.g., 1990) has, for at least a decade, been suggesting that the present-day preoccupation with computers as analogues of cognitiona modern-day form of Cartesianismhas produced technical findings that are essentially trivial. The fixation on the mind as an information-processing device has led psychology and philosophy astrayaway from a deeper objective understanding of the mind as a creator of meanings. The computational metaphor in cognitive science has unnecessarily taken the study of the mind "out of the body," so as to be better able to study it "in
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a machine." It has produced models of human thought that resemble the operation of mechanical devices. Ultimately, it has led to the view that the mind is a machine. In his recent writings, Bruner has eloquently argued that the most appropriate route to the mind is the one that can be charted with its more imaginative narrative outputs. Literature and myth, as manifestations of narrative thinking, put on display our conceptions of ourselves and of the world that we inhabit. They reveal a form of thinking that, over and above any other form, gives pattern and continuity to human experience. The steadily growing awareness among many scientists today that the classical Aristotelian-Cartesian mode of inquiry is insufficient for gaining access to the operations of the mind is going to lead slowly but surely to Vico's doorsteps. As researchers and theorists come more and more to the realization that the ideological rigidity spawned by rationalist approaches inhibits true inquiry from asking meaningful questions about the mind, they will find in the NS, as Tagliacozzo (1983a: 98) indicates, "countless implications" and "the actual and potential contributions of Vico to them." Previous Work on Vico: A Schematic Survey The shift in epistemological coordinates away from the Cartesian-rationalist paradigm, especially in philosophy, has in my view been the main factor that has led to an intensification of interest in Vico and to a proliferation of studies on his NS. Vico is not an unknown figure any longer to Anglo-American philosophers. But it is still true to say that he remains virtually unknown to cognitive and social scientists generally. A perusal of the bibliographies contained in technical journals and of historiographical treatises of the various cognitive and social sciences will make this saliently obvious. Vico's name rarely appears in them. My purpose in this section is to comment briefly first on general studies on Vico and the NS in English. Then I will cast a quick glance at those which have examined Vico's views on language and glottogenesis. A comprehensive review of all the relevant work written on Vico in English would be extensive and well beyond the scope of the present discussion. A glimpse at recent bibliographies of studies on Vico, and of work mentioning Vico, published in New Vico Studies, reveals how enormous and ambitious a task this would be. So, I have had to be selective. Those studies which I have chosen are the ones which, in my opinion, have been pivotal in getting Vico's ideas on language and the imagination better known to an Anglo-American audience of scholars. Works on the New Science in English My point of departure is to mention those book-length works on the NS that have introduced Vico to an English-speaking audience. For the first
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fifty years of this century, very little was written on Vico. One can mention Flint's (1901), Adams's (1935), Collingwood's (1946), and Berry's (1949) efforts to get English-speaking scholars acquainted with Vico. But the Neapolitan rhetorician remained virtually unknown until Bergin and Fisch published their translation of the NS in 1948. The decade of the 1950s did not see very much either in the way of an increase of interest in Vico. Robert Caponigri (1953) published a book in which he aimed to present Vico's theory of history in terms of time and ideas. Written in an idiosyncratic way, and with almost no references to other work in the field, Caponigri's work did not inspire very many to read the Bergin and Fisch translation. Arthur Child's 1953 book, Making and Knowing in Hobbes, Vico, and Dewey, and Alfonsina Grimaldi's 1958 volume, The Universal Humanity of Giambattista Vico, also did not cause much of a stir. As Tagliacozzo (1983b: 6) aptly remarks, the 1960s "were marked by a number of publications which individually and cumulatively constituted the beginning of what an Italian scholar on Vico has called the Anglo-American trend in Vichian studies." However, a perusal of the studies published in this decade reveals that only a handful of articles and no new monographs were published. A translation by Gianturco (1965) of Vico's On the Study Methods of Our Time and a biography of Vico scholarship, also by Gianturco in 1968, are the only book-length additions to the Anglo-American library shelf. The decade ends with Tagliacozzo and White's 1969 anthology of studies on Vico. In addition to the anthologies published under the auspices of the Institute for Vico Studies, the main book-length contributions on Vico in English since the 1970s have been the following: Leon Pompa's Vico: A Study of the "New Science" (1990 [1975]), Isaiah Berlin's Vico and Herder (1976), Verene's Vico's Science of the Imagination (1981) and his recent study on Vico's autobiography (1991), Mooney's Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric (1985), Burke's Vico (1985), the Emory Vico Studies volumes (Albano 1985; Kunze 1987; Grassi 1990), Haddock's Vico's Political Thought (1986), Bedani's Vico Revisited (1989), Lorraine Weir's Writing Joyce (1989), and John Schaeffer's Sensus Communis (1990). Pompa (1990) published the first edition of his key study on the NS in 1975. Although several book-length discussions of Vico were published before Pompa's volume (Flint 1901; Adams 1935; Berry 1949; Caponigri 1953; Child 1953; Manson 1969; Piovani 1969; Vaughan 1972), it is fair to say that, at the time, it came to constitute the main work in English on the NS, offering a comprehensive guide to the main theoretical issues that the NS raises. It became, and still is, a point of reference for work on the NS. Berlin's (1976) comparative study of Vico and Herder in terms of the history of modern thought highlights Vico's concept of knowledge and questions the divorce between the sciences and the humanities. Verene's 1981 book is perhaps the fullest interpretation of Giambattista Vico's thought in English to date. Its main value to the discussion of the
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primitive mind and glottogenesis lies in having given the Vichian imagination a definition and in having elaborated the crucial concept of "imaginative universals"a point of reference for any serious work on the primitive mind in Vico. According to Verene, Vico has made us aware that it is a universal tendency of the human mind to transform the biologically programmed affective and sensorial responses to urges and environmental stimuli into mental units. The patterns formed by these units are the "imaginative universals" that signaled the advent of consciousness in the human species and of the capacity to reflect upon beings, objects, and events away from their contexts of occurrence and existence. Mooney's (1985) study of Vico in the tradition of rhetoric has provided an in-depth analysis of the rhetorical traditions that led to Vico's so-called philological method, especially his use of etymology to uncover the hidden layers of meaning that underlie our everyday concepts. Also crucial to Vico's method is the view that metaphor is the primary tool for communicating and for seeing connections and therefore for making and remaking mental models and social institutions. Burke's (1985) biography of Vico has become a classic in the genre. Burke examines the myth of Vico, Vico's intellectual development, the contents of the NS, and the importance of Vico to posterity. Intended as a volume for the general reader, it fulfills the task of introducing a major figure in the history of ideas without sacrificing the requirements for sound scholarship. The Emory Vico Studies monographs (Albano 1985; Kunze 1987; Grassi 1990) have provided an important forum for discussion of, and research on, Vichian science and philosophy. Focusing on Vico's conception of Providence, Albano's work can be placed in the category of works which aim to point out the originality of Vichian thought. Kunze shows that Vico's concept of metaphor shaped his conceptualization of space and location. Grassi emphasizes that Vico's view of metaphor and the imagination allowed him to amalgamate rhetoric and philosophy. For Vico philosophy was an enterprise rooted in the meanings of words. Haddock's (1986) study of Vico's political thought shows how Vico challenged the established theories of natural law and social contract. Political ideas, like artifacts, were seen by Vico to be fabrications of the human mind, shaped by the metaphorically forged concepts it continually creates. Haddock claims that it would be rather naive for any political theorist to ignore this feature of the human thought system. Bedani's (1989) revisitation of Vico is intended to assess Vico scholarship in both Anglo-American and Italian contexts. Bedani rejects the main thrust of Anglo-American scholarship as having been obsessively concerned with demonstrating the relevance and modernity of the NS. But Bedani ignores a simple fact of human nature. In the context of the changing paradigm in AngloAmerican science and philosophy, it is not hard to understand why the discovery of Vico's "modernity" is generating such enthusiasm over the NS.
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A recent work that stands out as a key study of Vico's influence on James Joyce is the one by Lorraine Weir (1989). Weir turns to Vico's NS to develop her theory of narrative cognition and imaginative creativity. Without going into the details of Weir's Vichian analysis of Finnegans Wake, suffice it to say here that Weir sees Joyce's book as offering "us the possibility of a radical restructuring of our still-Cartesian world" (Weir 1989: 8081). She argues in her final chapter (Weir 1989: 82104) that when we strip the mind of its rational symbols and codes, as does Joyce, then we are left with sound: i.e., with a form of perception and memory generated by a primordial form of audio-oral osmosis. The Vico-Joyce connection is a well-known one. Joyce discovered the NS when he was living in Trieste. He became immediately fascinated by Vico's views on myth, metaphor, and language (Burke 1985: 78). What Weir shows in her penetrating analysis of the Joycean system is that the concrete modes of thought and perception that must have shaped the primitive mind continue to reverberate in the corners of the modern mind. As Verene (1981: 123) has observed, the primordial mind thinks emotively. Thunder, for instance, is a special kind of noise that Vico identified as having made a traumatic effect on the emerging conscious mind of our hominid ancestors. That effect is being "sounded" over and over in the deepest layers of our own minds. This is why Joyce associated Finnegan's fall to the sound of thunder on the first page of his book. Joyce was obviously struck by Vico's simple, but profound, insight. In his study of sensus communis, Schaeffer (1990) argues that the oral culture of Naples shaped Vico's thoughts about common sense. Vico's conception of "common" sense as a kind of "communal" sense is well documented by Schaeffer in the context of current debates on mental and cultural relativism. Relevant Work on Vico's Views of Language The first general observation to be made here is that there exist no book-length discussions focusing specifically on Vico's views on language origin in either English or Italian. In English there are also very few article-length studies on Vico's thoughts about language and cognition. The contributions by De Mauro, Hampshire, and Dorfles to the 1969 Tagliacozzo and White anthology mentioned several times above may, in fact, be the first English-language essays devoted entirely to Vico and language. These were among the first studies to argue that metaphor was a much more fundamental feature of language than literal discourse. But, given the theoretical climate in linguistics and psychology at the time, these studies were destined to go largely unnoticed. From the 1970s onward, the amount of article-length work on Vico and language in English has increased noticeably. However, most of these have not been published in the major scientific journals, but in periodicals
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which most Anglo-American cognitive and social scientists would not normally read. The specific language-related studies on Vico in the anthologies of the Institute for Vico Studies which have profoundly influenced my own views on Vico are the ones by Robert J. Di Pietro (1976b, 1981). Di Pietro argues, in essence, that linguistics would become a much more meaningful science if it were to take Vico's notion of "poetic logic" more seriously and thus to turn its attention to studying how language inheres in the workings of the imagination. New Vico Studies has published three of my own articles (Danesi 1986, 1987, 1989a) dealing with Vico's views on language origin and on verbal creativity. These have led me to contemplate writing the present book. In the pages of the same journal, Schaeffer (1984) has examined Vico's theory of metaphor from a philosophical perspective, pointing out that metaphor itself was for Vico an analogue for cognition. In addition to studies devoted specifically to Vico, it is interesting to note that there have been a number of works by linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, and psychologists in the last two decades that have made reference to Vico. A few illustrative examples will suffice: Stam (1976) starts off his historiography of glottogenetic thought, Inquiries into the Origin of Language, with Vico, to whom he devotes most of his opening chapter. Although he accurately identifies Vico as the first glottogeneticist in the modern sense of the word, Stam (1976: 13) views Vico's treatment of language origin as generally unclear and inconsistent. Stam seems not to have noticed the resemblance between Vico's ideas and those of most of the others to whom he gives extensive consideration in his book. Psychology has also started to take note of Vico. The psychologists Shotter (1986) and Haskell (e.g., 1987a, 1989) make reference to Vico as the discoverer of the cognitive significance of metaphorical thought. Haskell (1989: 249) points out that Vico is not well known in his field because he diverges "considerably from the predominant definition of a rationalistic epistemology." Sullivan (1984) has argued persuasively that a Vichian position in modern psychology would make the study of mind a much more humanistic, and less mechanical, one. The most extensive treatment of what a Vichian paradigm in psychology would be like is, to the best of my knowledge, the one by Littleford and Whitt (1988). Their basic argument is that a Vichian psychology would be superior to any other kind of psychology. Although it is not clear from my reading of this book exactly how a Vichian psychology could be constructed, there is no doubt in my mind that this discipline can no longer ignore Vico.
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In the fields of linguistics and semiotics, Apel (1965), Aarsleff (1975), Hawkes (1977), Eco (1984), and Nöth (1990), for instance, all refer to Vico as a precursor of many modern schools of thought. In his monumental handbook of semiotics, Nöth (1990: 31) identifies Vico as a precursor of Piagetian and Lévi-Straussian psychology. Samuel Levin (1988: 10630) devotes an entire chapter of his book on metaphor to Vico's view that metaphor is at the core of the language faculty. In the recent anthology of studies edited by David E. Leary (1990a), tracing the role of metaphor in the history of psychology, there are only a few passing references to Vico; but they show an increasing awareness of his importance to the study of the mind. The following citation is typical (Leary (1990b: 3): "It is only in modern times, beginning with the etymological, rhetorical, and historical analyses of Giambattista Vico, that many scholars have come to share the view that metaphor characterizes human thought and language in a truly fundamental way." The recent book by Michael Herzfeld (1987) on the epistemological basis of anthropology uses Vico to reflect upon the current state of anthropological science. And the recently published work by Marshall McLuhan and his son (McLuhan and McLuhan 1988), subtitled The New Science in homage to Vico, proposes an approach to the understanding of media and communication that is essentially Vichian in nature. Finally, there are several Italian-language studies on Vico's conception of language origin that have in some way helped to shape my thinking and therefore have influenced some of the parts of the glottogenetic scenario that I intend to sketch in the next chapter. I mention them here simply to draw attention to them: Pagliaro's (1950) study of Vico's linguistic philosophy remains, to this day, a basic point of reference for work on glottogenesis. Papini's (1984) monumental Arbor humanae linguae is an in-depth philosophical treatment of Vico's views on the origins of things, including language. In Mente, corpo, linguaggio (1986) and a related study (1990), Gianfranco Cantelli extends Vico's and Cassirer's (1953) views that language and myth share the same cognitive structures in glottogenesis. As is well known, Cassirer was influenced throughout his career by the NS (see Verene 1979). The recent studies by Modica (1988), Pennisi (1988), and Di Cesare (1988) reassess Vico's linguistic thought in the context of modern views of lan-
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guage. These were originally published in the Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani (1986). Fano's 1962 study of the origins of language (English edition 1992) mentions Vico in a few parts. Fano does not seem to be aware of the fact that his own primal scenario, which gives great weight to the role of iconicity in language phylogenesis, is reminiscent of many of Vico's ideas. The New Science Before putting together a Vichian account of the primitive mind, it is instructive to consider briefly the main intellectual problem Vico attempted to solve in the NS and the method he used to conduct his inquiry into human mentality. Background Even though Vico's primary occupation was that of professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples (from 1699 to 1741), his interests spanned many branches of knowledgelaw, language, myth, literature, philosophy, historyand his life-long goal was to construct out of these a "new science" of the human mind and of the institutions it has generated. His main concern in the NS was to solve the enigma of human history. His solution was a cyclical theory, according to which human societies progressed through a series of stages from barbarism to civilization and then back to barbarism. In the first stagecalled the "Divine Age" or the "Age of the Gods''religion, burial rites, the family, and other basic institutions emerge to lay the foundations of human culture. In the succeeding "Age of Heroes" a dominant class of nobles emerges typically to subjugate the common people. And this leads to the third stagethe "Age of Humans"in which the common people rise up and win equality; but in the process society begins to disintegrate. This, according to Vico, is the natural "course" of human history. Within the framework of this theory, Vico searched for the origin of human consciousness and thought in the symbols that the mind constantly generates and utilizes. So in his NS Vico sought to unravel the origins of symbols by means of a method based primarily on the interpretation of myths and on the etymology of words. Through his "philological" approach, Vico wanted to explain one of the greatest enigmas of all time: How did human language and culture come about? His search for an answer to this question led to what is arguably his most important discoverythe "primitive mind." And, as with many of Vico's groundbreaking ideas, it is only in recent times that this notioncalled the "savage mind" by Lévi-Strauss (1962)has started to receive widespread academic attention. The NS was first published in 1725. Previously, Vico had published four
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works in Latin, principal among which were an exposition of his conception of education, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709 [1990]), and a treatise on knowledge and metaphysics based on a criticism of Descartes, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710 [1988]). The fact that he wrote the NS in Italian probably indicates that he intended it for a broader nonacademic audience. As he himself proclaimed, the main idea behind the work was to establish the "natural laws" which governed human thought by reconstructing, in the tradition of Plato and Bacon (both of whom he read with voracious interest), the world and the mind of the first sentient and reflective humans. Vico took issue with the reconstructive scenarios put forward by both Plato and Bacon because he felt that they were drafted solely in accordance with the ideas that prevailed during the times in which each one wrote. What Vico wanted to do instead was to divest his own mind of any acquired culture-specific notions and to seek out the birth of ideas in the original meanings of the words and symbols used to encode them. Only in this way, Vico claimed, would it be possible to gain some really significant insights into the morphogenesis of human mentality. In a certain way, therefore, Vico was a prereconstructionist. But unlike most reconstructionists, he was not interested in protophonology, but in protosemantics. Vico firmly believed that his NS would do for the study of mind and culture what Newton's Principia Mathematica had done for the study of matter. So, soon after the publication of the first edition, he sent a copy to Newton. It is not known whether Newton ever received the book. But, as Manuel (1963: 43) suggests, even if he had, Newton "would not have remotely comprehended its meaning." The general lack of response from the academic community, together with a widespread condemnation of the NS within Naples, greatly affected Vico. As a consequence, he decided to return to his other academic and creative interests for a while. He revised a rhetoric textbook which he had previously written. He wrote poetry for the Neapolitan aristocracy. And from 1735 until his death he took on the post of official historian to the new ruler of Naples, Charles Bourbon. Design In the back of his mind Vico continued to mull over his beloved NS. He produced a second edition in 1730, in which he reorganized the contents and manner of presentation in a major way. In 1744 the third and final edition came out just after his death. In its definitive version, the NS was divided into five "books," preceded by an allegorical frontispiece designed by a local artist, Domenico Vaccaro, with Vico's assistance. Vico also added an explanation of the frontispiece to serve as a general introduction to the work. Book 1 was devoted to the "Establishment of Principles" on which the entire work was based. It also contained a chronological table summarizing
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the main events in the histories of seven civilizations: the Hebrews, Chaldeans, Scythians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Book 2 dealt with the cornerstone notion of the work"Poetic Wisdom." Vico divided the study of this innate universal capacity into eleven categories: metaphysics, logic, morals, economy, politics, history, physics, cosmography, astronomy, chronology, and geography. In book 3, "The Discovery of the True Homer," Vico argued that the Homeric poems had been elaborated over a long period of time and therefore that the personage referred to as "Homer" was actually a fictional creation. In book 4, ''The Course that Nations Run," Vico developed his theory of the corso of history in terms of three ages (the "Divine," the "Heroic," and the "Human"). He portrayed each age as manifesting its own particular kind of customs, laws, language, and even human nature. He did not, however, see this historical sequence as necessarily irreversible. So, in book 5, "The Recourse of Human Institutions which the Nations Take When They Rise Again," Vico elaborated the idea of the ricorso, the return of an earlier age in the life of a culture. In his concluding remarks, Vico turned specifically to the question of Divine Providence, suggesting that, although human beings may have created history themselves, they were guided unwittingly in their efforts by a higher mentality: It is true that men have themselves made this world of nations (and we took this as the first incontestable principle of our Science, since we despaired of finding it from the philosophers and philologists), but this world without doubt had issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves; which narrow ends, made means to serve wider ends, it has always employed to preserve the human race upon this earth. (NS: 1108) [All citations from the NS are taken from Bergin and Fisch's 1984 revised translation. The number refers to the paragraph from which the citation has been taken, this being the normal practice in Vico studies.] It is a well-known fact that Vico, who went through an early period of enthusiasm for the ideas of Descartes, became disenchanted with these ideas in later life (Burke 1985: 1617). But he never lost his admiration for Descartes's lucid and very elegant "geometrical" method. This is the most probable reason why Vico adopted a geometrical style, with axioms and propositions, to present his ideas in the NS. Vico's axioms and propositions dealt not with points, lines, surfaces, and figures, but with conjectures and demonstrations about the nature of thought, language, and culture. Just as geometry constructs the world of points, lines, surfaces, and figures by defining them and then relating them to each other, so too did Vico believe his science would "create for itself the world of nations" (NS: 349). The method he used to "prove" his various statements was not the deductive one used by geometricians, but a philological one that aimed to show that the ideas and doctrines that cultures viewed as being natural and
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immutable must have taken their "beginning from that of the matters of which they treat" (NS: 314). The world's first myths, for instance, are to be considered authentic "civil histories of the first peoples" (NS: 352). Aware that a mind studying itself ran the risk of generating an infinite regress of speculations, Vico stressed the need to focus exclusively on the concrete origins of myths, rituals, and symbols. He believed that this was the only way that he could adequately distance himself from his object of study. Therefore, he proposed to conduct his search for the emergence of primitive thought by studying word origins and by comparing what he found to the development of the mind in childhood. The former technique was based on the proposition that the first thoughts could be reconstructed from the concrete meanings of the words used to express them. The latter grew out of Vico's belief that the ontogenesis of thought and language in the individual constituted a chronologically condensed reenactment of their phylogenesis in the human species. As pointed out in the previous chapter, this hypothesis lay at the core of traditional theories of language origin, but it can also be detected in current glottogenetic thinking. Lieberman's (1975) comparison of Neanderthal skulls with those of the modern child is a case in point. Basic Vichian Notions The NS contains ideas which can be assembled in myriad ways to construct theories, models, and ideational frameworks that have relevance to disciplines ranging from philosophy and law to social anthropology and cognitive psychology. And what is even more amazing is that it permits so many constructions on the basis of a handful of notions. There are three such notions that are crucial to the drafting of any Vichian model of the primitive mindthe fantasia "imagination," the ingegno "ingenuity" or "invention,'' and the memoria "memory." But before dealing with these, it is necessary to examine briefly three other terms, science, verum-factum, and myth, since these are essential to understanding the methodology employed by Vico in the NS. Science Ever since Aristotle, Western science has espoused the idea that the physical universe is a great machine operating according to natural laws. These are said to be discoverable objectively by human reason. The term science in the NS has nothing to do with this traditional notion. For Vico we can know only what we ourselves have made, including mathematics and physics. As Bergin and Fisch (1984: xxxi) put it: "We can have scienza in mathematics, because we are deducing the consequences of our own definitions and postulates; and we can have scienza in physics to the extent of
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our capacity for experiment." The "laws" of Euclidean geometry, for instance, are not inherent in the universe. Rather, they constitute humanity's cognitive strategy for organizing and rationalizing visual sensations. The idea that knowledge could be gained by exact observation and ordered thinking was extended logically to the scientific study of mind from the 1600s onward. For almost four centuries, the notion that the mind's activities could be understood better if they were to be simulated, reproduced, or modeled in mechanical ways has held a strong appeal to the mindset of Western philosophy and cognitive science. Thomas Hobbes (1656 [1839]) was among the first to have articulated this viewpoint in 1656 when he defined ratiocination bluntly as computation: i.e., as a process akin to the addition and subtraction of numbers. He believed that thinking was essentially a mechanical process and that, in principle, machines could be built that were capable of thought. In more recent times, there have been significant attempts to make good on Hobbes's claim. In the previous century, George Boole (1854 [1951]) sought to determine the laws of thought within a system of logic. His algebra has been of prime importance to the study of pure mathematics and to the design of modern computers. Gottlob Frege (1879) then combined Boole's system with Aristotelian logic, providing the foundations for modern mathematical logic. Frege's work greatly influenced Bertrand Russell, who together with Alfred North Whitehead (1913), axiomatized the Boolean-Fregean system. This line of philosophical thinking led in the 1930s and 1940s to the first serious attempts to take the study of mind "out of the body" so as to be able to study it more objectively "in a machine." Alan Turing's (1936) ground-breaking work on finite-state automata showed that the simple architecture of a four-operation machinemove right, move left, write a slash, erase a slashcould in principle carry out any recursive function. Turing's machine formed the theoretical platform upon which work in artificial intelligence and modern computer programming has been grounded. Claude Shannon then went on to show in 1948 that any kind of information could be described in terms of binary choices between equally probable alternatives, thus providing a means of representing information that was independent of its specific content and of the devices that carried it. The psychological implications were immediately obvious: machines could carry out rational thinking processes, and the brain could finally be studied as an information-processing device. Vico's approach to the study of mind has always stood in diametrical opposition to the mechanical view. For Vico, the study of rational thought was not a point of departure; it was its point of arrival. Modern computational theories of mind would be seen to be products of the metaphorical imagination. We will never be able to mechanically reproduce this creative process, for it is designed by nature to "make sense" of the world "from sensation." Vico would be rather bemused by current attempts to take the study of mind "out of the body," because for him the mind took its origins
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from the body: "the human mind is naturally inclined to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to understand itself by means of reflection" (NS: 236). Vico's objective in the NS was to make us aware of those unique mental features that have made possible the great achievements of rational thought systems, which incidentally would include modern computational theory. The Verum-Factum Principle The fundamental notion upon which the methodology of the NS rests has been called the verum-factum principle (e.g., Mondolfo 1969; Garin 1972; Verene 1981: 3664, 1988). Vico's motivation for this notion comes from his observation that "the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind" (NS: 331). As Verene (1988: 2) argues, even though precedents for this notion can be found in Aristotle, Plato, and Renaissance humanistic thought, "no thinker has so completely meant by it what Vico does." It is only in the present century that we have finally come to understand the full extent of the implications of the verum-factum notion. Western science has traditionally operated on the belief in an external world independent of the percipient subject. But in the first decades of this century the great physicist Werner Heisenberg (English translation 1949) brought to the attention of his colleagues the fact that the scientist's so-called objective reality was a mental artifact. His uncertainty, or indeterminacy, principlefor which he won the Nobel Prize in 1931has come to have profound repercussions on scientific thinking in the second half of this century. In essence, Heisenberg showed that the idea of an objectively knowable universe, independent of our particular modes of observing, is just thata human idea. Heisenberg suggested that the construct of "objective reality" had to be replaced by the more suitable notion of "observer-created reality." The verum-factum principle has become the operative one for most of the work in several branches of contemporary anthropology, which has redefined "common sense" as "communal sense." In Vico's words, common sense "is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race" (NS: 142). This notion has guided the work of Sapir (1921) and Whorf (1956) in anthropological linguistics, and of Malinowski (1922) and Lévi-Strauss (1963) in social anthropology. Edmund Leach (1976: 33) articulates what is in effect a modern version of the verum-factum principle as follows: Our internal perception of the world around us is greatly influenced by the verbal categories which we use to describe it. A modern urban street scene is wholly manmade and it is only because all the things in it carry individual names, i.e. symbolic labels, that we can recognise what they are. This is true
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of all human culture and of all human societies. We use language to cut up the visual continuum into meaningful objects and into persons filling distinguishable roles. But we also use language to tie the component elements together again, to put things and persons in relationship to one another. This double function of symbolic action applies to nonverbal as well as to verbal behaviour. Myth The third essential feature of Vico's methodology is myth. For Vico, the world's primitive myths were narrative descriptions of environmental events (thunder, lightning, etc.). They were "true" to their creators in the same way that scientific theories are "true" to modern humans: "But these treacherous reefs of mythology will be avoided by the principles of this Science, which will show that such fables in their beginnings were all true and severe and worthy of the founders of nations" (NS: 81). Myths provided the first humans with the narrative tools that allowed them literally to ''carve up" the world of nature. The structure of myth betrayed the actual structure of the primitive mind. Manifestations of mythological thinking can still be seen in our social behaviorsi.e., in our constant need for stories in both factual and fictional form. Some recent work in developmental psychology has been showing that children develop concepts primarily through story formats. As Wells (1986: 194) has put it, "constructing stories in the mind is one of the most fundamental means of making meaning; as such it is an activity that pervades all aspects of learning." Children seem to grasp new concepts only if these are presented to them in the form of narratives (e.g., Winner 1982: 266305). Stories provide the intelligible formats that mobilize the child's natural ability to learn from context (e.g., Miller and Gildea 1991). After reviewing a large corpus of research in the field of child development, Jerome Bruner (1990) comes to the conclusion that culturally shaped narrative thinking underlies how we come to understand ourselves and the social world in which we live. Beginning with the acquisition of language, narrative thinking brings the developing human organism into the arena of human culture. It is the form of thinking that gives pattern and continuity to human perception and experience. The Vichian idea that myths underlie the cognitive structures and processes that allow humans to make sense of the perceived environment found its way, in this century, into the writings of Ernst Cassirer (e.g., 1953) and into the work of Lévi-Strauss (1963). Cassirer maintained that the structure of myth was to be found in an unconscious "grammar of experience," whose categories and canons were not those of rational thought, but of a creative imagination that continues to wield its power over even our most rigorous thought patterns. Similarly, for Lévi-Strauss the components of mythsuniversal percepts of smell, sound, light,
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darkness, etc.are to be viewed as the coceptual tools for coming to grips with the more abstract concerns with which human beings must grapple. The Fantasia, the Ingegno, and the Memoria The crucial notions required to draft any Vichian scenario of the origin of mind and language are the fantasia, the ingegno, and the memoria. The fantasia, or the "imagination," is the facultyunique to the human speciesthat has made possible the mind's ability to reflect on stimuli not present in the immediate environment. It has endowed humans with the capacity "to carry the world around in their heads," so to speak, by allowing them to transform the nonreflective form of mentation that they probably share with the other animalsthe physically bound type that reacts instinctively to urges and changes in the continuum of perceived eventsinto a reflective one. Thus, for Vico, the distinguishing feature of human consciousness is that it allows us literally to "imagine" stimuli that are no longer present for the sensory system to reach to in its biologically programmed way. Consciousness emerged when the primordial fantasia allowed the human mind to organize the images that the brain formed from perception into meaning-making structures. The brains of all animals have the capacity to form memorable images. This is essentially a survival function. But animals lack the ability to transform their images into new structures for the mind to utilize. This ability inheres in the agreements or resemblances that the human mind alone is capable of making between the images produced by the brain and the sensory units registered by the body: "The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body" (NS: 236). The imagination is an epiphenomenal product of brain functioning that conferred upon the first reflective humans the ability to map mental images onto the beings, objects, and events that the senses had captured, and thus to make associations and connections among them. The units that resulted from these mappings are what semioticians call iconic signsunits of thought that stand for their referents in direct ways. Since they could be generated exclusively within the mindi.e., away from the contexts in which their referents occurredthese units allowed humans subsequently to model their referents in totally contextindependent ways. The mind thus "created" new realities wholly within the confines of its own spacehence the meaning of imagination as a creative faculty. Humans alone have the capacity to "imagine" fictional (context-free) beings, objects, and events. The primordial fantasia thus liberated human beings from the constraints imposed on all other organisms by biology. As Verene (1981: 101) puts it, the imagination allowed the first humans" to know from the inside" by extending "what is made to appear from sensation beyond the unit of
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its appearance and to have it enter into connection with all else that is made by the mind from sensation." The ingegno"ingenuity," "invention"emerged as the faculty the conscious mind required for organizing the meaning-making units produced by the fantasia into new units and structures. Whereas the fantasia is an epiphenomenal product of brain activity, the ingegno is a derivative of the fantasiaa kind of "epi-epiphenomenal" activity. It is thus not connected directly to bodily processes, operating totally within mental space as it concatenates meaningful units to form context-free models of world events. Primordial "meaning" was a product of the ingegno as it sought to impose pattern onto the units that the fantasia had stored into memory. The ingegno is, therefore, the source of syntax in language and of narrative structure in verbal discourse. It generated the earliest myths that humanity literally invented. Laws, scientific theories, fictional narrations, etc., are all traceable to the ability of the ingegno "to beget''the word ingegno derives etymologically from Latin in "in" + gignere "to beget." Finally, the primordial memoria is the neurological system that stored the units produced by the fantasia for future utilization. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, the probable locus for this "perceptual memory system" is the right hemisphere of the brain. It is in this memory system that the ingegno emerged to organize the imagination's iconic signs into structured patterns and models. While iconic signs are stored in the form of percepts (units derived from perception) by the memoria, the invented structures of the ingegno are stored as "categories"i.e., as structures derived from combinations of percepts that underlie our models of space, time, emotions, etc. The fantasia and the ingegno are unique characteristics of human mentality. Why did they come about in the first place? Vico answers simply that they were bestowed upon human beings by Divine Providence, and that no one can possibly understand God's design. But humans can profitably study and come to understand the products of the fantasia and the ingegnorational thought, language, and culture: Thus the proper and continual proof here adduced will consist in comparing and reflecting whether our human mind, in the series of possibilities it is permitted to understand, and so far as it is permitted to do so, can conceive more or fewer or different causes than those from which issue the effects of this civil world. (NS: 345) The Primitive Mind The notions just discussed can now be used to construct a model of a primordial mind that would have had the capacity to generate language.
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The essential feature of this mind is the imagination. It was, therefore, a mind that did its work on the basis of bodily experience, not analysis and deduction. Vico used the term poetic wisdom to characterize the operation of the primordial mind, which can be defined, in essence, as the capacity to "make sense" of perceptions. I remind the reader that Vico never explicitly put forward a theory of glottogenesis, nor a model of the primitive mind as such in the NS. So the reconstruction to be attempted here is a Vichian" one that I have sketched on the basis of various statements made by Vicor in the NS. The Mind's Two Layers In my view, the key to modeling the Vichian mind is to separate it into two levels or layersa deep and a surface one. The deep level is where consciousness originated. Even in the modern mind, it inheres in the sense impressions that the brain transforms into images and the imagination into percepts and iconic units. These are then organized into affective and perceptual models by the ingegno. Percepts register our physiological and affective responses to the signals and stimuli present in the environment; perceptual models give form and new meaning to these responses. Thomas Sebeok (1987a: 190) aptly characterizes the operation of this primitive level of mind as an "affective modeling of knowledge." Although all species participate by instinct in the experiential universe, only humans are endowed with the capacity to "model" their sense impressions by transforming them into iconic signs and perceptual models. It is at this deep level that one can talk of "imaginative universals" (Verene 1981: 6595; Mooney 1985: 22730). When these iconic transformations of our bodily experiences came to be connected to each other through the medium of metaphor, a surface form of cognition crystallized. The particular characteristics of this metaphorically fabricated mental universe became the source of differences among persons and among cultures. Although it evolved out of the deep level, it has come to be the dominant form of mentality. For Vico metaphor is a mental capacity that results from the interaction of the fantasia and the ingegno. Before defining it formally, it is useful to summarize the functions of the features that make up the deep level of mind: The fantasia takes the percepts manufactured by the brain from images of bodily sensations and generates context-free iconic units on the basis of the mind-body extensions it is capable of making. The ingegno organizes the units produced by the fantasia into meaningful structures. It is the source of all human inventionsyntax, myth, etc. The memoria is the neurological system that stores the products of the fantasia and the ingegno.
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It is interesting to note that in modern Jungian psychoanalytic theory, the primordial percepts that the deepest layer of memory has stored away into genetic material have been labeled "archetypes." These are the mental models that have shaped the genetic configuration of memory and have therefore come to form a "collective unconscious," as the Jungians call it. The search for universal patterns of transformed perception in the deepest levels of mind as they reveal themselves, for instance, in the narrative structure of dreams is highly congruent with the Vichian model of primitive mentality. As the fantasia and the ingegno perform their functions in tandem, they generate metaphor, which can be defined as a kind of epiphenomenal amalgam of fantasia and ingegno. Its primary function is to connect percepts and perceptual models (which can be represented as A, B, etc.) by imposing on them an equivalence, or "isness" structure, as Verene (1981) calls itA is B. The instant that metaphor relates A to B in this way, it creates a completely new unit of thought that has no immediate connection to physiological processes. Metaphorical equivalences do not occur between the body and the mind, as they do when the imagination transforms sense-derived images into meaning-making units, but between units already present within the mind. In the evolution of mentality, metaphor generated the surface level of cognition, by producing the first concepts out of the connections it had made in the deep level. A primitive, or first-order, concept can be defined as a context-free thought unit resulting from a metaphorical connection between percepts (A is B, C is D, etc.). The plausibility of this model of conceptformation will be examined in both the third and sixth chapters. Suffice it to say here that in the primitive mind metaphor was the operation that gave unity to iconic or perceptual thinking by seeking out and making connections among iconic signs and models. It thus generated abstract thought by transforming percepts into concepts. The process of conceptualization did not completely separate the mind from the body. First-order concepts originated in the operations of the deep level, where bodily processes were being transformed into iconic signs (percepts and perceptual models) by the fantasia and the ingegno. These processes were then interconnected in an abstract way by metaphorthe "connecting" capacity arising from the interaction of the fantasia and the ingegno. But they could be reelicited at any time. And, in fact, it is still a common experience to witness that words can affect us in physiological ways. They have the capacity to anger us, move us, excite us. The mind-body nexus is clearly still embedded in them. Vico referred to the deep-level operation of the mindthe constant interaction between the fantasia and the ingegnoas poetic logic. He called the first speakers "poets," which etymologically means "makers." He defined metaphor as a "fable-making" capacity emerging from poetic logic that searches for likenesses among percepts and perceptual models (A, B, etc.) to create new, and therefore, context-free, associations (A is B, B is C, etc.).
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In this new world of the mind even "inanimate bodies" can be brought to life: All the first tropes are corollaries of this poetic logic. The most luminous and therefore the most necessary and frequent is metaphor. It is most praised when it gives sense and passion to insensate things, in accordance with the metaphysics above discussed, by which the first poets attributed to bodies the being of animate substances, with capacities measured by their own, namely sense and passion, and in this way made fables of them. Thus every metaphor so formed is a fable in brief. (NS: 404) Phylogenetically, the metaphorical capacity emerged to convert deep-level percepts into surface-level concepts. But it did not stop there. It continued to do its work within the confines of the new surface level to produce second-order concepts. These resulted from the connections that metaphor made among first-order concepts. If a first-order concept had the structure A is B, and another D is F, then a second-order concept must have taken on the underlying structure [A is B] is [D is F]. The whole process of concept-formation will be discussed and illustrated in chapter 6. Here it is sufficient to say that in the evolution of mind second-order concepts must have emerged to constitute the "blueprint" for the whole "architecture" of abstract cognition, and hence for its propositional or computational structure: [A is B] is [D is F] can easily be restructured in the surface level of mind as If [A is B], then [D is F] and other conceptual formulas. To adopt Parisi's (1983) suggestion, syntax must have emerged to stabilize this new complex system of abstract though. Syntax is traceable to the workings of the ingegno, which literally "invents" ways of putting things together. Syntax is definable, therefore, as a surface-level system that emerged through the workings of the ingegno to arrange and organize the increasingly complex structures that this level of mind was generating. Syntax produced a stable cognitive system. Cognition can thus be defined as the surface-level form of thought that resulted from the syntactic organization of complex conceptual structures. To complete the Vichian model of mind, it is to be noted that the new cognitive level has come to be located in the left hemisphere of the brain. Phylogenetically, therefore, this part of the brain must have developed a new form of memoryconceptual memoryto store the new abstract structures that the surface level of mind was producing. As will be discussed in subsequent chapters, the neuroscientific research on memory has shown that there are two forms of memory in the brain, the spatial and the verbal, stored separately in the right and left hemispheres respectively. In the Vichian model just described, the spatial form corresponds to the deep-level memory system (perceptual memory), and the verbal to the surfacelevel one (conceptual memory). Figure 4 is a graphic summary of the evolution of cognition according to Vichian notions.
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Figure 4. The Vichian Primitive Mind. From Imaginative Deep Consciousness to Surface Cognition As surface-level concepts became more and more removed from their deep-level origins, settling into their new memory system, they started to generate highly abstract structures on their own. Free from sensory control, they gradually came to form the mind's dominant mode of thinking. This new cognitive system has become a truly powerful one. It can be employed, independently of bodily processes, to organize the world of reality totally within mental space. More importantly, it can be projected onto the external world of reality to organize it, classify it, partition it, and explain it. These projections of the mind have produced our symbolic systemsour institutions, scientific theories, our laws, etc. The structure of these systems, therefore, reflects the structure of our mind (the verum-factum principle). Vico warns us throughout the NS that we must never forget how our dominant abstract mode of symbolic thinking originated. Metaphor is always there to help us conceptualizei.e., to make connections that our cognitive system has not encoded. In other words, we continue to rely on our metaphorizing capacity when our abstract mind fails us. As Eco (1984:
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108) points out, "Vico is not speaking of a linear development from metaphorical language to a more conventional language, but of a continual, cyclical activity." When we lack the appropriate concepts and symbolic structures to understand or communicate something, we are forced to reenact the primordial scenario described above: "For when we wish to give utterance to our understanding of spiritual things, we must seek aid from our imagination to explain them and, like painters, form human images of them" (NS: 404). In an analysis of scientific theorizing, Hoffman (1983) has shown how scientists continually resort to metaphor to create theories and models of the world and of the mind. Similarly, Black's (1962) classic examination of the relation between model-making and metaphor has illustrated how dominant and pervasive the metaphorical capacity continues to be. As psychologist Julian Jaynes (1976: 51) states, in truly Vichian fashion, a close scrutiny of word origins will show that "language and its referents climbed up from the concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors, even, we may say, created the abstract on the bases of metaphors." This would explain why words referring to abstraction have a metaphorical origin: e.g., idea derives from a Greek word meaning ''to see," to be from a Sanskrit verb that meant "to breathe," etc. (Danesi 1990). To summarize, a Vichian model of the primitive mind would posit two levels and four chronologically related stages: At the deepest level of the mind, the imagination transformed the world of instinctually-programmed affective and sensorial responses to urges and environmental stimuli into a world of iconic signs. The presence of these signs in the brain signaled the advent of consciousness and of the capacity to reflect upon the beings, objects, and events in the world away from their contexts of occurrence and existence. Within this primordial layer of consciousness, the ingegno further transformed the brain's images into models of "connectedness" among them. Metaphor then transformedand continues to transformthe "iconic deep structure of thought" into a surface cognitive form by converting percepts into concepts. The primitive mind evolved into the modern mind when metaphorically forged concepts became gradually more abstract and removed from sensory control and syntax emerged to stabilize the system. In the modern mind, the surface level of cognition has become the dominant mode of thought, generating its own semantic system which has become increasingly dependent on concepts and their syntactic arrangements. Literal discourse is a product of this system. Vico, Eccles, Popper, and Sociobiology I am aware that the Vichian model of mind that I have just sketched is just thata model. But it is instructive to conclude this discussion by
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briefly comparing it to two other contemporary models. One of theseoutlined by Popper and Eccles (1977; see also Eccles 1989)is highly compatible with it; the otherdeveloped by sociobiologystands in stark opposition to it. Popper and Eccles classify the world into three domains. "World 1" is the world of physical objects and states, including human brains which can affect physical objects and processes by means of neuronal synapses transmitting messages along nerve paths that cause muscles to contract or limbs to move. A synapse is the junction of two neurons (nerve cells) across which a nerve impulse passes. As Sebeok (1985b: 167) remarks, this is a world of information without semiosis (the ability to produce and understand signs). "World 2" is the whole world of subjective experiences or states of consciousness. This is the level at which the concept of self emerges, as the mind allows humans to differentiate themselves from the beings, objects, and events of the outside world. "World 3" is the world of knowledge in the objective sense, containing the externalized products of the human mind. It is, in other words, the totally human-made world of culture. From a Vichian perspective, World 1 can be seen to correspond to the preconscious world of instincts and sense impressions. World 2 is comparable to the deep level of consciousness. And World 3 can be seen to coincide with the surface level of cognition. What the Vichian account adds to this model is the imagination, which converts World 1 states into World 2 ones, and metaphor, which transforms World 2 states into World 3 ones. While Vico sees the essence of mind as inhering in a creative force that generates abstract thought, language, and culture through the workings of metaphor and the imagination, sociobiology sees it essentially as a kind of survival-enhancing organ. For Vico we probably could have survived without the mind. For the sociobiologists we would have become extinct without it. Sociobiology combines information from the social and physical sciences to study and explain the biological and cultural bases of human behavior. The sociobiological model of evolution takes on various forms, but its main elements are four giant steps, each a billion years apart. The first one was the origin of life, defined in terms of a tiny simple organism that could reproduce itself. Next came a more complex cellthe basis of all higher life forms including human body tissues. The step after that consisted of larger multicellular organisms (flatworms, crustaceans, etc.) which had the capacity to develop more complex organs like eyes and brains. The last giant step was the emergence of the human mind. Sociobiologists attempt to describe what caused the change from largely genetically programmed behavior to reflective thought in terms of a gene-environment interaction. Lumsden and Wilson (1983), for instance, call the process that such an interaction started "gene-culture coevolution." This process was irreversibly triggered by Homo habilis hominids when they
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learned how to use their hands to make tools. They were small creatures with a human body and a brain similar to that of an intelligent ape. They lived in groups as hunter-gatherers on the savanna plains of Africa. Threatened by larger mammals, but desperately needing to catch game in order to survive, they had to learn how to act cooperatively, to think logically, and to communicate among themselves in some fashion. So, they developed social rules for hunting, food sharing, division of labor, mating, etc. Theirs was the earliest "culture" of humanity. In this hypothetical scenario, the mind was generated by genetic processes as they responded to such new cultural demands. As cultures became more complex, so did the human mind, which gradually allowed humans to make choices that conferred upon them greater survival and reproductive abilities. Gene evolution gradually gave way to cultural evolution. The body's survival mechanisms were eventually replaced by those of the mind. Although this paraphrase is highly reductive, and does not go into the kinds of fascinating data and arguments that sociobiologists use (for which see Dawkins 1976, 1987), I believe that it does capture the essence of their perspective. There is no imagination in this scenario: i.e., there is no fundamental, unexplainable creative impulse in the human organism. This organism developed a mind, rather than, say, an additional arm or leg, because it simply needed it to cooperate with other hominids in a shared survival strategy. This scenario is deceptively simple and highly persuasive. I will examine it more closely in the final chapter. I must alert the reader that I am not convinced by it. It is indeed true that the emergence of mind did allow humans to plan their actions, so that they could become better able to avoid danger, thus enhancing their survival capacity. But this is a kind of post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument. Why did our genes not develop some physical structure that would have been just as survival-enhancing? And what about human creativity? Why would a survival strategy also generate such useless things as myths, poetry, paintings, and the like? And why would such a strategy eventually turn on itself in a destructive way (as in homicide and suicide)? No matter what ingenious arguments sociobiologists might put forward to explain such aberrations, no physical organ would have evolved in such a way as to turn deleteriously upon itself! A Vichian search for the origin of mind would certainly not look for it in a gene-culture partnership. After all, how could there have been a protoculture without a mind to make it possible in the first place? In my opinion, the plausibility of the Vichian model inheres in the way that it traces the evolution of rational thoughtsociobiology's "survival organ"from a more fundamental experiential form of thinking. This form generated culture, not developed from it. Perhaps the most cogent contemporary perspective on this whole issue is the one offered by Sebeok (1991: 86), who makes the pertinent observation that genes and mind constitute two separate codes: To make "an anal-
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ogy between the two codes," he cautions, is an exercise in logic. What matters is that both are productive semiotic systems: the genetic code generates unconscious signs, the mental code conscious ones. To establish a causal link between the two, as do the sociobiologists, borders on logical fallacy.
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Three Language and the Imagination: The Vichian Glottogenetic Scenario "Imagination" is a word which derives from the making of images in the mind. Bronowski 1978: 10 As mentioned previously, Vico did not assign the subject of glottogenesis to a separate category (section, subsection, chapter) in the NS, aligned in some sequential way to other parts of the book. Rather, he interspersed the idea that rational-syntactic language, culture, and modern institutions were generated by the workings of the imagination and metaphor throughout his treatise in bits and pieces. So, given that Vico's mode of exposition was not a linear one, the various facets that make up this idea have to be distilled from the intricate thematic substance of the NS and reassembled in a more logical and sequential way. Only then can they be held up to the light of scientific assessment. The "geometrical method" that Vico claimed to be using consisted of what he called "elements" and "principles." But these were really no more than a series of aphorisms that he applied throughout the NS as frames for viewing the myriad subjects which he wanted to explain. The result is a piecemeal and repetitive mode of exposition. Indeed, Vico's nonlinear aphoristic mode of writing might have been, and may continue to be, one of the main reasons why Anglo-American scientists have largely ignored the NS. Used to a more sequential style of topic exposition, modern scientists would simply not recognize the NS as constituting a ''scientific" text. Moreover, the method Vico used to trace the origins of mind, language, and culture would seem to be rather unorthodox from the perspective of traditional Western science. In this chapter I will start with a brief look at Vico's method. Then I will
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sketch the glottogenetic scenario which I have based primarily on two key parts of the NS: "Poetic Metaphysics" (NS: 37499) and "Poetic Logic" (NS: 400500). I will end the chapter by considering briefly how abstract syntactic language and culture might have evolved. Then, in the next three chapters I will assess the various components of this scenario in the light of various kinds of scientific evidence. The premise that underlies this assessment procedure is the normal one for Western science: the higher the degree of compatibility of the theory to the evidence, the higher its plausibility. The Vichian Approach As mentioned in the previous chapter, Vico was a professor of rhetoricmore specifically of Latin Eloquenceat the University of Naples. In the last decade of his life (he died in 1744 at the age of 76) he was appointed Royal Historiographer by Charles of Bourbon. Rhetoric and history, therefore, were the things he knew how to do best. It is little wonder, then, that Vico emphasized philology and etymology in the NS as the primary means by which to approach the study of the origin of mind, language, and culture. So his method consisted of an interweaving of philology, etymology, and comparisons to child language development. Most academicians would view the NS as a work in philosophy, not in linguistic science in the modern sense of the word. But Vico would not have appreciated this kind of pigeonholing. Throughout the NS he articulated his displeasure at both philosophers and philologists for having gone their separate ways. For Vico, a true "science" of humanity would amalgamate philosophy and philology: Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true; philology observes that of which human choice is author, whence comes consciousness of the certain. The axiom by its second part includes among the philologians all the grammarians, historians, critics who have occupied themselves with the study of the language and deeds of people: deeds at home, as in their customs and laws, and deeds abroad, as in their wars, peaces, alliances, travels, and commerce. The same axiom shows how the philosophers failed by half in not giving certainty to their reasonings by appeal to the authority of the philologians, and likewise how the latter failed by half in not taking care to give their authority the sanction of truth by appeal to the reasoning of the philosophers. (NS: 13840) Vico wanted to develop a cognitive theory that would bring into focus the "modifications of our own human mind" (NS: 331). Contrary to the way in which a mathematical discipline "constructs the world of quantity out of its elements" (NS: 349), Vico genuinely believed that philology and etymology would allow him to "discover the way in which the first human thinking arose" (NS: 338).
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It is unlikely, however, that contemporary scientists wouldinitially at leastaccept Vico's methodological techniques in the NS as scientific. But they would no doubt change their minds if they were to look more closely at the particulars of Vico's approach. In the same way that reconstructionists attempt to arrive at an unattested stage of language through the comparison of lexical cognates, so too did Vico want to reconstruct the first thoughts of humanity through a study of the original meanings of the words that embodied them. While some of Vico's "semantic reconstructions" may be highly unlikely or idiosyncratic from the standpoint of modern etymological techniques, his notion that metaphor is at the core of concept-formation is not. Moreover, his contention that myths provide an access route to the workings of early mentality can no longer be dismissed as unscientific. This is the premise under which Lévi-strauss worked in anthropology, and more recently, Julian Jaynes (1976) in psychology. The current work on narrativity (e.g., Wells 1986), furthermore, seems to be suggesting that children come to form their first concepts through the medium of myth-like stories. And certainly no one would consider unscientific the comparison of phylogenesis to ontogenesis. This is the supposition that underlay traditional glottogenetic theories, and the one that continues to motivate a large portion of contemporary glottogenetic research. Thus, although Vico's knowledge domain may not have contained the kinds of solid information that the modern sciences now have at their disposal, his method cannot be dismissed as unscientific. As a matter of fact, as Riverso (1985: 50) has aptly observed, it is becoming apparent to some scientists that the Vichian approach is the key to interpreting "the new information supplied by the detailed inquiries performed in recent times by archaeologists, ethnologists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and philologists." It should be noted, incidentally, that Vico never once drew inferences about language phylogenesis from animal communication. Needless to say, comparative psychology was not around in Vico's time. But the issue was discussed in debates going back to ancient Greece. In all likelihood, Vico simply never saw anything in animal communication that could be construed as a possible precursor of human language. For Vico this could not have been otherwisean "animal" endowed with an imagination would have eventually developed language. Animals are endowed by nature with the capacity to use basic signals for survival (Sebeok 1990a). These exist in the information-based World 1 described by Popper and Eccles (1977). Humans have the same World 1 experiences as animals. But through the workings of the imagination, human beings alone have developed the capacity to create signs to reflect upon this World. This capacity has generated Worlds 2 (consciousness of self) and 3 (culture) to which probably animals have no access. So, there really is no basis of comparison between human language and animal communication systems. In giving an overall
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assessment of modern day ape language experiments, Aitchison (1983: 5758) aptly observes that very few points of contact have, in fact, been shown to exist between animal and human communicationthe animals have demonstrated only the ability "to carry out slot filling manoeuvres, providing they are adequately rewarded." This is not to imply that animals do not communicate effectively, nor that they do not have a rudimentary form of consciousness (e.g., Griffin 1981). But animals do not use their communication systems to make up stories (myths, legends, etc.) or to share their experiences with other animals. They also lack the ability to represent their purported conscious experiences in a symbolic way. The available ethological evidence suggests that these capacities are exclusively human. Philology Technically, philology is the discipline that studies written records in order to set up accurate texts and determine their meaning. It is generally associated with literary scholarship and with comparative and historical linguistics. In the nineteenth century, historical linguists were often called philologists. The etymology of this word shows that it derives from Greek philos "fond" and logos "word." So, its original meaning designated a "fondness for words." It is certainly this designation that characterizes Vichian philology. Moreover, as Burke (1985: 85) remarks, Vico saw philology as the natural partner of philosophy: Philology stood for induction as philosophy stood for deduction. When Vico suggested that the conclusions of philosophy and philology supported each other, he was claiming that human history illustrates certain principles and that it does not make sense without them; that there is an order underlying the variety of human customs. As discussed in the previous chapter, the main target of Vichian philology is myth, the narrative strategy that the first human cultures employed to explain natural phenomena like the origin of the sun, the moon, etc. . In a Vichian theory of culture, typical social behaviors and institutional structures can be understood and explained in terms of the symbolically transformed experience they reflect. Vico searched for the underlying properties of human symbol systems, such as metaphor and myth, in order to explain the conceptual models people continually invent to rationalize their culturally constructed activities. For Vico, therefore, the path to understanding the genesis of mind, language, and culture went necessarily through a study of myth and metaphor. In the NS Vico wanted to seek out the morphogenesis of cultural norms in the original meanings of the words and symbols used to institutionalize them. His search for the origin of a specific culture was based on the proposition that the first thoughts of that culture could be recon-
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structed from the concrete meanings of the words, symbols, and myths used to express them. Myths were "all true and severe and worthy of the founders of nations" (NS: 81). For Vico they revealed how early humans attempted to make sense of the world, and their narrative structure betrayed the actual metaphorical structure of their minds. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Vico's philological perspective led him to distinguish three main types of language, each one associated with his three ages: Age of the Gods. During this age of protoculture, humans communicated by means of a highly concrete metaphorical language, derived from gesture. The media for registering the meaningful thoughts of these "first poets," as Vico called them, were myth and pictographic forms of writing. Thus, the first form of language was natural, not conventional. Age of Heroes. During this age a conventional, symbolic language emerged, which nevertheless had many vestiges in it of the previous metaphorical language, since it was being manufactured by the metaphorical capacity at the surface level of cognition. Age of Humans. Finally, with the appearance of the rational intellect through the incessant workings of metaphor, a highly abstract and conventional language emerged as the dominant form of communication. Etymology As Burke (1985: 84) aptly puts it, in Vico "the argument from philology means essentially the argument from etymology." Etymology is the science that studies how a word originated, by breaking it down into basic elements, tracing these elements back to their earliest known forms, and indicating their changes in form and meaning. The etymology of the word itself shows that it derives from Greek etymon "true meaning" and logos "word." For Vico the study of human origins inhered in the study of the etymology of words. The original meanings of words were the "fossil records'' of the human mind. To reconstruct the changes undergone by words was to reconstruct the evolution of cognition. By modern standards, many of Vico's etymologies can easily be seen to be amateurish. But what is significant, as Burke (1985: 84) astutely emphasizes, is Vico's "insight that the history of words, like the history of myths, offers valuable evidence of changing values and modes of thought." From the perspective of current semantic theory, Vico's insight that metaphor is the progenitor of conceptual meaning is even more significant. The recent book by Eve Sweetser (1990), From Etymology to Pragmatics, is based on this cardinal Vichian principle, even though Sweetser seems to be unaware of it. Like Vico, she argues cogently that the conceptual system that emerges from human experience is grounded in metaphor, and that etymology provides the access route to this system.
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Ontogenesis as Phylogenetic Reenactment For Vico, studying the ways in which children develop language constituted an important means for gaining insight into the origin and evolution of language in the species. There is really nothing peculiar or innovative about this particular methodological perspective. As discussed in the first chapter, it was the premise that was built into the traditional glottogenetic theories. During the intellectual ferment of nineteenth-century Darwinian biology it was even raised to the status of a biogenetic law: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. As Milner (1990: 44) remarks, during that century it "was considered one of the proofs of evolution." In this century it was largely abandoned, because it turned out to be untenable in some of its particulars, until Stephen Jay Gould's 1977 book Ontogeny and Phylogeny rekindled widespread interest in it. On this same topic, the Vichian model of mental evolution holds an intriguing implication for modern developmental psychology that has seldom, if ever, been pointed out. It can be phrased in the form of a question: Is it possible that the sequence of "ages" that characterize the course of human history according to Vico are reenacted in the mental and verbal development of the child in a chronologically compressed way? To put it in a slightly different way: Will the child pass through developmental "ages" that correspond mentally and verbally to Vico's phylogenetic ages? Remarkably, a quick glance at the literature on child development suggests that this is a line of inquiry worth pursuing. Child language is concrete, analogical, and iconic. As the great Russian psychologist Vygotsky (1972: 298) put it: "The primary word is not a straightforward symbol for a concept but rather an image, a picture, a mental sketch of a short concept, a short tale about itindeed, a small work of art." In summarizing the literature on verbal development, the psycholinguists Glucksberg and Danks (1975: 204205) reach the conclusion that children typically use concrete analogies because they lack knowledge of the relevant linguistic and societal constraints. Vico went one step further when he compared childhood analogical language to humanity's first attempts to express itself: Children by the ideas and names of the men, women and things they have seen first, afterwards apprehend and name all the men, women, and things that bear any resemblance to the first. This we said was the great natural source of the poetic characters, with which the first peoples naturally thought and spoke. (NS: 412) When viewed cumulatively (e.g., Gruendel 1977; Winner 1979; Gardner 1982b: 18489), the developmental literature makes it obvious that it would not be too farfetched to compare the child's first words to those of Vico's "first poets." During their "first age" of emerging consciousness, children
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develop a vocabulary that reflects a need to understand beings, objects, and events in terms of their perceptual attributes. Children then pass typically through a secondary stage when they are totally wrapped in the heroic figures that their specific cultures make available to them. During this "heroic age," children recreate themselves in terms of their heroes. They constantly generate imaginary worlds in which, as Gardner (1982b: 364) observes, "they show themselves capable of assuming the roles of other individuals." The transition from childhood to adulthood occurs when "poetic" and "heroic" thinking evolve into abstract rational thought. This is the final developmental "age'' of the human being. Reconstructing the Primal Scene The Vichian notions of the imagination and metaphor are the basic ones that have guided my reconstruction of the primal scene. The imagination transforms the body's World 1 experiences and states into iconic signs. In the World 2 universe it makes possible, it operates in tandem with the ingegno to generate models of World 1. The accumulation of these models in the deeplevel memory system leads to apperception, i.e., to the ability to be conscious of perceiving. The Vichian imagination is, as Verene (1981: 101) points out, the "power to know from the inside, to grasp the object in its inner nature." Vico's three-component model of the primitive mindthe fantasia, the ingegno, and the memoriahas not, to the best of my knowledge, been investigated as such by psychology. This model suggests that the brain's capacities to manufacture images is more fundamental than its abstract computational abilities. The latter are, in fact, derivatives of the former. Given its focus on the rational intellect, it is little wonder, then, that psychology has yet to establish as a fact that mental imagery is the fundamental mode of thought. Nevertheless, the literature in the field is replete with suggestions that it plays a key role in human cognition. The relevant findings emerging from this line of psychological research will be examined in the next chapter. As discussed at some length in the previous chapter, the Vichian model of mind also nicely explains how the transition from perception to conception might have occurred. And it explains how the ingegno is the force behind human creativity. Working in tandem with the fantasia, the ingegno undergirds all our symbolic cultural artifactsmusical compositions, paintings, scientific theories, etc. Metaphor, on the other hand, allows the mind to transcend its own surface-level cognitive architecture to create new conceptual domains, to make new associations, to invent new cultural institutions all the time. It can be hypothesized that the deep level of consciousness originated in Homo habilis and became entrenched in Homo erectus. This is suggested
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Years Species before Present 8 million Ramapithecus
Characteristics
Teeth have some similarity with hominids 4 million AustralopithecusBipedal walker; small afarensis brain; teeth have similarity with hominids 2.5 AustralopithecusBipedal walker; user of million africanus bones as weapons 2 million Homo habilis Bipedal walker; tool user 1 million Homo erectus Abundant tool use; relatively large brain 1/2 Homo sapiens Modern humans million Table 2. Hominid Ancestors (see Kimura 1987: 239). by the archeological finding that both these hominid types had cultures based on tool-making. By the time of Homo sapiens, the surface level of mind had emerged, as supported by the finding that this hominid type produced sophisticated artifacts such as drawings and ornaments. Table 2 summarizes our hominid ancestors. The Vichian model of mind thus suggests that Homo habilis and Homo erectus had only a perceptual memory system that was located in the right hemisphere of the brain. The same model suggests that the brain of Homo sapiens developed an additional memory system in the left hemisphere in order to store the concepts being produced by the surface level of mind. Contemporary neuropsychology has, in fact, documented that the memory system is divided into spatial and verbal subsystems located in the right and left hemispheres respectively (e.g., Bogen 1975). The Vichian model posits that the right hemisphere's function of storing iconic signs is phylogenetically more basic than the left hemisphere's capacity for retaining verbal concepts. The latter is a relatively late evolutionary development. Moreover, the imagery-content latent within verbal concepts can
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always be reelicited from right hemispheric memory. The "intuitive proof" for this is the common experience that we can always "visualize" even the most abstract concepts, if and when we are required to do so. As Gerard (1972 [1953]: 372) explains, global memory is distributed throughout the brain since it ''involves the making of an impression by an experience, the retention of some record of this impression and the re-entry of this record into consciousness (or behavior) as recall and recognition." The link between the imagination and languagei.e., between iconicity and conceptualizationis metaphor. This is the capacity to transform the iconic units and models of the deep level into surface level units by making connections among them. Metaphor, as Vico phrases it, allows the mind "to consider things in all the forms by which they may be signified" (NS: 400). Since metaphor arises from the interaction of the fantasia and the ingegno in the right hemisphere, but generates conceptual structures that involve left-hemispheric functions, the Vichian model predicts that the programming of a novel verbal metaphor will follow a right-to-left hemispheric flow. The experimental literature on metaphorical language programming indicates that this is indeed the case (Danesi 1989b). The neurological programming of metaphor will be discussed in chapter 6. The primordial metaphorical capacity was an "isness" process. It generated the surface level of cognition by converting deeplevel percepts into surface-level concepts. The metaphorical capacity could have existed in Homo sapiens (or even as far back as Homo erectus) without articulate speech. This would explain why the archeological record reveals that the first expressions of thought are visual, not vocal (e.g., Samuels and Samuels 1975: 1119). And this is why in the Vichian scenario to be sketched below I have made the imagination and metaphor the prerequisites for speech in Homo sapiens sapiens. The bits and pieces in the NS can now be put together to construct a plausible scenario. I will refer to the chronologically related stages in the scenario as "events." I will describe the four events that led to the origin of language in this chapter. Then in the next three I will assess their scientific plausibility. Event 1: The Iconicity Hypothesis Paleoneurological research has shown that the brain of Homo habilis and Homo erectus had the capacity to form images of sense impressions and of affective responses (e.g., Holloway 1974). Consciousness emerged when such neurological internalizations of bodily experience were forged into iconic signs by the imagination. The mind thus took its origin from the body: It is equally beyond our power to enter into the vast imagination of those first men, whose minds were not in the least abstract, refined, or spiritual-
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ized, because they were entirely immersed in the senses, buffeted by the passions, buried in the body. (NS: 378) As the brain's images of bodily experiences become impressed within mental space by the workings of the fantasia, the ingegno, and the memoria, they eventually sought external expression. Vico referred to this first iconic stage as "mute times." The forms that mute expression took must therefore have originally been visual and gestural: "Thus the first language in the first mute times of the nations must have begun with signs, whether gestures or physical objects, which had natural relations to the ideas to be expressed" (NS: 401). (Note that Vico used the word nation with its original meaning of a "birth"; he used it, in other words, to refer to a "common origin"). This primitive form of expression was grounded in the categories of visual perception: "all nations began to speak by writing, since all were originally mute'' (NS: 429). Vico used the term writing to refer to the first expressive attempts to represent deep-level iconic signs pictorially. The units of expression of this mute language were poetic characterswhich etymologically signified "made carvings" (from Greek poieein "to make" and charassein "to carve"). Alphabetic writing was a much later development: "and certainly poetic characters came before those of articulate sounds, that is, before alphabetic characters" (NS: 429). Inside the mind, iconic signs model a referent in some direct fashion. They can be said to present the brain's images of sense impressions and affective states in a form that the memory system can put into storage. These can then be represented outside the mind by some form of visual expressioni.e., by signs that can be seen as resembling their referents. Charles Peirce (193158, vol. 1: 365) defined iconicity as "resembling ideas together into one conception" (see also Morris 1946 and the essays in Bouissac, Herzfeld, and Posner 1986 for recent discussions of iconicity). Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between two types of iconicity: internal iconicity, which is the process that presents an imagistically modeled referent to perceptual memory for appropriate storage; external iconicity, which is the process that representsi.e., "presents again"the imagistically modeled referent outside the mind through some form of visual mimesis, so that the body's eyes can literally "see" it again. Henceforward I will use the term image schema to refer to an imagistically modeled referent (after Lakoff 1987 and Johnson 1987). This term will be defined formally in the next chapter. This first event in the phylogenesis of language occurred in the deep level of consciousness and can be traced to the activities of the sensory-perceptual system and the right hemisphere of the brainthe biological
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prerequisites for the human imagination. The presentational image schemata that the brains of Homo habilis and Homo erectus generated signaled the emergence of mind. In this new World 2 state humans developed the ability to apperceive"to see inside the mind"and to become aware of the self as an entity. Residues of the fantasia's iconic modeling of the brain's imagistic transformations of bodily experiences are to be found in all the first-order concepts that the metaphorical capacity fabricated at a later stage (event 4). This might explain why novel language metaphors are programmed neurologically as iconic units (e.g., Danesi 1989b, 1989c, 1990). Event 2: The Visual Mimesis Hypothesis I use the term visual mimesis here to refer to the external representation of iconic signs by means of imitative limbic movements. The first acts of expression and representation in Homo habilis and Homo erectus were most probably movements of the limbs to point out beings, objects, and events in their immediate environment and to convey different affective states to others. The former was accomplished by hand movements; the latter by such modalities as facial expressions and bodily postures. Gestural communication grew out of repeated mimetic limbic movements. It can be defined as an iconic form of expression that inheres in the use of the hands to represent referents in terms of their visual properties (shape, size, etc.). The first "speakers," according to Vico, were "hand signers": "Since it has been demonstrated that the first gentile nations were all mute in their beginnings, they must have expressed themselves by gestures'' (NS: 434). (The word gentile as used by Vico means "original"; it derives from Latin gens, plural gentes, "genesis" or "birth"). The development of gesture from pointing and posturing was a natural consequence of the attempts to represent thought iconically. During event 2 the body itself was being transformed into a kind of "signifying system." By the time of Homo sapiens at event 3, the movements of the limbs, especially of the hands, were recorded on rocks, cave walls, etc. by means of tools. The simulation of referents by means of the hands, holding a cutting object, to represent gestural units on some other object or place produced humanity's first tokens of visual art. The end result of this type of visual mimetic representation at event 4 is writing. This developed from a compressed form of artistic representation: i.e., as drawing movements became more and more compressed in form, they developed into pictorial "symbols" which could be used in combination to express ideas, including speech sounds. The earliest appearance of symbolic writing dates from Mesopotamia around 3,500 B.C. Known as cuneiform, it consists of signs made by pressing a wedge-shaped stylus into a slab of wet clay (see fig. 5).
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Figure 5. Examples of Cuneiform Signs (see Walker 1987: 10). Reprinted by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. Visual mimesis, therefore, was a gradual process that went from a limbic indication of the beings, objects, and events in the immediate environment at event 2 to an advanced form of symbolic iconicity at event 4. The expression of iconic thought started from simple bodily movements (e.g., pointing) and developed into complex mimetic units of representation (gesture). These same movements were eventually transferred onto objects and places by means of tools. This led to pictorial representation and ultimately to writing as a symbolic system. Event 2 ends with the appearance of pictorial representations, which announce the arrival of Homo sapiens onto the glottogenetic scene.
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Event 3: The Audio-Oral Osmosis Hypothesis The thought and expression of Homo sapiens was initially iconic. The passage from Homo sapiens to Homo sapiens sapiens (= Homo loquens, the first "speaker") occurred when the limbic movements that were employed for indexical, deictic, and gestural expression, as well as for pictorial representation, were accompanied and eventually replaced by imitative vocal ejaculations. The latter became the audio-oral analogues of internal and external iconic signs. Realizing the advantages that audio-oral representation conferred upon themsound can be heard even when the speaker is not within the line of vision and can be used to communicate while the hands do something elsethe first signers eventually came to replace iconic signs with corresponding audio-oral ones. The image schemata that allowed Homo sapiens to retain memorable experiences and to externalize them through visual mimesis were, of course, originally without sound. But the beings, objects, and events to which they referred (thunder, water, animal cries, etc.) normally implied a sound-association. So, primordial osmosis inhered in two main vocal modalitiesonomatopoeic and interjectional. Onomatopoeia involves an attempt to represent the referent by reproducing the sound or sounds it is perceived as making: "at the same time that the divine character of Jove took shapethe first thought in the gentile worldarticulate language began to develop by onomatopoeia" (NS: 447). This same process, Vico continues, is one "which we still find in children happily expressing themselves" (NS: 447). The first interjectional units, according to Vico (NS: 448), resulted from the awe and terror that the first speakers must have felt in coming to conscious grips with natural phenomena such as thunder and lightning. So, for Vico, the first words did not have a conventional meaning. They were linked naturally to their referents either by onomatopoeia or by interjectional vocalizations: The philologians have all accepted with an excess of good faith the view that in the vulgar languages meanings were fixed by convention. On the contrary, because of their natural origins, they must have had natural significations. (NS: 444) Audio-oral osmosis produced the first articulated words on the basis of sound symbolism. These were the audio-oral counterparts of the iconic units expressed by means of visual mimesis. Only a conscious mind could make the link between a sound produced in the vocal tract and a sound property of a referent it was designed to portray. This is why audio-oral osmosis follows iconicity and visual mimesis in phylogenesis. It also suggests that the first words had iconic or concrete meanings. These came to form a basic core vocabulary that organized the world in terms of sound-percept associations. Vico called this vocabulary a mental dictionary.
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Event 4: The Metaphoricity Hypothesis The end result of the previous three processes was a vocal language made up of wordsand perhaps a few words in combinationthat represented concrete referents. This language reflected a perceptually based mode of thinking. The transition from perceptual to conceptual language occurred at event 4, when the language based on iconic modeling was transformed to language based on abstract structures. Vico proposed metaphor as the process that made this transformation possible. Vico used this word to refer both to this transformational feature of the mind and to specific verbal metaphors. But the crucial type at event 4 was the purely mental process resulting from the interaction of the fantasia and the ingegno. The characteristics of Vichian metaphor are as follows (S. R. Levin 1988: 10630 puts forward a similar assessment): It produced (and continues to produce) language-specific metaphors and other tropes which underlie our conceptual models of the world. It is a process by which the percepts already present in the deep level of consciousnesswhich are encoded in an iconic way first and then by means of audio-oral osmosisare paired by association and combined into first-order concepts. This primary function of metaphor was located in the deep level of consciousness. But as metaphor generated concepts with increasing regularity, it eventually generated a new level of mindthe surface levelwhere concepts formed a new kind of cognitive space. Metaphor then started to work within this new space to form second-order concepts out of first-order ones. This layering of concept on top of concept ultimately produced abstractions and ideational models. At this point the genesis of propositional abstract language was complete. The rational minda mind capable of organizing, planning, and categorizing independently of immediate experiencecame into existence. Language then developed a complex syntactic structure, a literal semantic base (i.e., a meaning system abstracted from a previous metaphorical stage), and a grammar. The metaphorical capacity is the source of the verbal tropesmetaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. These are defined phylogenetically by Vico as follows: Metaphor. "It gives sense and passion to insensate things, in accordance with the metaphysics above discussed, by which the first poets attributed to bodies the being of animate substances, with capacities measured by
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their own, namely sense and passion, and in this way made fables of them" (NS: 404). Metonymy. "The first poets had to give names to things from the most particular and the most sensible ideas. Such ideas are the sources of synecdoche and metonymy. Metonymy of agent for act resulted from the fact that names for agents were commoner than names for acts. Metonymy of subject for form and accident was due to the inability to abstract forms and qualities from subjects. Certainly metonymy of cause for effect produced in each case a little fable, in which the cause was imagined as a woman clothed with her effects: ugly Poverty, sad Old Age, pale Death" (NS: 406). Synecdoche. "Particulars were elevated to universals or parts united with the other parts together with which they make up their wholes. . . . The use of 'head' for man or person, so frequent in vulgar Latin, was due to the fact that in the forests only the head of a man could be seen from a distance" (NS: 407). Irony. "Irony certainly could not have begun until the period of reflection, because it is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth" (NS: 408). The choice of these four tropes as the main types of verbal figuration was a practice that Vico inherited from the Renaissance. The practice today is to follow Roman Jakobson's (1956) suggestion that irony be considered a separate kind of phenomenon and synecdoche a subclass of metonymy in the same way that simile is a subclass of metaphor (see Dane 1991 for a recent discussion of Vico's concept of irony). This leaves metaphor and metonymy as the two master tropes. As Anttila and Embleton (1989), among others, have suggested, it is best to think of metaphor as a process working to create similarity, while metonymy as one based on contiguity. Metonymy is therefore a kind of "elliptic metaphor." For this reason it is now the practice in psychology not to make any distinction between metaphor and metonymy, but to consider metonymy as a specific kind of metaphor. This is the practice adopted in the present discussion. Verbal tropes, including metaphor, emanate from the metaphorical capacity. They are conceptualized models of thought. To avoid potential ambiguities, I will henceforward adopt the following two practices: So as not to confuse "metaphor-as-mental-capacity" with "metaphor-as-trope," I will write the former with an upper case initial letter (Metaphor), and the latter with a lower-case one (metaphor). I will use this practice even when quoting from the NS. I will use lower-case letters to represent deep-level iconic signs or percepts (a, b, c, . . .) and upper-case ones to represent surface-level concepts (A, B, C, . . .)
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Metonymy can now be defined as the result of Metaphor associating some perceptual attribute (a) of a concept (A) to the concept as a whole (a is A). It can also result when a concept like "poverty" (A) is related to another concept like "ugly" (B) by implication (A implies B): e.g., "ugly poverty." Synecdoche also results when a property like "head" (a) of some concept like ''man" (A) are paired (a is A). Verbal metaphor can result from establishing a direct relation between two percepts (a is b), between a percept and a concept (a is B/A is b), or between two concepts (A is B): e.g., "head for top or beginning; the brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes of needles and potatoes; mouth for any opening; the lip of a cup or pitcher" (NS: 405). Finally, irony combines a concept (A) with its opposite (-A) by implication (A implicates -A). These four types are clearly the results of Metaphor as it seeks to connect different perceptual and conceptual domains, creating new dimensions or layers of meaning in the process. To summarize, tropic concepts are forged originally by Metaphor. And indeed the semantic layers of all concepts, no matter how abstract, can be peeled away to reveal a metaphorical base. The plausibility of the metaphoricity hypothesis rests therefore on showing that concepts, including abstract words, were formed originally by Metaphor. From all this it follows that all the tropes (and they are reducible to the four types above discussed, which have hitherto been considered ingenious inventions of writers) were necessary modes of expression of all the first poetic nations, and had originally their full native propriety. But these expressions of the first nations later became figurative when, with the further development of the human mind, words were invented which signified abstract forms or genera comprising their species or relating parts with their wholes. (NS: 409) Metaphor is characterized by Vico as "poetic speech," since it operates on "poetic characters" (NS: 413): i.e., it is the mental capacity linking audio-oral osmosis to visual mimesis. As Diamond (1959: 166) has perceptively pointed out, the words we use today are, upon closer analysis, remnants of Metaphor which "are forever repeating themselves, moving, as it were, along the channels of the mind cut in the distant past." In Vico's words "poetic style arose before prose style" (NS: 460). Literal meaning arose when "the peoples went on to form prose speech by contracting into a single word, as into a genus, the parts which poetic speech had associated" (NS: 460). It is important to emphasize that Vico used the word poet with its original meaning. Its etymology is explained by Thomas (1969: 18) as follows: Etymologically, the word "poet" comes from a Greek word that means "maker." As this fact suggests, the Greeks considered poets to be the makers of language and of thought. Recently, Haskell (1987a) has argued that the Vichian metaphoricity hypothesis implies three corollaries. First, Metaphor resides at a primitive,
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poetic level of mind, which in this book has been called the deep level of consciousness. Second, this deep level is "forgotten" and therefore not easily accessible to the rational mind. Third, Metaphor can only be studied from an evolutionary perspective. In a more recent study, Haskell (1989: 250) points out that Vichian Metaphor is a cognitive function that "progressively develops intelligible knowledge or, in modern terms, clear and literal concepts." In assessing the Vichian concept of Metaphor, Levin (1988: 130) gives a good account of how the primordial function of this capacity differs from the more conventional function it has in modern speech: Where the first poet, on hearing thunder, would look at the sky and say, "Jove is angry" and conceive of the sky as an animated being, we, on reading the sentence "The sky is angry," will conceive of a world in which the sky may be angry. The attribution of divinity apart, there is a profound difference between the two responses. The first poet simply projected what he knew further into the world in which he lived; he believed that Jove was a part of that world. But in order for us from our metaphysical vantage point to conceive of the sky as angry, we have to transcend our world. For us, therefore, the status of the expression is not a mere (cognitive) catachresis; it evokes an act of construal, an act in which the state of affairs described by the expression is conceived of as a possibility. The locus of such "possibilities" is a metaphoric world. After the Primal Scene The four events described above led eventually to the development of rational thought, literal semantics, and grammar. Glottogenetically, this form of thought and language is a point of arrival. Iconic thinking, visual mimesis, and audio-oral osmosis constitute the point of departure. Metaphor is the evolutionary link between these two points. It generated surface rational thought and language. The essence of mind for Vico is Metaphora notion that some linguists and psychologists are starting to take rather seriously in order to develop a comprehensive theory of language (e.g., Anttila 1977; Klein 1987; Skousen 1989). Language as we know it today is a product of Metaphor. The glottogenetic process started first through the eye when the brain's images of sense impressions and affective states were transformed by the imagination into iconic signs (event 1). These then came to be expressed in a visually mimetic way (event 2). The limbic movements required both to indicate and to draw shapes led to a highly sophisticated form of pictorial representation and ultimately to the development of writing (event 4 and beyond). As their iconically shaped consciousness allowed protohumans to reflect on the sounds made in the vocal tract to imitate or react to environmental events, vocal language, language through the ear and mouth, emerged to replace mimetic units with osmotic ones.
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Language was thus transferred from the visual channel to the audio-oral one to become speech (event 3). Finally, percept-based speech consciousness was transformed into a concept-based cognition by the workings of Metaphor (event 4). The workings of this epiphenomenal product of the fantasia and the ingegno transformed Homo sapiens into Homo loquens. The question now becomes: How did language develop syntax and grammar? Although Vico's purposeand that of this bookis to reconstruct the primal scene, it is interesting to ponder briefly how syntax could have developed from the workings of the ingegno at the surface level of mind. The Development of Language after the Primal Scene As Metaphor was transforming percepts into first-order concepts it was simultaneously generating the surface level of cognition. It subsequently became an agent within this new level converting first-order concepts into second-order ones. To illustrate the difference between the workings of Metaphor in the deep and surface levels consider the following sequence of events, which portray the development of the concept idea in a purely hypothetical way, but in accordance with the glottogenetic theory outlined in this chapter: Event 1: Iconicity. Let us assume that a member of a Homo habilis or Homo erectus group becomes aware of some natural phenomenon like lightning. The awareness of this event is encoded by the emerging deep level of mind as an internal iconic sign. Event 2: Visual Mimesis. Shortly thereafter, or perhaps at the same time, the first individual wants a second individual to notice the phenomenon of lightning. The first individual might point to an eye to indicate to the other individual to take note (literally "to take eye") of the phenomenon. This "eye-pointing" sign for "look" is noticed, imitated, and eventually adopted, by other members of the group for future usei.e., to get others to look at various things in the environment. Event 3: Audio-Oral Osmosis. Let us now assume that an early Homo sapiens culturewhose members have developed a vocal tract capable of speechhas somehow learned the iconic "eye-sign" of their ancestors. An individual of this culture now ejaculates a sound in concomitance with the "eye-sign." This sound might have resulted from pain (touching the eye too vigorously), from osmosis with a sound analogue, or from mere happenstance. Let us assume the sound to have been something like Ahi! Through osmosis the other members of the group picked up this audio-oral analogue for the "eye-sign" and came to use it in its place. Event 4: Metaphoricity. The iconic "eye-sign" might also have been represented pictographically by some Homo sapiens individual on a rock or on
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some other object as an "eye." Later on, some other individual might have decided to stylize the eye figure into an upright and flattened pictogram I. At event 4, the "eye-sign," its audio-oral counterpart, Ahi!, and its pictorial representation could have come to be associated with other perceptual models, say dee "activity," and in ''in." Metaphor then entered this hypothetical evolutionary scenario to connect these percepts to produce a new word and, in effect, to generate a conceptideein "to see in." Beyond Event 4: Conceptualization. I must reemphasize the fact that the sequence of events narrated so far is totally fictional. No one has any record of how the word ideein was forged. But it is certainly a plausible sequence of events, according to the Vichian glottogenetic scenario sketched in this chapter. I have intentionally chosen to reconstruct this word because it is the ancient Greek word for "to see" and the basis for the modern word and concept idea. After event 4, we have enough etymological and philological knowledge to reconstruct the development of this concept: through Metaphor "seeing externally" has come to be associated with "seeing internally"; hence the concept idea. At the surface level of mind Metaphor continues to connect concepts with percepts and other concepts to produce second-order concepts. These lead to conceptual models which are created within specific cultural contexts. The work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) has illustrated how conceptual models work: Ideas are Plants. This is an example of concept-formation forged by connecting a concept, ideas, to observable plant activities ("Her ideas have come to fruition"; "Ideas do not grow on trees"; "Most of their ideas are fertile"; etc.). Ideas are Geometrical Figures. This is an example of concept-formation by which a concept, ideas, is metaphorized in terms of another conceptual domain, geometrical figures (Danesi 1979) ("Those ideas are diametrically opposite"; "Your ideas are parallel to mine"; "I do not see the point of your idea"; etc.). Phylogenetically, as such concept-formation processes became more and more intricate (e.g., [A is B] is [a is D]), syntax emerged to stabilize the increasingly productive conceptual system. Syntax is a product of the ingegno's capacity to create novel structures for combining the products of the mind. The creation of such combinatorial structures led to the systematization of concepts that linguists call grammar. The emergence of grammar coincided with the development of alphabetic writing. The word "grammar," in fact, derives from the ancient Greek word for "letter of the alphabet," gramma. The categories and symbols of grammar and the alphabet are highly arbitrary, free from sensory control. As Roy Wagner
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(1986) has recently put it, at the surface level of cognition symbols are not tied to the contexts of their referents and can therefore "stand for themselves." So, at a late stage of mental evolution the surface mind's conceptual domains came to be configured by implication (If A . . . , then B . . .), by conjunction (A and B), and by other syntactic devices. These grammatical configurations have come to constitute a framework for cognitive activity which now guides the mind's efforts to plan actions, to solve problems, to analyze, to reorganize reality. When Noam Chomsky published his ground-breaking study on syntax in 1957, Syntactic Structures, he provided us with a simple, yet insightful, description of how the rational syntactic mind might work. Since then the claim has been made by Chomskyan linguists that the essence of language and mind is syntax. But as will be discussed again in the final chapter, they have really only scratched the surface level of language. There is no "universal grammar" in the human species; there is only the mind's capacity to organize metaphorically forged concepts into cognitive structures. The Vichian notion that the imagination started the process that led to the construction of the syntactic edifice of language seems to me to be a much more plausible account of how language and mind interact. Even the rational mind, as Vico warned us, still has to resort to Metaphor when it lacks the concepts and categories it might need to do its work. If what has just been described is plausible, it would mean that syntax is traceable, ultimately, to the ingegno's ability to juxtapose image schemata that relate to time and space constraints in the representation of beings, objects, and events. This view of syntax has, in fact, been proposed recently by Ronald Langacker (e.g., 1987, 1990). Langacker (1987: 39) describes the syntactic relation of He sent a letter to Susan and He sent Susan a letter in the following way: Because [the first one] employs the preposition to, it emphasizes the path traversed by the letter with Susan as goal. By contrast, [the second one] emphasizes the resulting state in which Susan possesses the letter; I will assume that this possessive relationship is symbolized by the juxtaposition and linear order of Susan and a letter . . . The differences in grammatical structure therefore highlight one facet of the conceived situation at the expense of another; I will say that the two sentences present the scene through different images. Indirect evidence in support of this theory of the evolution of syntax can be extrapolated from developmental psycholinguistics. Children invariably develop one-word concepts firstknown as holophrasesand syntactic structures and propositional thought much later. This sequence is tied to a neuropsychological timetable which can be seen to follow in parallel the sequence of four events that the glottogenetic scenario described in this chapter posits. Children must reenact the four phylogenetic events, so to
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speak, before they develop syntax. Children are not born with syntax and grammar, nor will they develop it if they skip any of these events, as the case of the wild child Genie has made saliently obvious (Curtiss 1977). The Development of Culture The emergence of the surface level of cognition made it possible for modern culture to develop. Culture can be defined as an agreement to live together on the basis of communal "sense-making." This implies that a modern social institution or behavioral pattern is traceable to some surface-level concept that has become generalized by consensus of the group. The essence of culture inheres in making verbal agreements about how group members should interact. Vico points out that all cultures have such agreements for burial, religion, and marriage rites. When these agreements are written down in a highly evolved culture, they become the laws of the culturea word originally meaning "something that can be read." Together with conventionalized modes of behavior, these written verbal contracts provide the guidelines for the social activities of the culture. They are obvious products of the rational intellect. The Vichian theory of culture stands in opposition to pragmo-communicative glottogenetic theories and especially to the sociobiological perspective. It posits that culture is a product of the mind and that cultural differences are traceable to mental categories. For Vico language did not emerge as a result of some cultural need or of a gene-culture interaction. There would not have been a culture in the first place without cognition and language. Like thought and language, culture evolved according to three "ages." During the "Age of the Gods," Metaphor and myth allowed humans to lay the foundations of culture. The institutions of primitive cultures were therefore metaphorical and mythical. Lévi-Strauss's (1963) contention that a primitive culture reflects the structure of its language is a modern version of this Vichian principle. As the mind developed more symbolic structures, cultures too fashioned their institutions in more symbolic ways. During this stage of cultural evolutionthe "Age of Heroes"particular individuals (heroes) emerge typically to provide models of leadership, inspiration, and guidance for the culture. Myths come to be replaced by legends of heroes past and present. Finally, with the emergence of the rational mind, cultures become increasingly more tied to the categories of the rational intellect. In the "Age of Humans'' legends are replaced by rational histories. The sequence myth-legend-history seems to characterize human cultural evolution rather nicely. Table 3 summarizes the Vichian theory of cultural evolution in terms of the type of speech, narrative, level of mind, type of mentality, and role played by Metaphor during each age. Vico characterizes the kinds of language and writing that belonged to each age as follows: during the Age of the Gods hieroglyphic language
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Vichian Age of the Age of Age of Humans Age Gods Heroes Type of concrete, emergence prose dominates, Speech metaphorical of prose symbolism Narrativesmyths legends rational histories Mind iconic (deep surface cognitive surface level) level is level dominates forming Mentality concrete concept- abstract formation Metaphor transforms generates aids the rational percepts concepts intellect in new concept-formation Table 3. The Vichian Ages. dominates; during the Age of Heroes symbolic language prevails; and during the Age of Humans epistolary or vulgar language rules (NS: 173). Each one of these results from the particular kind of mentality that typifies each age. And each type of mentality produces corresponding cultural institutions and structures: "The order of ideas must follow the order of institutions" (NS: 238). Since Vico traces the creative spark that led to the evolution of mind, language, and culture to what he calls the "poetic imagination," it is fitting to conclude this chapter with a description of this imagination by one of the greatest literary critics of all time whose ideas were profoundly shaped by VicoNorthrop Frye (1990: xxiixxiii): The poetic imagination constructs a cosmos of its own, a cosmos to be studied not simply as a map but as a world of powerful conflicting forces. The imaginative cosmos is neither the objective environment studied by natural science nor a subjective inner space to be studied by psychology. It is an intermediate world in which the images of higher and lower, the categories of beauty and ugliness, the feelings of love and hatred, the associations of sense experience, can be expressed only by metaphor and yet cannot be either dismissed or reduced to projections of something else. Ordinary con-
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sciousness is so possessed by either-or contrasts of subject and object that it finds difficulty in taking in the notion of an order of words that is neither subjective nor objective, though it interpenetrates with both. But its presence gives a very different appearance to many elements of human life, including religion, which depend on metaphor but do not become less "real" or "true" by doing so.
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Four The Dawn of Language: The Iconicity and Visual Mimesis Hypotheses The brain's ability to manufacture mental images was originally more important than its ability to produce language. Fincher 1976: 75 The Vichian scenario holds a strong intuitive appeal. But is it a plausible one? After all, language does not leave fossil records. So, in this, and in the next two chapters, my plan is to put the scenario described in the previous chapter against the template of scientific research. Each chapter will assess a different part of the scenario. The present one will look at the plausibility of the iconicity and visual mimesis hypotheses (events 1 and 2). Chapter 5 will examine the transition from visual mimesis to audiooral osmosis (event 3). And chapter 6 will assess the metaphoricity hypothesis (event 4)the crucial part of the Vichian scenario. Any literature-search procedure is bound to be somewhat influenced by the particular objectives of the searcher. I must admit to the reader that I too started my search of the relevant literature with a "selective eye." My original intention was, frankly, to locate only corroborative evidence for the scenario sketched in the previous chapter. However, the more I probed the relevant literature, the more information I came across that supported some specific part of the Vichian scenario. As a matter of fact, outside of genetic theories of language and computational analyses of the mind, I could find nothing but data and information that I could use in some way to support it. I have already discussed genetic theory and computationism previously. They are persuasive alternatives that cannot be easily dismissed. So I have taken them out of my "literature-search pool," in order to discuss them separately in the final chapter of this book. What remains
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in the "pool" constitutes a body of evidence that is very supportive of the Vichian scenario. The Nature of Iconicity In the Vichian deep level of mind, consciousness emerged when the imagination converted the images produced by the brain into iconic signs (internal iconicity). The expression, or external representation, of these signs occurred first in the form of mimetic limbic movements and then in the form of pictorial representation (external iconicity). I will now look more closely at the nature of internal iconicity. Then I will suggest how it came to be expressed by means of indexical signing and gesture. Iconic Thinking Internal iconicity is a state of mind that results from the formation of percepts in the deep level. It can be characterized as a kind of "internal seeing." We commonly say that we see ideas, that we have points of view; that we have insight, etc. Such figurative expressions allude to internal iconicity as a sort of "inner eye" of the mind. Phylogenetically, this mental state led the human organism to become aware of its own existence, to differentiate itself from other beings, to locate itself in relation to external objects. Dreams became meaningful, because they could be recalled during waking hours with the help of the "mind's eye." The dream state unfolds in terms of iconically presented episodes arranged into a narrative sequence by the ingegno. The first form of consciousness, as Samuels and Samuels (1975: 11) aptly point out, was ''visual": Primitive, precivilized man in every part of the world lived in integral connection with his environment. He saw and interacted with spirits and gods in every animal, tree, stone, and cloud. Every event and natural force was animated with primitive man's inner vision. His basic consciousness was visual. He thought, felt, lived visually. Often little distinction was made between sleeping and waking activities, between visions and perceptions. Dreams and fantasies were valued more than thought. In this period of union, man lived in nature. Primitive man did not need to be made aware of visualization; it was the way in which he related to the world. The main components of iconic thinking, from a phylogenetic standpoint, can be outlined as follows: Iconic thinking is the primal form of mentality, introducing, or presenting, image schemata within the deep level of mind. Image schemata (iconic signs) are produced by the fantasia's transformation of brain-generated images of sense impressions and affective states.
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Iconic thinking is the source of apperception (conscious perception) and consciousness of self. Even congenitally blind people possess internal iconicity. Iconic thinking underlies the narrative structure of dreams. This structure is fabricated by the ingegno and is derived from life experiences. Iconic thinking seeks expression through some form of bodily or pictorial representation (external iconicity). Primordial iconic thinking created a mind-space that bestowed upon human beings the capacity to intentionally transcend their biologically programmed instincts and reflex actions. The ability to summon up memorable images and models of life experiences, to reflect upon them, and to evaluate them, allowed humans to direct and plan their bodily activities deliberately. Through iconic thinking, intentionality came to be the essence of humanness. The word intention derives from Latin intendere "to stretch," defining intentionality as a kind of "stretching" of the mind to see into the future. The feelings and sense impressions that these primitive humans were able to convert into iconic signs and to reuse for planning bodily actions and for recreating the external world within the mind must have filled them with awe and terror, as Vico points out throughout the NS. Julian Jaynes (1976) similarly remarks that early humans must have thought that they saw and heard "gods" all the time. That iconic thinking precedes verbal or conceptual thinking is implicit in a large portion of the research in developmental psychology. Vygotsky (1962), for instance, has documented an "inner speech" stage in early childhood that is highly suggestive of an iconic form of consciousness. It is only after the child has acquired language that "verbal thought" overlaps with this more fundamental mode of thinking, becoming indistinguishable from it. The biological feature that made iconic thinking possible was the emergence of what Jaynes (1976) calls the "bicameral" mind. In modern humans, the brain is structured to carry out a symmetrical "division of labor." Its two hemispheres work cooperatively to produce mental functions. The left hemisphere (LH) is responsible for rational analytical thinking, speech, and selfawareness. The right one (RH) balances these functions. It is responsible for intuitive synthetic thinking, imagery, and emotional states. The claim that iconic thinking was the original form of consciousness would posit that the RH once controlled most of human mentality and that the left hemispheric functions emerged to assume more of the cognitive load as the mind became more and more capable of abstraction. It is therefore instructive at this point to take a rapid look at neuroscience and at the notions it makes available to the glottogeneticist. In 1861 the French anthropologist and surgeon Paul Broca published his classic study of a patient who had lost the ability to articulate words during
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his lifetime, even though he had not suffered any paralysis of his speech organs. Noticing a destructive lesion in the left frontal lobe of the left hemisphere at the autopsy of this patient, Broca was thus able to present concrete evidence to link the articulation of speech to a specific cerebral sitewhich shortly thereafter came to bear his name (see fig. 6). This discovery established neuropsychology ipso facto as a field of inquiry by making a direct connection between a psychological function and a specific area of the brain. Broca was also responsible for suggesting that there existed an asymmetry between the brain and the body by pointing out that right-handed persons were more likely to have language located in the LH. Since 1861 the accumulated research in neuropsychology has confirmed both that functions originate in the neural substrate of one or the other of the two hemispheres and that the motor control system and sensory pathways between the brain and the body are crossedi.e., that they are controlled by the contralateral (opposite-side) hemisphere (e.g., Geschwind 1979). In 1874 the work of the German neurologist Carl Wernicke brought to the attention of the medical community further evidence linking the LH with language. Wernicke documented cases in which damage to another area of the LHwhich came to bear his name (see fig. 6)consistently produced a recognizable pattern of impairment to the faculty of speech comprehension. Then in 1892 Jules Déjerine showed that problems in reading and writing resulted primarily from damage to the LH alone. So, by the end of the nineteenth century the research evidence that was accumulating provided an empirical base to the emerging consensus in neuroscience that the LH was the biological locus for language. Unfortunately, it also contributed to the unfounded idea that the RH was without special functions and subject to the control of the so-called dominant LH. Right after Wernicke's observations, the notion of cerebral dominance, or the idea that the LH is the dominant one in the higher forms of cognition, came to be widely held in neuroscience. Although the origin of this term is obscure, it grew no doubt out of the research connecting language to the LH and out of the conceptual link that has always existed in Western culture between language and the higher mental functions. As Springer and Deutsch (1985: 13) aptly note, it nicely captured "the idea of half a brain directing behavior." The RH, in contrast, came to be designated as the "weak" or "minor" hemisphere. The nineteenthcentury neuroscientists could not possibly have predicted the consequences of this infelicitous choice of terms for both education and science. As Roger Sperry (1973: 209) remarked two decades ago, it took the research in neuroscience most of the first half of this century to dispel the notion that only the verbal part of the brain was crucial for the higher forms of cognition, and to establish the fact that the brain is structured anatomically and physiologically in such a way as to provide for "two modes of thinking, verbal and
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Figure 6. Major Neural Speech Areas nonverbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres respectively." Actually, the nineteenth-century British neurologist John Hughlings Jackson (1874, 1878)paradoxically one of the authors of the dominance notionwas already casting doubts on the extreme view inherent in strict localization and dominance theory by pointing out that patients suffering from Broca's aphasia were nonetheless able to carry out basic communicative interactions, and by suggesting that nonverbal perception might be located in the RH. The second landmark event in the history of neuroscience came a century after Broca's ground-breaking 1861 discovery. In 1967 Eric Lenneberg put forward his now classic "optimal age" hypothesis. On the basis of a large body of clinical studies, Lenneberg noticed that most aphasiasthe partial or total loss of speech due to a disorder in any one of the brain's language centersbecame permanent after the age of puberty. This suggested to Lenneberg that the brain lost its capacity to transfer the language functions from the LH to the nonverbal RH after puberty, which it was able to do, to varying degrees, during childhood. Lenneberg concluded that there must be a biologically fixed timetable for the lateralization of the
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language functions to the verbal LH and, consequently, that the critical period for the acquisition of language was before adolescence. Although his time frame has been disputede.g., on the basis of the same clinical evidence, Krashen (1973, 1975) inferred that the period of lateralization was completed by around five or sixLenneberg's hypothesis that there is a fixed time period, a "critical period," during which the brain organizes its division of labor has not been seriously contested. According to Jaynes (1976), in prehistoric times the brain was bicameral, not bilateral. The LH was not the so-called dominant one that it is in the modern brain. In these early times the mind thought iconically, not verbally. So, it was up to the RH to plan, to concentrate for long periods, and to solve problems creatively. It was hardly a "weak" or "minor" contributor to the human mind. The collapse of bicamerality led to the modern brain's complementary bilaterality. At that point, Jaynes maintains, humans developed rational thought and modern culture (see Eccles 1989 for a recent discussion of brain evolution). The "discovery" of the RH by neuroscience came about during the 1950s and the 1960s as a result of the experiments with socalled split-brain subjects. The neuropsychological studies conducted by Roger Sperry and his associates (e.g., Myers and Sperry 1958; Gazzaniga, Bogen and Sperry 1963; Gazzaniga and Sperry 1967; Sperry 1973; Sperry, Gazzaniga and Bogen 1969; Levy, Trevarthen and Sperry 1972) on epilepsy patients who had had their two hemispheres separated by surgical section of the corpus callosumthe cable of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheresshowed rather conclusively that both hemispheres, not just a dominant one, were needed in a neurologically cooperative way to produce complex thinking. In other words, the split-brain research established the fact that the cerebral hemispheres worked in tandem in processing incoming stimuli. In hindsight, it seems astounding that it took a century after Broca's clinical observations to reach the intuitively obvious conclusion that the two hemispheres worked as a unit to generate complex thinking. Sperry's work changed the course and nature of neuroscience in a permanent way (Trevarthen 1990 contains studies that both assess and pay homage to Sperry's work). By the 1960s, the split-brain research provided neuroscience with a breakdown of the main psychological functions according to hemisphere (e.g., Bogen 1975). By the 1970s even the idea that the LH alone was responsible for language was starting to come under scrutiny. Neurolinguists were beginning to entertain the possibility that even if specific language functions were concentrated in the LH, the possibility existed that some of the functions related to discourse were controlled by the RH. In such an "interhemispheric" model, language is considered to have a "double modality." Its form and motor functions are programmed in specific centers of the LH; but its content and espressivity are controlled by the synthetic
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functions of the RH (see Albert and Obler 1978; and more recently Joanette, Goulet, and Hannequin 1990). In sum, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the RH is an equal partner of the LH in all aspects of neurofunctional organization. It is an "iconic" hemisphere that comprehends, produces, and stores percepts and images. The iconicity hypothesis claims that it must have played a much more crucial role in the formation of mind (see also Armstrong and Katz 1983 on this point). In a recent study, Jerison (1988: 4) explains how the brain's imaging capacity might have produced humanity's first iconic models, or "maps" as he calls them, of the world: Adaptations for mapping the external world are brain functions that are easy to think about neurologically. They are extensions of those functions that convert sensory signals into nerve impulses, patterns of nerve impulses, and eventually into what we conventionally call visual fields, auditory signals, body images, and so on. This neural activity eventually sums up to a map or set of maps that is a picture of the external world. Indexicality and Gesture: The Origin of Visual Mimesis While internal iconicity exists in mind-space, external iconicity inheres in the expression of iconic thinking by means of representational forms and modalities. Visual mimesis is the term I have been using in this book to designate the process by which external iconicity is expressed. This process unfolds through a mimetic (imitative) movement of the limbs, especially the hands, in order to represent some referent. Visual mimesis generated the first "iconic languages"indexical, deictic, gestural, and pictorial. The ability to use the handsthe dominant limbs in the human species, given their physiological structure for grasping and pointingwas made possible by the fact that the first hominids walked upright. The liberation of the hands from the requirements of locomotion allowed Homo habilis to make tools and Homo erectus to use fire deliberately. But both used their hands more importantly for signing. The first "speakers" were really "hand signers." I will now discuss indexical, deictic, gestural, and pictorial signing, respectively. Indexicality is the use of the hands to point out some being, object, or event in the immediate environment (Sebeok 1990b). The word derives from the Latin index "forefinger," emphasizing the fact that the index is the finger that can be easily extended and used to point. Pointing with the index finger is the most rudimentary form of signing and may well have been the first act of external iconicity. The combination of seeing and pointing produced the first indexical signs. But these primitive acts of manual designation could not have occurred without a preexistent iconic mind: i.e., without a mind that had the capacity to encode referents as image schemata. Here's how an indexical sign might have arisen:
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The mind's "internal eye" must have first relayed to the ocular system information about some external referent that it had previously encoded as an image schema. This iconically coded information was then transmitted from the brain down the appropriate motor pathway to initiate a pointing action in the index finger. The end result was an indication of either the object's existence or of its location. This might seem like a relatively straightforward event today. But in the world of Homo habilis and Homo erectus it was a truly remarkable psychomotor feat resulting from the coordinated effort of a conscious mind and the nervous system. The capacity to point out and locate beings, objects, and events in the immediate environment, and to convey their existence and location to others, conferred upon our earliest ancestors a new and powerful control over their environment and over their own lives. An indexical sign, as Morris (1938: 24) aptly defines it, "designates what it directs attention to." The first utilization of indexical signing was to establish the existence or location of some referent. Indexical signs served as direct links between the body and specific referents through the use of the index finger. As mental processes became more complex, so did visual mimesis. Hand movements became more and more imitative of the physical properties (shape, size, location, etc.) of the referents they brought to awareness. Deixis must have therefore become an early option of the developing mimetic system of representation. Deixis represents location by situating the self in relation to the beings, objects, and events present in the environment (Jarvella and Klein 1982; Auer 1988). It is a much more sophisticated type of external iconicity: indexicality indicates; deixis relates. This new language of the body was reflective of an increasing complexity of mind. It led directly to the first true form of representation and communicationgesture. It was Darwin (1872) who established the phylogenetic significance of gesture as a complex mode of communication expressing a broad range of iconic thoughts, from touching movements to affect displays. As Stross (1976: 56) observes, the fact that gesture has survived as a subsystem within the human communication system is suggestive that it "must at one time have carried a greater share of the communicative load in hominid societies." Gesture allowed the first signers to go beyond the indication of beings, objects, and events in the immediate environment to represent internal states and intentions: e.g., clenching could have conveyed anger; the opening of the hand could have communicated prohibition; and so on (Bouissac 1973; Ekman 1976, 1980). As already mentioned, Vico did not draw parallels between the phylogenesis of language and animal communication. But a discussion of ges-
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ture cannot exclude some mention of the current experiments with animal gesture languages, especially since some glottogeneticists see the development of signing abilities in apes and chimpanzees as a useful point of departure for the reconstruction of prehistoric signing. The study of animal communication traces its roots to Darwinian evolutionary biology (1859 [1900]), and especially to Darwin's contention (1872) that animal behavior constituted a viable analogue for human mental functioning. So, by the end of the nineteenth century, Darwin-inspired work led to the establishment of comparative psychology (e.g., Morgan 1895; Thorndike 1898). Early animal experiments led to the theory of classical conditioning in humans. Ivan Pavlov (1902), for instance, rang a bell while he presented meat to a dog. The meat stimulus, not the ringing of the bell, evoked an instinctive salivation response in the dog. However, after repeated bell ringings, Pavlov found that the bell alone would evoke salivation. The dog had obviously learned to associate the sound of the bell with the presence of meat. It was then claimed that humans learned in a similar way. Robert Yerkes (1916) succeeded in showing that monkeys and apes had the capacity to transfer their conditioned responses to novel tasks. And in 1925 Wolfgang Köhler showed that apes could achieve spontaneous solutions to problems without previous training. The goal of early comparative psychology was to generalize the findings from the animal experiments to human learning. The assumption was that the same laws of learning applied across all species and therefore that universal principles of learning and problem-solving could be deduced from animal behavior. Some glottogenetic theorists work under this same assumption. However, already before mid-century, the use of animals as convenient substitutes for people in the laboratory came under attack. The ethological movement stressed that animals and people lived in separate worlds and that animals should be studied within their natural habitats. The work of Lorenz (e.g., 1952), Thorpe (e.g., 1961), Tinbergen (e.g., 1963), and Frisch (e.g., 1967) came forward to establish the basic research categories for studying animal behavior in its own right. Linguists came to regard the study of animal communication as particularly relevant to their own field of inquiry during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1960 Charles Hockett proposed a series of points of contact between animal and human communication which he claimed would be useful for understanding glottogenesis. The widely popularized animal language experiments of the Gardners (e.g., 1969), Premack (1976), Rumbaugh (1977), Patterson (1978), and Terrace (1979) were based on the proposition that interspecies communication was a realizable goal (Linden 1986). Although there have been reports of some symbolic activity (e.g., Savage-Rumbaugh, Rumbaugh, and Boysen 1978), of some comprehension of humor (Patterson and Linden 1981), and of some control of sentence structure (Gardner and Gardner 1975), the animal experiments have not established the gestural languages of higher primates as potential precursors of vocal lan-
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guage. It is perhaps more appropriate to say that ape gesturing is analogous to the gestural language of the early hominids in several respects, but that it does not have the same structure and origin (Reynolds 1983). The opinions of Sebeok (e.g., 1990a) are particularly germane to the whole issue of interspecies communication. Taking inspiration from the work of the biologist Jacob von Uexküll (1909), Sebeok suggests that every organism has different inward models and outward experiences. The key to understanding this duality is in the anatomical structure of the organism itself. Animals with widely divergent anatomies do not live in the same kind of reality. There exists, therefore, no common world of objects shared by humans and animals equally. When we study animal behavior with our own rational minds we are dissecting it in terms of our own anthropomorphic categories. What we are really describing are these categories. The form of representation that developed out of gesture is pictorial representation. The first inscriptions, cave drawings, and other kinds of pictographic signs were the end result of the use of the hands to represent deep-level iconic thought. Pictorial representation is the most abstract form of external iconic expression. The imitative hand movements used to portray shapes, for instance, were transferred to a cave wall or to an object by means of some sharp cutting tool. These portrayals constitute humanity's first genuine works of art. The earliest of these works go back some thirty thousand years. Pictorial representation signaled the transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, who was at first primarily a signerbut a highly abstract one. The art works of Homo sapiens took two main forms: the vivid carvings of animals which cover the roofs and walls of caves, such as those at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain; and the small sculptures and relief carvings of animals and female figures found in caves throughout Europe. As the hand movements used to make such works of art became more abbreviated, the figures made by Homo sapiens became more condensed and abstract. This led to the invention of writing. The earliest form of writing, as Brown (1986: 44748) points out, was vastly different from the alphabetic or syllabic writing that came to be based on vocal language: It is usual to think of early writing itself as an independent invention of language, because the modern writing systems we know are almost all secondary to speech, and so necessarily came later than the spoken language. No alphabetic or syllabic writing system can be thought of as an instance of the invention of language. However, the earliest writing systems were all independent of speech and were not alphabetic or syllabic in character but were all pictorial or representational in character. A fascinating study by Schmandt-Besserat (1978) has, in fact, shown that the origins of alphabetic writing lie in a previous iconic medium of representation. Schmandt-Besserat has traced the earliest precursor of modern writing systems to the symbols found on clay tokens discovered
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in western Asia that belong to the Neolithic era. Made out of elemental shapes, these tokens were used as image-making objects. They were obviously employed to express something concretely in visual mimetic form. The Research on Imagery, Iconicity, and Gesture The plausibility of the iconicity hypothesis rests, clearly, on showing that mental imagery is a fundamental mode of thought and that gesture is a rudimentary mode of expression. As it turns out, defining mental imagery experimentally is a difficult task. Does it make any sense to think of individuals as having "pictures" in their heads? Psychologists are divided on this question. Among other things, it would have to be shown that mental imagery has some of the same properties that characterize visual perception. I will now look more closely at the general research on iconic thinking. For the sake of exposition I will discuss the literature review under three categories: imagery research, gesture research, and the recent work on image-schemata. Imagery Research It is important, above all else, to make a clear-cut distinction between an imagery theory of verbal meaning and internal iconicity. The former attempts to explain why images can be evoked by language; the latter posits that iconic signs form the basis of preverbal thinking. Within vocal language, any concrete referent can be easily visualized. If one were required to think of, say, an equilateral triangle, an image of this referent can easily be constructed by the mind. This "imagery content" can then be modified as if it were a picture: e.g., one could be asked to put a dot in the middle of the triangle, to enclose the triangle in a box, etc. All these modifications can be easily visualized by the mind. But psychological research has shown that many referents, especially abstract ones, do not elicit imagery content. The experimental study of images presents ambiguous findings. Even suitable images for concrete referents are hardly ever reported by subjects. A few initial observations are appropriate here. The problem with the research on imagery, as Rollins (1989) has argued, is that it is motivated by an ideological dichotomy. One campthe pictorialistsbelieves that the brain generates visual information in the form of picture-like displays; the other campthe descriptionalistsmaintains that our so-called mental pictures are actually mental descriptions derived from our knowledge of how things are perceived. When we say that we think in pictures, we are using language to represent a nonverbal phenomenon. No wonder we get the two mixed up. Good discussions of what an image is and of how we characterize it can be found in Barlow, Blakemore, and Weston-Smith (1990).
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The research that shows no imagery has been conducted on subjects who have been using language virtually since birth. In my view, this line of investigation has simply shown that the imagery system has become subordinate to the linguistic conceptual system. The constant use of language from early childhood onward eventually diminishes the need to employ iconic thinking. But, if one were asked to think of something totally imaginary, like a ''winged cow," then the imagery system reemerges to make such a verbal description literally "imaginable." It is almost impossible in the modern mind to separate iconic from verbal thought. Perhaps the most conspicuous flaw in imagery theories is that they often portray imagery content as just "pictorial." As discussed previously, internal iconic signs, or image schemata, encode all kinds of sense impressions and affective states, not just visual perceptions. I cannot but agree with Nelson Goodman (1990) when he points out that mental imagery is a kind of Gestalt: it need not be only "pictorial;" it can also be musical and even verbal. One can literally think up melodies and words as easily as visualizable scenes. According to the iconicity hypothesis, an image can be defined as a mental version of an external sense impression or of an affective state. It can be a sound, a shape of an object, a smell, etc. It is a form that the deep level of mind uses to record what the body has sensed or felt. Imagery would seem to share many of the same neural processes as the sensory perception system (Finke 1990). As Block (1981: 9) has characterized the vast corpus of research on mental imagery, it would indeed appear to be the case that "imagery and perception share much of the same physiological machinery." This might explain why our vocabularies for visual sensation and mental perception share many elements (Wierzbicka 1980: 99158). In actual practice, we rarely make a distinction between the two. To see how different kinds of sensory and affective modalities inhere in mental imagery, Adams (1986: 96) suggests the following mental tests: Imagine . . . the laugh of a friend; the sound of thunder; the feel of wet grass; the feel of a runny nose; the smell of fish; the taste of toothpaste; the muscular sensation of running; the sensation of being uncomfortably cold; the sensation of having eaten too much; the sensation of extreme happiness. The fact that we can easily conjure up an "image" in each case bears witness to the mind's ability to encode sensory-affective modalities. It is
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virtually impossible to define such images psychologically. All that can be said is that they present the stimulus and contextual conditions that evoked a sensory-affective response by the body in remarkably accurate form, although the stimulus is not a "replica." The conversion of experience into image schemata is called "visual thinking" by Rudolf Arnheim (1954, 1969, 1986), in order to differentiate it from conceptual, or verbal, thinking. The topic of imagery has a long history in psychology. Individual differences in the ability to experience imagery were recorded by Fechner already in 1860 (Woodsworth 1938: 523), by Galton a few years later (1880 [1928]), and by Perky (1910) at the turn of the present century. The study of imagery in language is the one that has most intrigued psychologists. This is because, as Fincher (1976: 98) points out, language and vision share the characteristic of categorical perception: "Categorical perception is the instantaneous classification, or putting into a category, of a stimulus even as we perceive it." The research that shows how iconic thinking can be elicited is actually rather straightforward and, in my view, unambiguous. People can recall faces and recognize voices accurately and quickly (Arnheim 1969: 17476), rotate objects in their heads (Shepard and Metzler 1971), locate imaginary places in terms of so-called cognitive maps (Oatley 1977), and scan game boards in their minds (Eisenstadt and Kareev 1977) with no difficulty whatsoever. Imagery, as Miller (1987) has convincingly shown, is also at the core of scientific thinking and theorizing. While researchers might disagree on exactly what it is that their subjects "see" or "experience" in their minds, they occur that something is "going on" in the mind. Stephen Kosslyn (1980, 1983) and a group of researchers have been investigating how the brain's imagery system might work. In a series of ingenious experiments, they have shown how subjects can conjure up images of the arrangement of furniture in a room, of how to move a couch, of how to redesign a blueprint, etc. They have shown, in essence, how people construct elaborate mental images, search them out for specific purposes, and perform all kinds of iconically describable movements in their minds (e.g., the mental rotation of objects). As an illustration, let us take one of Kosslyn's experiments. Kosslyn showed subjects a map containing fictional locations. After having had enough time to familiarize themselves with the map, the subjects were asked to imagine it and then to answer specific questions about it. For example, they were asked to focus on one location and then to press a button when the dot "reached" the required point. If they could not locate the point, then the subjects were directed to press a different button. Kosslyn found that for this kind of task the time required to scan from one location to the other was a linear function of the distance between the two points on the map. If asked to indicate whether a named location was on the map, the subjects showed no hint of this distance effect. In carrying out the first task, the subjects were clearly employing imagistic thinking.
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Only when verbal information was used (in the second task), did they utilize propositional, language-based thinking. Experiments such as this one have been leading to the conclusion that a large portion of mental imagery has the same properties as visual perception. The neuropsychological research of Wilder Penfield (e.g., Penfield and Roberts 1959) has gone a long way toward establishing a link between the two. In one experiment Penfield stimulated specific areas of the brain electrically. The experiential responses described by his subjects invariably took the form of flashbacks to scenes that they knew from their past. The visual "episodes" formed a picture-strip narrative that proceeded at a natural speed as long as the electrode was held in place. They could neither be stopped nor turned back by the subjects. As Arnheim (1969: 104) has remarked, the images produced by Penfield's subjects "seem to approach the completeness of scenes directly perceived in the physical environment; like that outer visual world they seem to have the character of something objectively given, which can be explored by active perception the way one scrutinizes a painted or real landscape." Phylogenetically, iconic thinking and visual mimetic expression are the antecedents of conceptual thinking, even though we may no longer consciously recognize this. As Vico put it, during this first stage of mentality humans formed ideas "by way of contemplation of the heavens with the bodily eyes" (NS: 391). It is an established paleoneurological fact that our hominid ancestors possessed binocular vision. So, they could combine their two eyes to focus on objects in a wide range of locationsnear, left, right, distant. This allowed them to judge distances accurately and to distinguish hue, shape and brightness. Rotating their eyes in their sockets allowed them as well to follow movement without moving their heads. Added to this visual modality, was the tactile one made possible by the freeing of the hands as a result of bipedal locomotion. The thumbs and fingers of the hands allowed our ancestors to explore surfaces by touch, and to grip objects strongly and precisely. These physiological developments made it possible for the brain to transform perceptions and sensations into meaningful imagery contenti.e., into mental presentations of these perceptions and sensations. Later on they became externalized into visual representations through the medium of mimetic communication (indexicality, deixis, and gesture) and pictorial art. Vico refers to iconicity as the universal mental language. It is a language which "uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life and exposes it to many diverse modifications as these same things may have diverse aspects" (NS: 161). The elements (iconic signs) of this language are produced by the workings of the imagination and so can be called "imaginative" universals: The first men, the children, as it were, of the human race, not being able to form intelligible class concepts of things, had a natural need to create poetic
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characters; that is, imaginative class concepts or universals, to which, as to certain models or ideal portraits, to reduce all the particular species which resembled them. (NS: 209) The work in neuroscience has provided some supportive evidence for a crucial aspect of the iconicity hypothesisthat perception and mental imagery are embedded in the same neural substrate. The split-brain experiments established that each hemisphere processes information according to the structure of the incoming stimulus. In the human brain complex thinking emerges only when the hemispheric functions work in tandem. The brain is therefore a unitary structure that reconciles two clearly differentiated modes of knowing associated with two hemispheric substrates. The functions of the hemispheres have been documented extensively. The following list shows how interhemispheric cooperation works (Bogen 1975): LH Functions most language functions (phonology, grammar, semantics) verbal memory intellectual activity convergent thought abstraction analysis
RH Functions comprehension of prosodic features of language (tones, stress, etc.) spatial memory intuitive activity divergent thought concretization synthesis
A breakdown of psychological functions according to hemisphere is now interpreted by neuroscientists generally to mean that a specific task has a primary hemispheric locus, but that it is interconnected with other neural substrates by neuronal-synaptic activities which work in parallel (e.g., Luria 1970; Rumelhart and McClelland 1987). So it can be said that a specific function may be "concentrated" in one hemisphere but not excluded from the other. One of the most significant findings that has crystallized from the neuroscientific literature is the likelihood that the RH is a crucial point of departure for processing novel stimuli: i.e., for stimuli for which there are no preexistent cognitive codes or programs available. In their often-quoted review of a large body of experimental literature, Goldberg and Costa (1981) suggest that this is so primarily because of the anatomical structure of the RH. Its greater connectivity with other centers in the complex neuronal pathways of the brain makes it a better "distributor" of new information. The LH, on the other hand, has a more sequentially organized neuronal-synaptic structure and thus finds it more difficult to assimilate information for which no preformed categories exist.
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The neuropsychological research can be interpreted to support the iconicity hypothesis in many ways, including the following: The same centers of the brain are involved in perception and mental imagery. The functions of the RH are essentially iconic in nature (spatial memory, synthesis, intuition, etc.). The RH is the one that permits the mind to comprehend and store novel information. Phylogenetically, the RH's capacity to manufacture images preceded the LH's capacity to organize thinking into abstract conceptual domains. The LH, in fact, came into the glottogenetic picture only when the units of perception that the RH was making available to the mind were becoming more and more abstract. At that point, the brain was "ready for speech" and for propositional thought. In terms of the Vichian model of mind, it can be said that the RH is responsible for deep-level functions, and the LH for surfacelevel ones. The "flow" of information in the brain goes from "right to left" when the information to be assimilated is novel: i.e., it goes from the imagistic to the abstract. The research on the brain not only suggests a neurological locus for Vico's deep-level functionsthe fantasia, the ingegno, and the memoriabut also a structure to the brain's processing of the flow of information. Congenitally blind people have been found, amazingly, to have the ability to construct images derived from metaphorical utterances that are comparable to those of individuals who have the capacity to see (e.g., Kennedy 1984). As Kosslyn (1990: 94) has recently put it, "the study of imagery may end up providing one of the first case studies in how the brain creates the mind." This explains why scholars such as Jaynes (1976) and Eccles (1989) have approached the evolution of consciousness primarily on the basis of brain research. Jaynes has gone so far as to claim that language originated in the RH and was "heard" by the auditory speech centers of the LH through the corpus callosum. Gesture Research Corroborative findings for the iconicity hypothesis can be gleaned as well from the research literature on gesture. The developmental literature has shown, for example, that children invariably pass through an initial stage of indexicality and gesture before they develop grammar. Lieberman (1984: 87) points out that gestural communication in children seems to follow from the models of indication that they pick up from their environment. These are used for practical purposes (e.g., pointing to something
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desired) and are probably reinforced by osmosis with adult gesture. It is intriguing to note that, although vocal language eventually becomes the dominant form of communication, the gestural modality does not vanish completely. It remains a functional subsystem of human language that can always be utilized as a more generic form of communication when an interaction is impossible. This happens typically when two interlocutors speak different languages. And, of course, in individuals with impaired vocal organs, gesture constitutes the main mode of communication, with communication via computer keyboard and other manual means as subsidiary options. All such considerations favor the iconicity and visual mimesis hypotheses, in that they suggest that these are the fundamental forces in symbol creation (Brown: 1986: 44759). The study of how gesture and vocal language intersect in ordinary communicative behavior has shown that it has become a largely unconscious complement of the latter. The intriguing work of McNeill (McNeill and Levy 1982; McNeill 1992), for instance, has revealed that metaphors about languagecalled "conduit" metaphors (Reddy 1979)are typically accompanied by gestures which iconically depict the vehicles of these metaphors (the B in A is B): Concepts are palpable substances: "Lay it out on the table"; "Where did you get that idea?"; etc. The accompanying gesture consists of the hand curved, up high in front of the face, with the fingers and thumb forward and apart. It looks as if the speaker is holding onto something. Concepts can be transmitted along a conduit: "I gave him that idea"; "It's hard to get that idea across"; etc. The accompanying gesture consists of both hands extended, moving downward. It looks as if the speaker is presenting an object to the other person along a conduit. Speech is a container. "Your words are full of meaning"; "I can't get these ideas into words"; etc. The accompanying gesture consists of both hands forming a cup, with the fingers curled and palms up, to show two containers. Concepts are brought out of containers: "This idea comes out of an old tradition"; "This idea arises in the second paragraph"; etc. The accompanying gesture consists of the hand forming a cup at face level to show the object rising. Studies such as this give us some idea of how the iconic modality intersects with the verbal one in normal discourse programming. Frutiger (1989: 112) points out that accompanying gestures reveal an inner need to support what one is saying orally: "If on a beach, for example, we can hardly resist drawing with the finger on the smooth surface of the sand as a means of clarifying what we are talking about."
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Image Schemata The recent work on so-called image schemata is also highly supportive of the iconicity hypothesis. Johnson (1987: 79), for example, argues that the basic form of thought involves the transformation of bodily experience into image schemata which he defines as "those recurring structures of, or in, our perceptual interactions, bodily experiences and cognitive operations." Similarly, Lakoff (1987: 44446) argues that the mind's capacity for knowing inheres in a kind of "effortful activity" that allows it to portray locations, movements, shapes, etc. in cognitive ways. His example of how this works is instructive. Consider the idiom to spill the beans. Most people would not think of this initially in iconic ways: i.e., people would not think of it in the concrete terms of beans and spilling. They would think of its abstract meaning first. But this is a result of the conventionalized use of this expression. Its iconic structure can be elicited rather easily if someone were asked questions such as: Where are the beans before they are spilled?; How big is the container?; Is the spilling on purpose or accidental?; etc. Speakers will invariably answer such questions in remarkably uniform ways: the beans are supposed to be kept in a container, the container is always about the size of the human head; etc. Image-schemata theory is obviously supportive of the notion of internal iconicity. The idea that units of perception (size, shape, etc.) can be transformed into mental iconic units is, in fact, the crux of the iconicity hypothesis. Lakoff and Johnson see image schemata as tied primarily to conceptual language. The iconicity hypothesis, on the other hand, sees them in more general termsas products of the nonverbal deep level of consciousness. Nevertheless, as will be discussed in the sixth chapter, imageschemata theory nicely captures the idea that iconicity leaves its residues in metaphorically fabricated concepts at the surface level of cognition. We have inherited these residues from the "vast imagination" of the first poets "whose minds were not in the least abstract, refined, or spiritualized, because they were entirely immersed in the senses, buffeted by the passions, buried in the body" (NS: 378). As Langer (1948: 9192) has aptly put it, such iconic units of thought constitute "our readiest instruments for abstracting concepts from the tumbling stream of actual impressions." Iconic Representation Pictorial representation dates from prehistoric times, most likely from the early period of Homo sapiens around one hundred thousand years ago. The appearance of primitive art was the step just before vocal language. I will conclude this chapter by discussing briefly this fascinating manifestation of visual mimesis and its eventual descendantalphabetic writing.
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Primitive Art The making of art is unique to the human species. As Gregory (1974: 614) suggests, "the specifically human capacities to draw and appreciate pictures, and to write, speak and understand language are linked in no accidental way but represent an almost unitary skill." The paintings of animals found on cave walls and roofs, and the artifacts that explode onto the scene in Europe thirty-five thousand years ago, bear witness to the productivity of preverbal iconic thinking (White 1989, Dissanayake 1992). These are the "fossil records" of "the expressiveness of the poetic images that the world formed in its first childhood" (NS: 212). In the Vichian scheme of things, primitive art was the end result of visual mimesis, the "poetry of imitation'' (NS: 75). Vico elaborates further as follows: This axiom will explain the fact that all the arts of the necessary, the useful, the convenient, and even in large part those of human pleasure, were invented in the poetic centuries before the philosophers came; for the arts are nothing but imitations of nature, and in a certain way "real" poems are made not of words but of things. (NS: 217) Primitive art betrays the narrative work of the ingegno. The first cave figures are, as Gregory (1974: 619) asserts, "pictures arranged to tell a story." Similarly, Frutiger (1989: 112) points out that primitive art constitutes a phylogenetically advanced form of expression which shows that the "narrative speech of sounds and gestures must have existed in close association with the picture." Actually, the cave drawings were, according to Gregory (1970: 137), never fully representational, but "cartoon-like pictures" of familiar things. As the hand movements used to draw them became more abrupt, the first artists gradually distanced themselves from reproducing their objects, and the figures they drew became more abstract. Gregory (1974: 61920) explains this abstraction process as follows: As symbols escaped the semblance of objects, and became less like pictures, so they became more powerful. In the development of the determinatives, and of the signs for logical operations, we see how the power of symbols and formal languages as tools developed, drawing men inexorably away from their biological origins. It was, surely, the artists who took the first crucial step; to see, and to select and make objects representing something else; something existing in a different space and time or not existing at all. The use of determinatives for connecting pictorial symbols betrays the work of the ingegno on its way to generating syntax. As Logan (1987: 63) explains, the determinative sign was originally an ideographic sign added to another ideogram indicating to what general class of objects or concepts that ideogram belonged: "Determinative signs denoted deities, animals, plants, fishes, rivers, cities, material, or gender, among other
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things." The use of a sign to classify and connect other signs signaled the beginning of syntax, which, as discussed in the previous chapter, arose from the ingegno's ability to string symbols together in order to make a story. What is the evolutionary significance of primitive art? I see no intrinsic connection between art and the sociobiologist's claim that the mind's products are survival-enhancing strategies. What possible survival functions did the art works of thirty-five thousand years ago serve? These represented animals engaged in some action or found in some physical state imbued with significancee.g., a dying animal which had collapsed on the ground (Pfeiffer 1982; Morphy 1989). I would like to suggest that primitive art reveals a fascination with consciousness. Children invariably start to draw as they discover their conscious thoughts (Winner 1982). In adulthood, art penetrates the surface, or conceptual, level of mind, reawakening in us our now largely unconscious perceptions of reality. It takes us back, in other words, to our imaginative origins. As Hausman (1989: 124) appropriately observes, art "might be construed as identical with an image or only the intentional object, or as the contents of perceptual and perhaps intellectually functioning imagination." On the topic of artistic representation, it is also interesting to note that by the time of the first civilizations the imagination was collaborating with the conceptual mind to produce what is, arguably, humanity's first great iconic rationalization of realitygeometry (Lawlor 1982; Verstockt 1987). This wonderful product of the interactive workings of the rational and imaginative levels of mind gave the world its first spatial categories. There is nothing that is more aesthetically and logically pleasing, at the same time, than the visual order constructed by Euclidean geometry. It is, as Lawlor (1982: 16) observes, a metaphor of universal order. It is a perfect combination of art and language. As the great scientist Ernst Mach (1906) pointed out at the turn of the present century, our notions of space, as idealized by geometry, are rooted in our physiological selves, in our bodily experiences and perceptions. They are not out there in any objective sense. Geometric concepts are metaphors transforming our iconic organization of the world into abstract experiences of space. Writing In the Vichian glottogenetic scenario sketched in the previous chapter, writing is to be seen as coincident with the emergence of symbolic language and concept-based cognition. It can be defined as conventionalized artistic expression. As primitive art proliferated, it must have become useful for recording and communicating thoughts. The movements used to record thoughts must, at a certain point, have become abbreviated. From these condensed iconic representations a pictorial form of writing emerged first
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(Gelb 1963). This became conceptual at about the time that vocal language came into the picture. As Brown (1986: 449) has pointed out: With respect to the origins of language, the important point is that the earliest writing systems were, without exception, pictorial or iconic. Since the first writing was independent of speech, it is a form of language invention, and since it need not have been iconic but could have been perfectly arbitrary, it follows that iconicity is, as far as written language is concerned, the primary principle of symbol invention. The first examples of pictographicas opposed to alphabeticwriting are actually rather recent (Pedersen 1931: 14866; Coulmas 1989; Green 1989). In the ancient civilization of Sumer around 3,500 b.c., pictographic writing was used to record agricultural transactions and astronomical observations. Most of the pictographs represented nouns for stars and animals with a few qualifying adjectives for "small," "big," "bright," and the like. A few centuries later, verbs were introduced into the pictographic writing system: to sleep, for example, was represented by a person in a supine position. To facilitate the speed of writing, the Sumerians eventually streamlined their drawings and transformed them into symbols for the actual sounds of speech. These were written down on clay tablets with a stylus in a form of writing known as cuneiform (see fig. 5, chapter 3). By about 3,000 b.c. the ancient Egyptians used a kind of scriptknown as hieroglyphicwhich consisted of symbols that stood for parts of words (Kristeva 1989: 6367). These allowed the Egyptians to record their hymns and prayers, to register the names and titles of individuals and deities, and to annotate various community activitieshieroglyphic derives from Greek hieros "holy" and glyphein "to carve." Such developments bear witness to a very advanced stage of mental and cultural evolution. Once writing became a flourishing enterprise, it began to appear without pictures, producing the first written textswriting without pictures. But long before the Sumerians, accounts in western Asia, as demonstrated by Denise Schmandt-Besserat (1978, 1989), were kept by distinctive clay tokens. Dating back some eleven thousand years, these show that a highly developed abstract mode for representing quantity had already emerged in the human species. Rather than contradict the phylogenetic flow from concrete to abstract, as Schmandt-Besserat hypothesizes, it seems to me that they reflect that iconicity is a much older form of mind than has been previously thought. By about 1,000 b.c. the Phoenicians had invented an alphabet. This became the primary means for recording vocal speech. The Phoenicians had finally severed the iconic relationship between pictures and referents, creating an abstract system for recording phonetic values. The Greeks adopted the Phoenician, or North Semitic, alphabet and called each symbol by such words as alpha, beta, gamma, etc., which are imitations of Semitic
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words: aleph "ox," beth "house," gimel "camel," etc. They also introduced symbols for vowel sounds, thus producing the first true alphabet, in the modern sense of the word (see Wescott 1980: 319 for a discussion of the iconic foundations of alphabets). Writing is a unique achievement. It made possible the recording and transmission of knowledge. Indeed, in Western culture to be literate is to be educated. The first schools were a logical outgrowth of the invention of cuneiform writing. So close has the link between the two been forged that today we can scarcely think of knowledge unless it is recorded in some textual form and preserved in some library for posterity. But in every symbol that we now use to record our thoughts, there is an iconic history and prehistory that has become "dim" or virtually "unseeable" because our eyes are no longer trained to extract iconic meaning from it. Our rational minds have now taken over the task of computing meaning from our textual productions. The recent book by Roy Harris (1986) on the origin of writing is relevant to the foregoing discussion. Essentially, Harris aims to debunk the main myths which have sprung up with regard to the origin of writing: that writing is an extension of oral language; that the alphabet is based on a different principle than that of pictographic or ideographic writing. In Vichian fashion, Harris (1986: 29) blames our misconceptions about writing on "the tyranny of the alphabet over our modern ways of thinking about the relation between the spoken and the written word." For Harris, and for Vico, writing systems should be seen as competing semiotic systems with vocal speech. They are equal contenders for our inbuilt faculty to produce signs.
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Five From Language to Speech: The Audio-Oral Osmosis Hypothesis Human speech arose out of a generalized gesture languagemade by the limbs as a whole (including the tongue and lips)which became specialized in gestures of the organs of articulation. Paget 1930: 24 The third event in the Vichian scenario signals the passage from Homo sapiens to Homo sapiens sapiens (= Homo loquens). The main feature of this event is audio-oral osmosisthe tendency to emit sounds that reflect or reproduce some property of the referent (onomatopoeia), or to associate an interjectional emission with some affective state, urge, or response. This chapter will look briefly at the plausibility of this hypothesis, focusing especially on the ontogenesis of speech. The discussion ends with a brief look once again at the language vs. speech distinction. Audio-Oral Osmosis As Wescott (1980: 7071) remarks, because of audio-oral osmosis "our sapient ancestors transformed their linguistic skills from the visual to the auditory channel one becoming, for the first time, speakers rather than signers." The appearance of osmoticallyproduced speech onto the glottogenetic scene is a remarkable accomplishment. The organs of articulation were designed to serve the more basic survival function of eating, not speaking. The echoes of articulated words in the ears of our hominid ancestors, and the images of beings, objects, and events that they conjured up, must have been interpreted as divine voices by these "first poets," as Jaynes (1976) suggests. To this day, we feel the "power" of articulated speech: obscene words, angry words, sweet words, etc. are expressions which
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reflect how we react physiologically and affectively to the mere uttering of words. Children invariably emit sounds osmotically when they play to accompany their rhythmic movements, to imitate the sounds of their toys, and to generate emotional responses in other children (Opie and Opie 1959). Speech evokes physiological responses because it literally grew out of the body (Appelbaum 1990). Audio-oral expression affirms the body's role in the evolution of speech. Since the first articulated words stemmed from a physical osmosis in the vocal tract with some aspect of reality, it is obvious that there should be traces of this physical process in the speech of modern humans and, especially, in the ontogenesis of language. I will therefore examine this question in the next section. In the section after that I will discuss the plausibility of audio-oral osmosis in etymological terms, for it predicts that the items of core vocabularies will reveal an osmotic origin. The Nature of Audio-Oral Speech Audio-oral speech entails a psycho-physiological capacity to consciously use the organs of the vocal tract to emit sounds and to distinguish acoustically among the various sounds that these organs are able to produce. Linguists have developed the concept of the phoneme to account for this capacity. The phoneme is a unit of sound that the mind can identify as having some feature that keeps it distinct from other sounds and that allows it to enter into a referential relation with other sounds. Let us assume that an early hominid uttered the syllable Pa! in terrified response to a bolt of lightning. This hominid would be able to utilize the new word again only if the ear and mind of the same individual could distinguish it from, say, Ra! (hypothetically) "the sound of thunder." The use of Pa! and Ra! in different contexts would indicate that the mind of that early speaker had made a meaningful distinction between /p/ and /r/. (In linguistics it is the normal practice to use slant lines to represent phonemes.) This distinction could then become an instrument of speech programming only after other speakers used it to refer to objects and events with similar osmotic properties as lightning and thunder. As Hewes (1983) has argued, the primary advantage of the phoneme in glottogenesis inhered in the "indexical function," as he calls it, that it had for memory storage and retrieval. The difference between /p/ and /r/ is psycho-physiological. The former sound involves the sudden explosion of breath at the lips, while the vocal cords located in the larynx are kept taut. The latter involves a rapid vibration of the tip of the tongue against the palate, as the air escapes from the mouth. In the case of /r/ the vocal cords are allowed to vibrate. These articulatory differences are perceived by the hearing center of the brain (see fig. 6, chapter 4) and programmed through the motor pathways of the brain into a complex system of coordination between brain and vocal organs. The utilization of this psycho-physiological apparatus to imitate, re-
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produce, or model the sounds associated with some referent is the essence of audio-oral osmosis. There are twelve cranial nerves that link the brain with the head and neck. Some perform a motor function, controlling the movement of muscles; while others perform a sensory function, sending signals to the brain. Seven of these serve the process of speech production and hearing. They are the links between the brain and the vocal organs. From a phylogenetic perspective, it is obvious that certain physiological developments had to have taken place before audio-oral osmosis could have become an expressive option by the time of Homo sapiens (sapiens). Above all else, the larynx must have developed the ability beforehand to control the flow of air to and from the lungs, so as to prevent food, foreign objects, or other substances from entering the trachea on their way to the stomach. It did this by means of a leaf-shaped cartilage known as the epiglottis, which is pulled across the entrance to the larynx as part of the swallowing procedure. This prevented substances from going in the wrong direction. Also, the ability to control the vocal folds made it possible to build up pressure within the lungs and to emit air not only for expirational purposes, but also for the production of sound. The work of Laitman (1983, 1990) is of direct relevance to understanding the physiological features that must have been in place before vocal speech became a possibility. Laitman and his associates have shown that at the age of eighteen months to two years the position of the larynx in human infants is high in the neck, as it is in those of other mammals. Infants breathe, swallow, and vocalize in ways that are physiologically similar to other primates. But, some time around the second year of life, the infant's larynx descends into the neck, dramatically altering the ways in which the child will carry out such physiological functions from then on. Nobody knows why this descent occurs. It is an anatomical phenomenon that is unique to humans. This new low position means that the respiratory and digestive tracts now cross above the larynx. This entails a few risks: food can easily lodge in the entrance to the larynx; and humans cannot drink and breathe simultaneously without choking. But in compensation, this new position produces a pharyngeal chamber above the vocal folds that can modify sound. This is the key to our ability to articulate sounds. Laitman and his associates noticed as well that the angulation of the bottom of the skull is related to the position of the larynx. Using a series of statistical techniques, they came to the conclusion that two basic skull-larynx relations exist: flat skulls relate to larynges positioned high in the neck; bent skulls correspond to larynges that are placed quite low in the neck. Since the latter anatomical configuration is unique to humans from after the age of about two years, it gave the researchers the necessary insight for reconstructing primitive vocal tracts. They now could approximate the level of the primitive larynx and its associated structures. By examining fossil skulls 2 to 3 million years old, Laitman and his associates found that the australopithecines of southern and eastern Africa of 1.5 to
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4 million years ago had the skull-larynx configuration of a monkey or ape. These hominids, therefore, could not have had speech, although they may have had some form of iconic language. Laitman uncovered the same skull-larynx pattern in Homo erectus (1.5 million to 300,000 or 400,000 years ago). It was not until the arrival of Homo sapiens that Laitman found solid evidence for the formation of a vocal tract that had the capacity to produce truly articulate speech. Recently, Krantz (1988) has examined the cranial anatomy of human fossils of forty thousand years ago. He comes to the conclusion that the descent of the larynx must have occurred in two stages: The first stage allowed for controlled exhalation through the mouth. The second stage resulted in the full development of the pharynx. Accordingly, Krantz posits that the earliest phonemic languages must have consisted entirely of consonants, with neutral vowels to support the pronunciation of the consonants. Phonemic vowels emerged later. Neurologically, the emergence of articulate speech indicated a shift in hemisphericity from the RH to the LHthe latter being responsible for the motor and comprehension functions associated with speech (Broca's and Wernicke's areas). This also entailed a gradual shift away from iconic mentality to an increasingly verbal form of cognition. The LH became crucial for auditory perception. It developed an area to perceive sounds as being the same (recognition) or different (discrimination); and it evolved the capacity to focus on certain aspects of complex auditory stimuli and to ignore others (auditory attention). Without this capacity, it would have been impossible for the mind to generate and utilize phonemic inventories. The emergence of bilateralityi.e., of a LH and a RH with complementary specialized functionshas been found in the endocasts of Neanderthals by LeMay (1976). This discovery puts the origin of audio-oral speech at somewhere between forty thousand and one hundred thousand years ago, as many others have claimed using different kinds of evidence. Holloway and LaCosteLeRaymondie (1982), however, have speculated that the formation of bilaterality in the human brain may go back even further than LeMay's estimate. They suggest that the localization of "language-as-speech" to the LH is a recent phenomenon. In the earliest hominids, they claim, the LH had the capacity for iconic language as well. But then why did this hemisphere not retain traces of this capacity? At the present time there does not seem to be a satisfactory answer to this question. Paleoneurological research has been used by many glottogeneticists to support the hypothesis that iconic language predated audio-oral speech. The best guess is that the australopithecines were mute (Hewes 1976) but that they could utter calls in response to various sensations and affective states. The latter were not controlled by the cerebral cortex, but by the level of the midbrain (Myers 1976). As Brown (1986: 463) remarks, the shift
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from iconicity to audio-oral speech brought along with it several advantages: vocal language "works at night; it gets around obstacles in the line of sight; it does not interrupt useful manual work." Let us now consider Vico's characterization of the formation of the first spoken words of humanity. "Articulate language," he observes, "began to develop by way of onomatopoeia" (NS: 447). He then goes on to explain the onomatopoeic origin of "Jove" in several languages: By the Latins Jove was at first, from the roar of the thunder, called Ious; by the Greeks, from the whistle of the lightning, Zeus; by the Easterners, from the sound of burning fire, he must have been called Ur, whence came Urim, the power of fire; and from this origin must have come the Greek ouranos, sky, and the Latin verb uro, to burn. (NS: 447) Interestingly, Vico then says that the metaphorical capacity transformed this event 3 occurrence into an event 4 one by generating the myth of Jove: With respect to these origins it is to be noted that the same sublimity of invention evinced in the fable of Jove, which we have observed above, marks the beginning of locution in onomatopoeia, which Dionysius Longinus certainly includes among the sources of the sublime, and which he illustrates from Homer, citing the sizzling sound (siz') emitted by the eye of Polyphemus when Ulysses pierces it with the fiery stake. (NS: 447) Vico goes on to suggest how some words were formed through interjection, a process by which sounds are "articulated under the impetus of violent passions" (NS: 448). His etymology of the word for "father" is worth quoting here: Thus it is not beyond likelihood that, when wonder had been awakened in men by the first thunderbolts, these interjections of Jove should give birth to one produced by the human voice: pa!; and that this should be doubled; pape! From this interjection of wonder was subsequently derived Jove's title of father of men and gods, and thus it came about presently that all the gods were called fathers, and the goddesses, mothers. (NS: 448) If audio-oral osmosis was as productive in glottogenesis as Vico claims it was, then it should have survived as a kind of communicative subsystem, in the same way that gesture has survived. To what extent, then, does osmosis characterize the speech of children? And do we continue to employ osmosis in ways that are reminiscent of Vico's first speakers? The answer to the first question can be easily gleaned both from common experienceimitative sounds invariably characterize the first attempts of children to speakand from the research literature. The latter has shown, for example, that the phonemic structure of the child's first words is like that of Vico's protoword for "father," pa!i.e., the first words of children invariably have a consonant before a vowel (da-da, ma-ma, etc.); final conso-
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nants develop later (Olmsted 1971). Moreover, studies have shown that children use intonationan interjectional strategyfunctionally before the end of the first year: i.e., they use different tones to express such meanings as questioning, demanding, surprise, etc. The development of prosody, in fact, continues right up to adolescence (Cruttenden 1974). The literature has clearly identified audio-oral osmosis as an early feature of speech development. On this topic, it is interesting to note that the classic study of the ontogenesis of symbolic competence by Werner and Kaplan (1963) is highly compatible with the Vichian sequence of events. These two researchers found that children start with a kind of iconic mentality in which referents are "objects of contemplation." From this event 1 stage they develop a system of motorgestural depiction (event 2). This is followed by an event 3 stage in which onomatopoeic naming predominates. Finally, children develop linguistic expression by associating concepts with each other (event 4). The second question posed abovewhether or not osmosis is an operative strategy in modern discoursecan be answered in the affirmative as well. Consider, for instance, the following hypothetical situation: · If an individual wanted to convey the message "I like your car" to a speaker of an unrelated language, chances are that the first individual would attempt to imitate or reproduce a sound emitted by, say, the car's motor (onomatopoeia), together with the sounds people typically makeMmmmm!, Aaaaaah!, etc.to express the feeling of liking something (interjection). · The first speaker might even accompany such osmotically formed locutions with a mimetic gesture highlighting some visual property of the care.g., a circular gesture for "steering wheel." · In so doing, the speaker has, in effect, reenacted scenes that are reminiscent of events 2 and 3 of the Vichian scenario. A little reflection will show that audio-oral osmosis is very much a productive strategy in everyday discourse: · We often use alliteration, or the repetition of sounds, for various effects: sing-song; no-no, etc. · We commonly lengthen sounds for emphasis: Yesssss! Noooooo! etc. · We regularly use intonation to express emotional states, to emphasize, to shock, etc.: Are you absolutely sure? Noooooo way! In addition, consider the following facts. The language of cartoons and comic books is replete with osmotic effectsZap! Boom! Pow! etc. Descrip-
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tion is, more often than not, osmotica mean individual, for instance, is typically compared, by osmosis, to a snake, as being slithery, slippery, sneaky, etc. Words used to refer to sonorous actions are typically osmotic (Crystal 1987: 174), as for example: / p / dip, rip, sip . . . / k / crack, click, creak . . . / b / rub, jab, blob . . . / l / rustle, bustle, trickle . . . / z / ooze, wheeze, squeeze . . . / f / puff, huff, cough . . . That osmosis is a fundamental interpretive strategy as well was shown several years ago by Roger Brown (1970: 25873). Brown asked native speakers of English to listen to pairs of antonyms from a language unrelated to English and then to try to guess, given the English equivalents, which foreign word translated which English word. The subjects were asked to guess the meanings of the foreign words by attending to their sounds. When he asked them, for example, to match the words ch'ing and chung to the English equivalents light and heavy, not necessarily in that order, Brown found that about 90% of English speakers correctly matched ch'ing to light and chung to heavy. Brown (1970: 272) concluded that the degree of translation accuracy can only be explained ''as indicative of a primitive phonetic symbolism deriving from the origin of speech in some kind of imitative or physiognomic linkage of sounds and meanings." Core Vocabularies A testable corollary following from the audio-oral osmosis hypothesis is the following one: If protowords were formed by osmosis, then the core vocabularies of the world's languages should reveal an etymology based on osmotic formation. Paget (1930), Swadesh (1971), Wescott (1980), and other glottogeneticists have, in fact, searched for osmosis in the core vocabularies of a wide variety of languages. Not surprisingly, most of their probes have uncovered a high incidence of osmosis. As Brown (1958a: 13254) points out, research has shown that core words reveal etymologies that generally reflect osmotic experiences. Brown (1958a: 13254) has suggested that the role of audio-oral osmosis in word-formation has come to be replaced by a kind of metaphorical osmosis based on sensory perception. This is why feelings are said to be warm, hot, cool; or why people are seen to be dull or bright. The principal intersensory dimensions are apparently the same for people everywhere: The quality is first detected is one sense modality and is named at that stage. Afterward the quality is detected in many other phenomena that register with other senses. The original name tends to be extended to any
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experience manifesting the criterial quality. And so it happens that unrelated languages extend their vocabularies of sensation in similar fashion. (Brown 1958a: 154) The work on PIE and Nostratic can also be enlisted to shed some light on what the first words might have been like. For instance, the reconstructed PIE (Proto-Indo-European) word for "ox," *kwou (Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1990: 113) is probably imitative of the sound that an ox might be perceived as making. Here are a few other examples of osmotically forged protowords (Wescott 1980: 1416; Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1990: 11415; Shevoroshkin 1990: 2327): · PIE *yotor "water" (possibly imitative of the perceived sound made by liquid in motion); · PIE *ekhos "horse" (possibly imitative of the perceived expiratory sounds emitted by a horse); · PIE *woi-no "grape" (possibly imitative of the perceived sound made when a grape is squeezed); · PIE *klak- "laugh" (possibly imitative of the perceived sound made when laughing); · Nostratic *kküyna "wolf, dog" (possibly imitative of the perceived sound uttered by wolves and dogs); · Nostratic *lapa "leaf" (possibly imitative of the perceived sound made when touching a leaf); · Nostratic *chunga "odor" (possibly imitative of a responsive sound to odor made when air is expelled through the nasal canal). Audio-oral osmosis can also be seen to underlie the formation of parts of protowords as well. The following PIE prefixes are cases in point (Wescott 1980: 176): · *pek- "to fleece" (possibly imitative of sounds associated with the action of fleecing); · *bhgu- "to flee" (possibly imitative sounds associated with the fleeing action); · *keu- "to hear" (possibly imitative of the expiration sounds that accompany the emphatic articulation of words); · *bhreg- "bo break" (possibly imitative of the sounds associated with the action of breaking things); · *ghed- "to take" (possibly imitative of the sounds associated with the action of taking things from others).
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Wescott (1980: 185) goes on to show how audio-oral osmosis overlapped with iconicity to produce some of the first abstract terms, including some color terms (see also Shields 1979). The original words were not specific to the visual channel, but denoted something like "strikingly perceptible." Examples of what Wescott (1980: 185) calls "audiovisual synesthesia" in English can be seen in the auditory and visual derivatives of the same PIE roots: PIE Root pEl bhEl bhEr kEl gEl ghEl ghEr
Auditory Derivative applause blubber bray clang clink yell growl
Visual Derivative splendor blur bright clear clean yellow grey
In sum, osmosis produced our first audio-oral signs: words. While these modeled their referents in terms of sonority (onomatopoeia) or by means of emotional responses (interjection), they were still tied to an iconic form of meaning (Todorov 1977 [1982]: 236). The image schemata they represented and/or evoked in the mind were, therefore, based on sound and feeling perceptions. These added substantially, therefore, to the repertory of perceptual models that the deep level of mind made available to Homo sapiens (sapiens). In so doing, they prepared the way for Metaphor to do its work of associating percepts of sound, sight, smell, touch, taste, and emotional responses to each other, thus creating the first concepts. Homo loquens was the first rational thinker. The Ontogenesis of Speech As discussed above, the research on child language can be enlisted to give support to the audio-oral osmosis hypothesis. The scientific study of language development is two centuries old. But detailed systematic investigations of this process did not commence until the 1950s. Since then, the subject has attracted immense interest from linguists and psychologists. These scientists would find Vico's commentaries about this subject remarkably contemporary. The following citations are typical examples: In children memory is most vigorous, and imagination is therefore excessively vivid, for imagination is nothing but extended or compounded memory (NS: 211). [Vygotsky (1962) has shown that children do indeed
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develop an iconic or imaginative "inner language" before they develop vocal speech.] Children excel in imitation; we observe that they generally amuse themselves by imitating whatever they are able to apprehend (NS: 215). [Many studies have documented that children speak their first words through imitation and so-called echoing.] Languages must have begun with monosyllables, as in the present abundance of articulated words into which children are now born they begin with monosyllables in spite of the fact that in them the fibers of the organ necessary to articulate speech are very flexible (NS: 231). [Modern research has established holophrases, or monosyllabic utterances, as the first words of children.] Children . . . take inanimate things in their hands and play with them and talk to them as though they were living persons (NS: 375). [The research has documented that play is an important contributor to speech development.] Children, by the ideas and names of the men, women and things they have seen first, afterwards apprehend and name all the men, women and things that bear any resemblance or relation to the first (NS: 412). [Recent work on Metaphor has shown that it is an early contributor to concept-formation]. The First Words The first thing to notice about the speech development process is that it is characterized early on by imitation. Crystal (1987: 232) summarizes the main findings on imitation succinctly as follows: It has also been recognized that imitation is a distinct skill in language acquisitionmany children spend a great deal of time imitating what their parents have just said. This is most noticeable when new sounds or vocabulary are being learned, but it has been shown that imitation may be important in the development of grammar too. Often, children imitate sentence patterns that they are unable to produce spontaneously, and they stop imitating these structures when they start to use them in speechsuggesting that imitation is a kind of "bridge" between comprehension and spontaneous production. It is instructive to plot what is now known about language development, so as to be better able to relate audio-oral osmosis to it. Although there is considerable individual variation in the rate of the developmental process and in the order of acquisition of the specific traits, there nevertheless emerge several common patterns that suggest that children follow a universal path on the way to speech. (Weir 1962; Miller and Ervin 1964; Lenneberg 1967; Brown 1973):
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By around six months the sounds that the child emits start to resemble monosyllabic utterances (mu, ma, da, di, etc.). At eight months reduplications and imitative repetitions become more frequent; intonation patterns become distinct; utterances can signal emphasis and emotions. By the end of the first year the first words emerge (mama, dada, etc.) At the completion of eighteen months the child has a repertory of not more than 50 words. Comprehension is expanding rapidly. At the end of the second year the child begins to join vocabulary items together into two-word phrases. Communicative behavior increases rapidly. The crucial period for the onset of language is when the child starts to utter so-called holophrastic (one-word) utterances around the first birthday. These are the first acts of true vocal communication. The holophrases have been shown to serve three basic functions: naming an object and event; expressing an action or a desire for some action; conveying emotional states. Holophrases are typically monosyllabic reductions of adult wordsda for dog, ca for cat, etc. Over 60% will develop into nouns; and 20% will become verbs. Reduplication during the second year is also a well documented phenomenon (Schwartz, Leonard, Wilcox, and Folger 1980). Children typically double their monosyllableswowo "water," bubu "bottle," etc., probably because they are becoming aware of the phonemic value of sounds in word- and concept-formation. The first words of children are the result of osmosis intersecting with conceptual development. In a recent study of four infants from different language backgrounds, Boysson-Bardies and Vihman (1991: 317) have shown that the first words stem from an osmotic and conceptual adaptation process: The flexibility of the human capacity for language has to be understood within the framework of a dual dependence on physiological constraints and the experience received through a specific language model. . . . The interinfant differences, as well as the similarity between the babbling repertoire and early words, show that infant productions are the complex product of an interaction between articulatory tendencies and the influence of the phonetic structure of the linguistic environment around the time when infants recognize and pay attention to words. Before the end of the first year children have learned how to use another osmotic featureintonationfunctionally: i.e., they have learned how to use tones to convey surprise, to signal recognition, to acknowledge a greeting, etc. (Cruttenden 1974). During the second year, the use of intonation
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increases in complexity. As Weeks (1982) has pointed out, intonation is the earliest evidence of the making of meaning in the human infant. The research shows that sentence structurea surface-level phenomenonstarts at around two years of age (Brown 1973). During the first year pronouns and other monosyllabic forms develop first. These lead to the construction of nouns. Verbs develop last. This synthesis of the relevant literature on grammatical development is an intriguing one from the perspective of what Vico suggests phylogenetically. He says that "song," his word for "intonation," "arose naturally" (NS: 448) to allow for the expression of ''great passions." Then pronouns developed, because they helped early speakers share ideas "with others concerning things which we cannot name or whose names another may not understand" (NS: 450). Particles (NS: 251), nouns (NS: 452), and verbs (NS: 453) follow in that order. While the match between the Vichian progression and the actual plot-line of child grammatical development may not always be a coincident one, it is remarkably close enough. In sum, the research on language ontogenesis has shown that iconicity and audio-oral osmosis go hand in hand in generating the child's first words. These have a concrete or perceptual semantic domain, being connected to the immediate environment (Benedict 1979; Stoel-Gammon and Cooper 1984). They refer mainly to the people in the child's life, to actions reflecting routine activities, to food, clothing, toys, household objects, and locations. By the second year of life concepts emerge to form the basis of language. By the age of puberty the development and cerebral entrenchment of language has run its course. The story of language ontogenesis reflects, in abridged form, the glottogenetic story of how mind, body, and culture must have cooperated to produce the greatest achievement of allthe rational intellect. Ontogenesis as Phylogenetic Reenactment As discussed in the first chapter, the idea that the development of language in the child is reflective of the stages and processes that must have characterized the development of language in the species is as old as civilization itself. But how far can one go with this premise? Perhaps Vico provides us with the best answer to this question. The method Vico employed to explain the phylogenesis of language utilized arguments from ontogenesis only in concomitance with those from philology and etymology. According to Vico, only when the observations from all three areas were compatible could the observations be used as the basis of a theory. The premise that ontogenesis reenacts phylogenesis is not at all an implausible one if it generates hypotheses that are consistent with other kinds of evidence (see also Lock 1983 on this point). Vico's thoughts on this are worth citing here: The theory of the genesis of languages is in conformity with the principles of universal nature, by which the elements of all things, out of which they
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are composed and into which they are bound to be resolved, are indivisible; and also with the principles of human nature in particular, according to the axiom that children, even in the present copiousness of language into which they are born, and in spite of the extreme flexibility of the fibers of their organs for articulating words, begin with monosyllables. So much the more must we deem the first men of the nations to have done so, for their organs were extremely obdurate, and they had not yet heard a human voice. (NS: 23031) Language and Speech The distinction between language and speech is a vital one for glottogenetic research. Language is essentially "mind work." Speech is the capacity to decipher and articulate vocal language; it is "ear and mouth work." The Vichian glottogenetic scenario posits that language was already present in the deep level before the development of speech. The "language universals" of the primitive mind were the iconic structures of consciousness. Vico called them "imaginative universals." These were organized by the ingegno into a "Mental Dictionary" (NS: 35). Through the workings of Metaphor the entries of this dictionary were connected to form concepts. This latter event occurred at about the same time that osmotic speech came onto the scene. When Metaphor started to generate conceptual language, osmosis started to lose its productivity. Even though its featuresintonation, stress, rhythm, etc.are still manifest in vocal communication, conceptual syntactic language is the modality that has become the primary one for conveying our thoughts. Language as Mind Work As linguistics has amply demonstrated, language is a mental code. Saussure (1916) used the analogy of a chess game to illustrate what this might mean. To play the game of chess both players must first know the language of chessthe rules of movement and the overall strategy of how to play. This part of the game is mind work. Knowledge of the rules of the game imposes constraints on, and provides a guide to, the choices each player can make in the act of playing. Each player thus speaks "chess-language" through these choices. According to the scenario proposed in this book, the first language of humanity was an iconic one that crystallized in the deep level of mind when the imagination transformed the images produced by the brain into iconic signs. Indexicality, deixis, gesture, and pictorial representation were the modalities through which this perceptual language came to be expressed. When Homo sapiens (sapiens) then developed the physiological capacity to produce osmotic models of the world, speech became the expressive modality for language. At about the same time, Metaphor was
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starting to transform percepts into concepts, generating the surface level of mind. Speech thus merged with the pictorial modality to produce alphabetic writing as a means for recording the new, concept-based language-as-speech. Through the workings of the ingegno syntax emerged to stabilize this new language. It did this by configuring the increasingly complex conceptual products of Metaphor into supportive structures. These products of the surface levelSaussure's "rules of the game"made it possible for the mind to organize and communicate conceptualized thought. Whereas the deep level of mind allowed the first humans to "make" or "create" sense, the surface level allowed their descendants to "convey" it through the architecture of syntactic structure. In 1957 Chomsky presented the first ever in-depth explanation of how this conveyance modality might work. Consider the following two sentences: Johh is eager to please. John is easy to please. Chomsky pointed out that while on the "surface" each sentence had the same structureN + V + A + I, a noun (N) followed by a verb (V) followed by an adjective (A), followed by an infinitive (I)each one conveyed a different meaning. So, Chomsky posited that in the "deep structure" the two had a different configuration: The deep structure of the first sentence could be paraphrased as John is eager to please someone. The deep structure of the second sentence could be paraphrased as It is easy for someone to please John. The convergence of these two deep structures into a structurally identical surface structure was due, Chomsky argued, to a transformational process that converted deep structures into surface structures. While the details of Chomskyan syntactic theory have changed over the years, the basic insight it offered in 1957 has not and, in my view, still remains a valid one. Essentially, Chomsky showed how language can work as a syntactic phenomenon independently of Metaphor and iconic thinking. More importantly, he showed that the rational mind has developed the capacity to convey meaning through syntactic structure. Indeed, it can deploy this structure to produce apparently meaningless messagesColorless green ideas sleep furiously. These have come to be known as anomalous strings. What Chomsky did not realize, however, was that Metaphor can provide the means for imbuing such strings with meaning. And, in fact, Pollio and his associates (e.g., Pollio and Burns 1977; Pollio and Smith 1979) have shown that when subjects are asked to interpret so-called anomalous strings, they will do so, no matter how contrived the interpretation might appear.
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The problem with the Chomskyan paradigm, in my opinion, is that it has become an all-inclusive one. Chomsky defined syntactic ability as creativity (Danesi 1989a). What he did not realize was that his "surface" and "deep" structures operated totally within the confines of the surface level of mind. The recent claim that there is a "universal grammar" (UG) in the human mind simply ignores the imaginative deep level. In so doing, UG theory has overlooked Metaphor, iconic thinking, and the imaginationthe very generators of grammar. Speech as Ear and Mouth Work The emergence of speech as a vocal modality of expression is a rather remarkable milestone in human evolution. Requiring complex coordination between brain and body, it is baffling to consider why it came about in the first place. No one knows, for instance, why the larynx descended in the neck to make the physiology of speech possible. And consider the complex neural structures that the brain had to develop in order to comprehend and produce speech. Speech is generated in Wernicke's area and transmitted to Broca's area for encoding (fig. 6, chapter 4). The motor program is then passed on to the motor cortex which coordinates the appropriate articulatory organs. In speech comprehension, signals arrive in the auditory cortex from the ear and are transferred to the adjacent Wernicke's area, where they are interpreted. While in modern children these bodily structures and neurological programs are in place by the age of two, because of genetic heredity, in the first speakers they had to be developed tabula rasa. Why this happened remains a mystery. All that glottogenetics can do is speculate about how iconic language became speech. This is what I have attempted to do in this chapter. The explanation that I have based on the NS is similar, incidentally, to the theories proposed by many other glottogeneticists. The following one put forward by Valsiner and Allik (1982: 255) is a case in point: At some time period in the phylogeny of man, when the total body communication system had been in use as the medium for a representational sign system of some kind and when it appeared preferable to use a sign system less iconic and quicker in execution, the vocal channel gradually began to code the representations present in the visual-kinesthetic signs of the communicational usage. The body movement signs became associated with different vocalizations, and the vocalizations themselves changed due to the growing coordination between the channels due to the total body movement synchrony. Swadesh (1971) gave a somewhat similar account of the origin of audio-oral osmosis. Positing that sound and gesture must have overlapped in early humans, he proposed, for instance, the following hypothetical scenario to explain the origin of the use of nasal phonemes to express negation (Swadesh 1971: 193):
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The use of nasal phonemes in the negative in so many languages in the world must in some way be related to the prevailing nasal character of the grunt. In English, the vocable of denial is almost always nasal; but it can vary from a nasalized vowel to any of the three nasal consonants: ã!ã, õ!õ, m!m, n!n. . . . Why is nasality so common? Surely because it results from the relaxation of the velum; . . . the most usual position of the velum is down, and the most relaxed form of grunt is nasal. The prevalence of nasals in the negative . . . may therefore be due to the fact that they are based on grunts. Fónagy (1983: 343) has been among the few to mention the possibility that the transition from osmosis to conceptualization was made possible by Metaphor. Although he does not develop this insight into a glottogenetic scenario, his eloquent articulation of this insight is to the point: Metaphor might be a candidate for bridging the gap between intonational and conceptual ideation. Metaphors imply, of course, the presence of words based on conceptual thinking. The metaphoric process starts, however, with the rejection and denial of existing adequate terms in order to create a new concept. Today we no longer distinguish between language and speechthe two having become so intrinsically intertwined. But in cases of breakdown the difference between the two immediately comes to the surface, since there can be breakdown in language as symbolic code (impairments in syntax), or in speech as physiological activity (impairments in articulation) (e.g., Danesi 1988). As Glucksberg (1988: 239) has recently emphasized, we must not forget that language is not just speech. Sign languages for the deaf have always been used to teach not only communication but reading and writing. Once these skills have been mastered they are indistinguishable from those of the hearing: What the literature on sign language and the cognitive accomplishments of the deaf tells us is that a "language" may indeed be necessary for complex human cognition but that the "language" is itself not restricted to spoken speech, or for that matter any particular form or modality. What seems crucial is some system of symbols that permit two indispensable and crucial activities: communicating with others and manipulating symbolic information. It may turn out that Watson (1925) was right after allthought is speechbut it is the speech of the mind, not of the tongue, that matters.
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Six From Percepts to Concepts: The Metaphoricity Hypothesis Metaphor is our most striking evidence of abstractive seeing, of the power of the human mind to use presentational symbols. Langer 1948: 14 The crucial feature of the Vichian glottogenetic scenario is Metaphor. As Fónagy (1983) has also suggested, it is the evolutionary link between perception and conceptualization. Metaphor is the feature that allowed the primitive mind to connect different percepts in the deep level and thus to generate first-order concepts. These then came to form the foundations of surface-level cognition. At this cognitive level Metaphor continued its work by connecting first-order concepts to generate second-order ones. As it proceeded to generate more abstract concepts by connecting those of the second order, the rational mind, with its syntactic abilities, emerged to stabilize the increasingly complex surface-level system. Metaphor, therefore, can be said to be the feature of the human mind that laid the foundations upon which abstract rational thought was constructed. The plausibility of this hypothesis rests on showing that it is compatible with several kinds of evidence. First of all, Metaphor must be shown to be a fundamental mode of thought and of communication. Then, it must be shown to be tied to iconicitythe kind of thinking that it transformed (and continues to transform) into abstract concepts. Neurologically, this would mean showing that it is programmed by both hemispheres of the brain, not just the verbal LH. Finally, it must be shown to be a vital strategy in the kind of creative thinking that the mind occasionally requires to fill gaps that may occasionally arise.
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The Nature of Metaphor Metaphor evokes as many perceptions among people as it does definitions. Aristotle is generally believed to be the one who, in his Rhetoric and Poetics, coined the termitself a "metaphor" (meta "beyond" + pherein "to carry")to refer to the common verbal phenomenon of implicit comparison (A implies B, or A is B). Aristotle's view has come to be known as the comparison theory of verbal metaphor. As Eco (1984: 88) has recently pointed out, despite "the thousands and thousands of pages written about metaphor" since then, Aristotle's theory has never been eclipsed. Aristotle noticed that metaphors revealed something fundamental about the human mind. But he did not pursue this line of thinking. He simply acknowledged that metaphorical language was psychologically powerful, but affirmed that it was, in essence, an ornamental or stylistic option to more basic literal ways of thinking and speaking. The literalist view of meaning has survived practically unaltered since Aristotle's time (Bickerton 1969; Thomas 1969; Grice 1975; Sperber and Wilson 1987; Fogelin 1988). Such models posit that metaphors are derivatives of literal, propositional modes of semantic programming. Others (e.g., Chomsky 1964) go further and view metaphors as deviations from semantic rules. But in the last few decades this view of metaphorization has changed drastically. As Hoffman (1983: 35) quippedmetaphoricallyless than a decade ago, the study of metaphorical language has come to be "a very hot topic" in the cognitive and social sciences. Although scientific interest in the subject was stimulated after Richards (1936) and Black (1962) put forward so-called interactionist models of the metaphorical capacity, it was not until the 1970s that scientific investigations of metaphorical language programming (MLP) started to proliferate. In 1977 an in-depth study by Pollio and his associates (Pollio, Barlow, Fine, and Pollio 1977) showed that MLP is a pervasive process in cognition and communication. They found that speakers of English utter, on average, three thousand novel verbal metaphors and seven thousand idioms per week. It became clear from their study that verbal metaphor was not a mere stylistic option to literal language. Since 1977 the number of volumes, symposia, courses and article-length studies on MLP in the cognitive and social sciences has reached astronomical proportions, as scientists come more and more to the conclusions that Vico reached two and a half centuries ago. The fact that I cannot possibly give a review of the relevant literature here attests to its mind-boggling dimensions. In 1979, Booth (1979: 49) remarked that "metaphor seems to be taking over not only the world of humanists but the world of the social and natural sciences as well". Booth went on to add anecdotally that, if one were to count the number of bibliographical entries on MLP published in the year 1977 alone, one would be forced to surmise
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that by the year 2039 there would be "more students of metaphor on Earth than people." The first effort to provide a bibliographical background to the scientific study of MLPhenceforward metaphorologywas Warren Shibbles's mammoth 1971 volume Metaphor: An Annotated Bibliography and History, which contained some four thousand entries. In 1985 Noppen compiled an exhaustive bibliography of post-1970 publications (up to 1985), which he has recently updated to 1990 with Hols (Noppen and Hols 1990). In 1986 metaphorologists got their own journal, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, which grew out of the Metaphor Research Newsletter published by R. R. Hoffman and M. K. Smith at Adelphi University (19821985). In the next section I will restrict my survey of metaphorological theories and models to the ones that I conside to be the most germane to the assessment of the metaphoricity hypothesis. "Literalist" and "deviationist" models of verbal metaphor are of no particular use to my purposes; both claim that literal speech is primary and that metaphors are deviations or anomalies. Only the studies that assess these theories will be looked at here. Then I will survey some of the relevant research within metaphorology. I should alert the reader to the fact that most theories and models of Metaphor are themselves metaphors. And, as Vico predicted long ago, it is virtually impossible to talk about anything abstract without recourse to Metaphor. This is because abstract thought is the direct offspring of the metaphorical capacity. Metaphor spawned our Age-of-the-Gods myths and it continues to generate our Age-of-Humans scientific theories (e.g., Black 1962; MacCormac 1976; Hoffman 1980; Gentner 1982). As Edie (1976: 193) has appropriately remarked, it is "impossible to understand the human mind or human behavior except by making a metaphorical detour." This is the way our mind works. But at the same time it allows us to understand what we ourselves have constructed, including theories and models of Metaphor. As Ortony (1979a: 1) has aptly phrased it, "language perception and knowledge are inextricably interdependent." Theories and Models Aristotle's comparison theory is still, in my opinion, the basis for any discussion of metaphors. Over the course of the centuries, the Aristotelian model has been rejected (Gumpel 1984), refined (Di Pietro 1978), and expanded (Richards 1936; Black 1962). But its basic premise, expressed in the formula A is B, has never been completely discarded. The comparison view implies an analogy between two concepts or entities. Verbal metaphor is construed, in effect, to be a condensed simile. Similarly, so-called substitution theories, which are versions of comparison theories, assume an analogy that is said to remedy gaps in literal expression. As Nuessel (1991: 42) characterizes them, substitution theories claim that "the speaker employs
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an expression which actually means (or refers) to something else." The comparison and substitution theories can be seen, in actual fact, to offer different perspectives on the same phenomenon. As Di Pietro (1978) suggests, the metaphorical capacity inheres in the ability to establish similarities among phenomenologically dissimilar thingsat times by comparison, at others by substitutionto create models of the world that the mind can utilize in many diverse ways. Metaphor is a "tool" that the mind uses to explore reality and to give order and coherence to our otherwise chaotic experiences. In fact, Metaphor can be said to fabricate similarity and resemblance in the world of human experience. As Gardner (1982a: 161) has aptly pointed out, Metaphor allows the mind "to perceive a resemblance between elements in two separate domains or areas of experience and to link them together in linguistic form." Vico was perhaps the first to recognize the psychological importance of Metaphor. He traced it to what I have called in this book the deep level of mind, where it arose epiphenomenologically from the interaction of the fantasia and the ingegno. Over a century later the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1873 [1979]) came to the pessimistic conclusion that Metaphor constructed "reality" in our minds and therefore that there is nothing "real" (Cantor 1982; Gumpel 1984: 2528; Schrift 1985; 1990: 12343; Crawford 1988). He thus wanted to "deconstruct" the philosophical systems built up by the metaphorical capacity so as to expose them for what they werefabrications of our image-laden speech. Nietzsche also put forward a fairly contemporary-sounding theory of Metaphor. Like Vico, he saw it as a transformational process that converted nerve impulses into images. These then became sound-words through some form of osmosis. The pairing of images and sound-words produced our concepts. When these were stored into verbal memory they lost their imagery content. The Vico-Nietzschean perspective of Metaphor as a fundamental transformational capacity of the mind has only recently been receiving the attention that it merits from the very scientists who study the mind (e.g., Haskell 1987b). The best-known modification to Aristotle's comparison theory is the one put forward by Richards (1936) half a century ago. Richards accepted Aristotle's basic idea that a domain, A, is related to another domain, B. But he added that the association between the two was not just one of mere comparison (A is B/A implies B) or of simple substitution (B stands for A), but of "interaction." Richards designated the initial A-domain as the tenor of a verbal metaphor, and the B-domain as its vehicle. The semantic base, or ground, on which these two are implanted generates an interaction between the two perceptually based semantic domains. Figure 7 illustrates how this interaction can be conceptualized. The meaning of the metaphor occurs in the area of intersection of these two domains (T = tenor, V = vehicle, I = area of meaning interaction). The interactionist model claims that both the A-referent and the B-referent retain a separate part of their meanings but create a new meaning
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Figure 7. The Interactionist Model of Metaphor. domain which generates an array of shared semantic attributes. Black emphasized as well that the two domains (A, B) are to be regarded as "systems" rather than as discrete units. A verbal metaphor works by means of the associated implications generated by these two systems. It is the cognitive interaction between tenor and vehicle that produces an open-ended meaning structure. To see how the Richards-Black model might actually work, consider the verbal metaphor John is a gorilla. In this example the tenor or A-domain encompasses the semantic attributes of the person John, while the vehicle or B-domain encompasses those of the animal gorilla. When the two are associated metaphorically the result is an area of semantic interaction whereby John acquires some of the semantic traits of the gorilla and vice versa. In iconic terms, a kind of semantic metamorphosis seems to be unfolding in our thought patterns: John appears to take on the physical characteristics of a "gorilla," if we concentrate on the tenor; but if we focus on the vehicle, then our mind seems to portray the gorilla as taking on the attributes of "John." These two "metamorphoses" generally take place simultaneously. The meaning structure, or ground, of the metaphor is open-ended. Any attempt to paraphrase it with literal language will never quite capture its essence. The Richards-Black model (see Wheelwright 1954; and Perrine 1971 for similar models) has made it obvious that a metaphor cannot be paraphrased completely by literal language (see Sapir 1977 on this point). This applies in particular to so-called implicit metaphors, whose tenors and/or vehicles are not stated explicitly. So, in a metaphor such as She broke the ice with her kind words, the action of "ice-breaking" provides an iconic context for the "establishment of social contact." But the meaning of these two domains creates an area of shared semantic attributes that is impossible to paraphrase completely. In fact, it can be claimed that the degree of open-endedness in the area of interaction of a metaphor is a measure of its overall novelty and creative effect (see Sternberg 1985: 16474 for descriptions of corroborative experimental evidence). A novel metaphor evokes a high interactive imagery content, whereas a constantly used, or conceptual, metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) evokes a low imagery content. A recent version of interactionist theory is the one put forward by Lakoff,
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Johnson, and their associates (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Turner 1989), who refer to the vehicle as the ''source domain" and to the tenor as the "target domain." The instantiations of the source are always evident in a discourse or poetic text, while the target domain may or may not be mentioned. This view of verbal metaphor extends it beyond the sentence level to encompass discourse and textuality. Metaphors vary in force and novelty. A conventionalized metaphor is automatic, effortless, and established by the community. To say that ideas are geometrical objectsthat they are parallel, diametrically opposite, etc.is a reflex discourse pattern that we have acquired from our culture. But other metaphors are conceptually new and thus require us to reshape the way we think. These are highly characteristic of poetry. Metaphor involves a thought process by which we understand one kind of thing experientially in terms of another. It is necessary, when discussing verbal metaphors, to distinguish among "conceptual," "frozen," and "novel" types. Conceptual metaphors are really "metaphorical formulas" that our cultures have made available to us. These formulas have crystallized from continual associations between a specific tenor and a class of vehiclesvehicles belonging to the same vocabulary theme known as a lexical field. The result is a conceptual domain that associates the entire lexical field with the tenor. So, for instance, if the tenor ideas is continually conceptualized in terms of different geometrical figures and relations (points, lines, etc), a new category of conceptualization eventually emerges: Ideas are geometrical figures and relations: Those ideas are circular. I don't see the point of your idea. Her ideas are central to the discussion. Their ideas are diametrically opposite. Conceptual metaphors or formulas, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have persuasively argued, underlie our culturally specific models of reality. They result from constant interaction between a single tenor and vehicles belonging to a particular lexical field. These formulas are, of course, surface level constructs. This is why it is now possible to write computer programs to generate conceptual metaphors à la Lakoff and Johnson (Martin 1990). But it must not be forgotten that they are the endproducts of a more fundamental creative force. The latter can never be simulated computationally. To see why this is so, consider the following hypothetical reconstruction of the origin of the conceptual formula More is up/Less is down. In the deep level of mind, image schemata are being continually generated on the basis of sensory perceptions and affective responses. The schema "verticality," for instance, is probably forged out of our perceptual experiences connected with standing upright, climbing stairs, looking up, etc. Let us assume that a certain individual might have spontaneously used this schema
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during a conversation in association with a "quantity" schema. This individual might have said something like Prices keep going up. Then another individualperhaps an interlocutormight have imitated the model constructed by the first individual to say Yes, and my earnings have fallen. Such associations between up and morei.e., between verticality and quantityin such routine communicative exchanges lead eventually to the concept More is up/Less is down. Only after this has transpired can a computational algorithm for generating instantiations of this formula be envisaged. Of course, a computational algorithm can be devised to make random associations between different A- and B-domains, and therefore to generate "novel" metaphors just like the individual of our hypothetical story. But for these random metaphors to become meaningful, and therefore communicatively usable, it takes a human mind in a specific social context to interpret them, i.e., to "metaphorize" them. Frozen metaphors are those that have lost their metaphoricity through repeated usage. The word see when used in such expressions as I don't see what you mean is a frozen metaphor. It started out as an association between the biological act of seeing outside the body with the imaginary act of seeing within it. Frozen metaphors can be definedin terms of the notions I have been using in this bookas first-order concepts. The productivity of Metaphor, however, makes its presence felt when we create a completely new metaphorical association. Consider how this creative capacity might work. Let us assume that I am not feeling well at the moment. Outside it is raining and I happen to see the rain dripping down my window. At that moment, my metaphorical mind allows me to make the association spontaneously between the drips of rain (B) and my bodily state (A). So, if someone were to ask me how I felt at that moment, I would probably say something like I'm feeling drippy today. My mind, through its metaphorical capacity, sought out a perceptual unit in the outside world that it could associate with a perceptual unit in my inner world. The amazing thing is that my interlocutor would have no difficulty whatsoevergiven the context in which the metaphor was utteredinterpreting my statement in the way I intended it. There are no contemporary theories that, in my view, have added much more to the Richards-Black model of Metaphor. Current experimental work, in fact, assumes this model. Disagreements in interpreting the findings coming out of metaphorology seem to arise when researchers fail to realize that Metaphor creates similarity and resemblance, not seeks them out. In fact, the only way we conceptualize "similarity" or "resemblance" is metaphorically. Research While the current scientific interest in Metaphor may have had few implications for a theory or a model that would satisfy everyone working within the field of metaphorology, it certainly has produced a plethora of empirical
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knowledge on how Metaphor works at both the deep and surface levels of mind. To put it another way, the data that have been accumulating on Metaphor can be used to substantiate Vico's claim that it was the crucial factor in the development of language: i.e., they suggest, cumulatively, that the Vichian blueprint of mind is a plausible one. As indicated above, even a schematic outline of the research on Metaphor would be well beyond the scope of the present discussion. Consequently, I have had to be rather selective, extracting from the mass of findings only those recurrent patterns that are germane to the glottogenetic scenario I have sketched in chapter 3. Although it is only in the last few decades that cognitive and social scientists have taken a keen interest in MLP (metaphorical language programming), the experimental investigation of MLP can be traced back to the first decades of the present century when Karl Bühler (e.g., 1951 [1908]) and his associates (e.g., Staehlin 1914) collected intriguing data on how subjects paraphrased proverbs. In the 1950s and 1960s a handful of psychologists started to look at such issues as the effects of Metaphor on concept-formation (e.g., Osgood and Suci 1953; Asch 1955; Brown, Leiter, and Hildum 1957), the neurological programming of Metaphor (e.g., Weinstein 1964), the effects of context on the choice of literal vs. metaphorical words (Koen 1965), and the role of imagery in Metaphor (e.g., Asch 1958; Werner and Kaplan 1963). Even Skinner, in his highly controversial treatment of language ontogenesis, Verbal Behavior (1957), had the insight and foresight to include verbal metaphors in his overall theory of verbal behavior. In my view, Asch's (1955) study signaled the turning point for the serious investigation of Metaphor as a psychological process. Asch examined metaphors derived from the vocabularies of sensation of several phylogenetically unrelated languages (warm, cold, heavy, etc.). All the languages he considered used the same modality pattern, even though the specific referential domains were different. For example, he found that hot stood for rage in Hebrew, enthusiasm in Chinese, sexual arousal in Thai, and energy in Hausa. As Brown (1958a: 146) aptly commented, Asch's study showed that "there is an undoubted kinship of meanings" in different languages that "seem to involve activity and emotional arousal." Put in Vichian terms, Asch's findings seem to corroborate the notion that Metaphor transforms perceived experiences into conceptual domains. They also showed that emotional states, no matter what language was used to encode them, constituted universals in human perception. The recent work of Ortony, Clore, and Collins (1988) has, in fact, confirmed that emotions can be separated from the language used to speak about them. Empirical work on MLP proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s. The two findings from the research that are the most relevant to the metaphoricity hypothesis are the following: metaphors are not alternatives to literal language; they are embedded in iconic thought.
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The evidence that Metaphor is not only a pervasive feature of routine conversation, but that it often constitutes the only means by which certain topics can be verbalized, is now a widely accepted fact. As Winner (1982: 253) states, the literature has established that if "people were limited to strictly literal language, communication would be severely curtailed, if not terminated." As mentioned in the previous chapter, the research on so-called anomalous stringsColorless green ideas sleep furiouslyhas shown how the metaphorical capacity allows subjects to extract meaning from virtually any well-formed combination of words (Pollio and Burns 1977; Pollio and Smith 1979). In the Vichian model of mind, literal speech can be said to emerge when metaphorically forged surface-level concepts have become routinized through constant usage. The cognitive salience of Metaphor can be seen instantly when contextual information is missing from an utterance such as The murderer is an animal. Our immediate inclination is to interpret it metaphorically, not literally. It is only when we are told that the murderer was an actual "animal" that a literal interpretation comes into focus. The system of meaning that crystallizes at the surface level is an accumulation of metaphorically generated information on the actual worlds of reality. Metaphor, however, continues to do its work at the deep level, making possible an infinite universe of potential worlds. This is precisely what we mean when we say that we can imagine anything we want inside our minds. Verbrugge and McCarrell (1977) and Ortony (1979a) have shown that the relation of the two domains (A, B) generates a wide range of interpretations when their order is reversed: Surgeons are butchers vs. Butchers are surgeons. This finding casts doubt on literalist feature-mapping accounts of verbal metaphor (see also Connor and Kogan 1980; Paivio and Clark 1986). Explaining verbal metaphor in terms of a "mapping" relation, whereby the literal meaning of one domain, the vehicle, is mapped onto that of another, the tenor, ignores the fact that the tenor-vehicle interaction creates an open-ended meaning structure. Meaning is created by the MLP process itself; it is not preexistent in the A and B units. Literalist accounts of MLP would have to be supported by research showing that metaphors require special processing demands. According to such accounts we purportedly try out a literal interpretation first when we hear a sentence, choosing a metaphorical one (by means of feature-mapping processes) only when a literal interpretation is not possible from the context (Grice 1975). This model of MLP starts with a literal interpretation stage and then proceeds to a rejection of this interpretation in favor of a metaphorical one according to context. Metaphor is thus seen to be an extension of the literal-semantic features of its referents. Psychologically, this should require more processing time. But as it turns out, this is not the case. Given sufficient context, no differences in processing time have been documented between literal and metaphorical utterances (e.g., Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds, and Antos 1978; Swinney and Cutler 1979; Hoff-
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man and Honeck 1987; Keysar 1989). Hoffman and Kemper (1987: 175) summarize the main findings as follows: "Most of the evidence shows that there is not a special metaphor comprehension process, or that such a process can be truncated." Perhaps the most significant finding of the research on MLP with respect to the metaphoricity hypothesis is that it is connected to iconicity. In the Vichian primitive mind, Metaphor transformed deep-level iconic units into surface-level conceptual ones. As pointed out above, a large portion of the research on MLP supports this very hypothesis (e.g., Billow 1975; Honeck, Reichman, and Hoffman 1975; Paivio 1979; Harris, Lahey, and Marsalek 1980; Johnson and Malgady 1980; Marschark, Katz, and Paivio 1983; Dorfmueller and Honeck 1981; Paivio and Clark 1986; Marks, Hammeal, and Bornstein 1987). It has confirmed that the more novel a metaphor, the more likely it is to be comprehended in iconic ways. In 1975 Billow studied the effect of pictorial aids on verbal metaphor comprehension in children. The metaphor The branch of the tree was her pony was accompanied by a picture of a girl riding a tree branch. Billow found that such images did not significantly improve comprehension. He concluded that metaphors were already high in imagery content and that accompanying pictorial supports added little information to the already iconically structured interpretation process. Sometimes it even contributed irrelevant detail that led to erroneous interpretations. In the same year Honeck, Reichmann, and Hoffman (1975) published somewhat contrasting findings. They presented adult subjects with high- and low-imagery proverbs accompanied by appropriate and inappropriate interpretations as cues for recall. The researchers discovered that appropriate interpretations were the most effective cues for the high-imagery proverbs. This suggested to them that imagery content did not have a role to play in comprehensiona view shared by others as well (e.g., Brewer 1975). But a few years later Verbrugge and McCarrell (1977) presented data to suggest that iconicity did indeed play a role in metaphor comprehension, not as a conscious imaging strategy, but as a perceptual one. Novel metaphorsBillboards are warts on the landscapeelicited an interpretation pattern that could be prompted by the tenor, vehicle, or ground. The fact that the ground was a reliable prompt, even though it contained none of the words that appeared in the novel metaphors, led Verbrugge and McCarrell to think that some abstract relation must have inhered between tenor and vehicle that was perceived to be the sum of the attributes of each. Cumulatively, this line of investigation has made it obvious that meaning in a metaphor is much more than the sum of its parts. The imagery content embedded in metaphors is a cooperative strategy with other aspects of thinking in comprehension, not its determinant. Other studies suggest that imagery plays a role in some, but not all metaphors (e.g., Honeck, Voegtle, Dorfmueller, and Hoffman 1980). In one experiment, Reichmann and Coste (1980) presented two groups of subjects
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with highly imageable metaphors (He who spits alone himself will have it all in his face) or highly abstract ones (Reputation is commonly measured by the acre). One group was told to think of the imagery content which all the metaphors may have suggested; the other group was instructed to concentrate only on abstract meaning. Then both groups of subjects were asked to identify the interpretations provided for each metaphor. As it turned out, the imagery instructions seemed to interfere with meaning recognition, just as Billow's (1975) pictorial aids did in the case of children. But the experimental methods used by Reichmann and Coste took out the imagery content from the metaphors they used. In comprehending metaphors imagery is an embedded component of the meaning and cannot be separated from it. As Hoffman and Honeck (1980: 11) aptly observe, metaphors invariably "result in the creation of a percept or image that need not be filled in with details yet has rich potential for details and symbolism." When viewed globally, the experimental research suggests that the programming and interpretation of verbal metaphors involves the kind of perceptual thinking that has many of the characteristics of iconicity. It also suggests that the imagery content of verbal metaphors is not separable from other mental processes involved in comprehension. Even blind people have access to the imagery content of metaphors. The work of Kennedy (1984; Kennedy and Domander 1986) has shown that visually impaired people are capable of making appropriate line drawings of concepts such as wind, pain, shouting, etc. if they are given suitable contexts and metaphoric devices. As Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987, 1989) have indicated, it is therefore quite likely that the processing of metaphor involves image schemata: i.e., mental extrapolations of recurrent patterns (color, shape, dimension, motions, etc.) that are derived from our bodily reactions to the environment. Such schemata allow us to organize sensorially acquired percepts into conceptual categories. To sum up, the MLP research has lent support to several aspects of the metaphoricity hypothesis that are worth highlighting here: Metaphor involves iconic thinking. Metaphor is not an ornamental option in discourse. It is its defining characteristic. Metaphor fills conceptual gaps all the time. Concepts that are born as metaphors soon become frozen and thus lose their metaphoricity. When this happens they become part of the surface-level system and take on an increasing literal quality. Metaphor and Concept-Formation The Vichian theory of mind would seem to bridge the wide gap of knowledge that now exists in psychology between perception and concept-
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formation. What I will claim here is that percepts are independent of language. Percepts are formed at the deep level of consciousness as iconically transformed sense impressions and affective responses. These are then transformed by Metaphor into concepts. Concepts are therefore language-specific: i.e., they are formed by the specific metaphors that people and cultures use to make associations among deep-level percepts. At the surface level of mind concept-formation is equivalent to languageformation. It is at this level that we "think in words." This was, arguably, the most important finding of Vygotsky's (1962) work on language development. He found that language and thought became highly interdependent during the adolescent years when language started to function largely as the servant of thought. But he noted that the two were distinct in origin during childhood. In the next section I will look at what evidence and arguments there are to suggest that concepts are indeed derived from Metaphor and are therefore language-specific. Then, in the section after that I will look at the neurological coordinates of Metaphor. The reason for attempting a neurological description is that the metaphoricity hypothesis predicts that the programming of novel verbal metaphors should involve both the RH and the LH: i.e., it should involve the collaboration of the iconic and verbal parts of the brain. Concepts Although the question of the relation of language to conceptualization is as old as civilization itself, it was really in the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt in the previous century (1836 [1988]) and in that of the anthropological linguists Edward Sapir (1921) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) in this century that it received its most meaningful formulations (see Brown 1967; Miller 1968; Penn 1972; Slagle 1974; Stam 1980; Bloom 1981; Malotki 1983 for varying perspectives of this question). According to Sapir and Whorf, concepts, and the social behaviors that accompany them, are not independent of the categories of the language that encodes them. Known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH), their theory claims that the categories of one's particular language are much more than mediators of thought subject to universal cognitive constraints. Rather, the categories are considered to be shapers of the very thought patterns they embody. In other words, the LRH makes the claim that language contributes directly to the ways in which we think about the world. To quote Sapir (1921: 75): Human beings do not live in the object world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language system which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely
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an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. While Sapir's overall assessment is a convincing one, from a Vichian standpoint it requires one significant modification. The relativity of thought occurs only at the cognitive surface level. In the deep level of mind, meaning is generated by bodily based imaginative processes. Given the universality of bodily structure and of sensory perception, it is in the deep level that universals of iconic thought-organization are forged. As Vico (NS: 374) puts it, "human nature, so far as it is like that of animals, carries with it this property, that the senses are its sole way of knowing things." Differences in thought occur only in surface-level cognitive structures which are embedded in specific cultures. Thought, therefore, exists without language at a more fundamental levelin the imaginationbut it becomes language-dependent at the metaphorically fabricated surface level. At this level languages serve to differentiate and codify those conceptual distinctions deemed to be significant by a culture. Problems in thinking about "reality," therefore, can be traced to the metaphorical hypotheses humans make about physical existence which have become conceptualized as surface-level informational structures. All attempts at this level to describe the world are necessarily language-specific. And since language concepts vary from culture to culture, a degree of relativistic thinking is bound to emerge. What is remarkable about this whole mental scenario is that we can understand such things as "relativity" primarily through our own imaginations. This was Vico's greatest discovery. The way in which all humans imagine the world is grounded in a universal deep level of mind. As a case in point, consider the concept anger. In all humans there is a biologically programmed set of response patterns that, through metaphorization, we have come to classify at the surface level under the category anger. The origin of this concept, however, is to be found in the deep level. An instinctive response, such as an increase in muscle tension, is registered as a percept by the deep level. Other response patterns associated with the same affective state are registered as well. These percepts are organized by the deep level into a model of feeling that all humans can intuitively identify. At this level "anger" is a perceived state. Through the workings of Metaphor, some of the percepts in this model are then connected to each other to form the concept anger. At this higher level anger is conceived in terms of the specific percepts selected by Metaphorbodily temperature, redness, etc.: I'm boiling with anger; I'm red with anger; etc. The transformational process from affective state to concrete perception to conceptualization has now been completed. Anger has been transferred from the world of affective states to the world of conceptualization. Since Metaphor is an individual or cultural mental activity, the conceptualization of anger will
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Figure 8. The effect of Labeling on Perception (from the experiment by Carmichael, Hogan, and Walter in 1932). now vary from person to person and from culture to culture. (See Kövecses 1986, 1988, 1990 for detailed treatments of emotion concepts). The research on concept-formation is clearly of relevance to the metaphoricity hypothesis. Consider the interesting experiment conducted by Carmichael, Hogan and Walter in 1932. These researchers found that when they showed subjects a picture such as the one in figure 8, and then asked them later to reproduce it, their reproductions were influenced by the verbal label assigned to the picture. The drawing was generally reproduced as something resembling "eyeglasses" by those subjects who were shown the eyeglasses label. On the other hand, those who were shown the dumbbells label tended to reproduce it as something resembling dumbbells. This suggested to the researchers that language influenced the "perception" of an object. In the 1950s several studies came forward to support this conclusion (e.g., Herman et al. 1957; Hanson 1958). But from a Vichian perspective, such experiments only confirmed the fact that language will dominate any task that involves conceptualization. The experimental tasks designed by the researchers were all cognitive in nature. The work on prototypical thinking has shed some valuable light on the nature of concept-formation. The study of so-called prototypical or basic-level categories is usually traced to Roger Brown's classic 1958 paper "How Shall a Thing Be Called?" (Brown 1958b) in which he pointed out that children did not learn the names for objects at the most general or most specific levels. Rather, they seemed to acquire categories characterized by the most typical name for them. While a dime can be called a coin or money (general term), or a 1972 dime (specific term), we somehow feel that dime is its real name. The word dime defines a prototypical concept. Money involves a movement upward toward a superordinate category; while 1972 dime implies a movement downward toward a subordinate category (see also Rosch 1973, 1975a, 1981).
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Prototupicality theory in psychology (see Smith 1988) is the counterpart of markedness theory in linguistics (see Andrews 1990 and Battistella 1990 for recent accounts). The latter claims that we "mark" certain verbal categories as more typical than others. So, for instance, the indefinite article form a in English is "unmarked," i.e., more typical than an, which is "marked." A "marked" form occurs in fewer contexts and is therefore cognitively more salient when it does occur. The work on prototypicality and markedness has shown that the mind builds conceptual categories from the most common and frequent elements that occur in the perceived environment. It is interesting to note here that Suzanne Langer (1948: 129) has compared the process of how concepts are formed from perceptual activities to a "fantasy." Suppose a person sees, for the first time in his life, a train arriving at a station. He probably carries away what we should call a "general impression" of noise and mass. Very possibly he has not noticed the wheels going round, but only the rods moving like a runner's knees. He does not instantly distinguish smoke from steam, nor the hissing from the squeaking. Yet the next time he watches a train pull in the process is familiar. His mind retains a fantasy which "means" the general concept, "a train arriving at a station." Everything that happens the second time is, to him, like or unlike the first time. The fantasy . . . was abstracted from the very first instance, and made the later ones "familiar." Metaphor is at the core of scientific theory formulation (Black 1962; MacCormac 1976; Hoffman 1980; Gentner 1982). By making new connections and relating concepts, Metaphor guides the rational part of the mind in its quest to give structure to the world of matter. Science involves things we can never seeatoms, waves, gravitational forces, magnetic fields, etc. So scientists use their metaphorical capacities to get a look, so to speak, at this hidden matter. Waves are said to undulate through empty space like water waves ripple through a still pond; atoms to leap from one quantum state to another; electrons to travel in circles around an atomic nucleus; and so on. The physicist K. C. Cole (1984: 156) puts it as follows: The words we use are metaphors; they are models fashioned from familiar ingredients and nurtured with the help of fertile imaginations. "When a physicist says an electron is like a particle," writes physics professor Douglas Giancoli, "he is making a metaphorical comparison like the poet who says 'love is like a rose.' In both images a concrete object, a rose or a particle, is used to illuminate an abstract idea, love or electron." As physicist Robert Jones (1982: 4) has also pointed out, for the scientist Metaphor serves as "an evocation of the inner connection among things." This is probably why Fernand Hallyn (1990) has recently referred to science as a thought system that gives the world a "poetic structure." In true
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Vichian style, Hallyn contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from the one that undergirds myth or poetry. All of science has a rhetorical, or more precisely, metaphorical structure. Even the nature of experimentation can be seen in this light. Experimentation is a search for connections, linkages, associations of some sort or other. As Rom Harré (1981: 23) points out, most experiments involve ''the attempt to relate the structure of things, discovered in an exploratory study, to the organization this imposes on the processes going on in that structure." And as Ormiston and Sassower (1989) have argued, the technique of scientific experimentation has always been tied to our narrative mode of putting things together into a coherent story or narration that would make sense only in the cultural milieu in which it was forged. There is no knowledge independent of the specific capacities of our minds. Euclidean geometry, for instance, can be said to give visual structure to the world. But this structure can be changed to suit new conditions and conceptualizations. When Nicholas Lobachevski (17931856) literally imagined that Euclid's parallel lines would "meet" in some context (e.g., at the poles of a globe), he gave the same world a different structurea non-Euclidean one (Wolff 1963: 6395; Davis and Hersh 1986). As Gregory (1988: 199) has put it, scientific explanations "no matter how wonderful, are stories about how we got from where we were to where we are." But then, this is how the human mind actually makes discoveries. Our capacity to metaphorize is both a constraint on what we are capable of knowing and a powerful means to an end. As MacCormac (1985: 47) has put it: Metaphors bring about changes in the ways in which we perceive the world, and these conceptual images often bring about changes in the ways in which we act in the world. Some of the most dramatic changes in our environment have resulted from changes in our scientific understanding based on changes in metaphors. The Neurological Coordinates The metaphoricity hypothesis can also be formulated in neurological terms. If it is true that Metaphor transforms the iconic world of the deep level into the verbal one of the surface level, then the programming of verbal metaphors should involve an interaction of the RH with the LH. And this, as a matter of fact, turns out to be the case. The relevant research on MLP has shown that it has a content-related locus in the RH and a form-related one in the LH. The evidence for this comes primarily from the study of brain-damaged patients (e.g., Foldi, Cicone, and Gardner 1983; Millar and Whitaker 1983). In 1964, Weinstein was among the first to conduct a clinical study, demonstrating that patients with LH damage had difficulty in establishing the boundaries of phonetic and semantic categories, whereas RH patients experienced no such diffi-
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culties. But the RH patients had virtually lost the ability to comprehend and produce metaphors. The experiment that has become a classic point of reference on the neurological programming of Metaphor is the one by Winner and Gardner (1977). These two researchers presented a series of verbal metaphors to various subjects asking them to select one of four response pictures which best portrayed the meaning of the metaphor. For the sentence A heavy heart can really make a difference the subjects were shown four pictures from which to choose: a person crying ( = metaphorical meaning); a person staggering under the weight of a huge red heart ( = literal meaning); a five-hundred-pound weight ( = a representation emphasizing the adjective heavy); a red heart ( = a representation emphasizing the noun phrase red heart). The subjects were divided into aphasics (i.e., subjects with LH damage), patients with RH damage, and a normal control group. Normals gave five times as many metaphorical responses; but the RH patients could respond only with equal frequency to metaphorical and literal cues. Winner and Gardner thus established a link between the ground of a metaphor and the RH of the brain, making it possible to hypothesize that the ground of a verbal metaphor is programmed by the RH. In the same year, Stachowiak, Huber, Poeck, and Kerschensteiner (1977) conducted a similar type of study and came to a similar conclusion. These researchers read subjects sentence stories and then asked them to pick from a set of five drawings the one which best described what happened to the main character of each one. In one of the sentences a metaphorical idiom was included. The groups tested were aphasics, RH patients, and normals. The researchers found that, of the three groups, the RH patients were the ones who showed the most inability to go beyond literal meaning. Since the early 1980s the evidence in favor of a RH involvement in MLP has been steadily mounting. Hier and Kaplan (1980) found that RH patients exhibited deficits in explaining the meaning of proverbs. Wapner, Hamby, and Gardner (1981) demonstrated that RH patients tended to exhibit significant difficulty in deriving the moral of a story, offering, in general, a literal response. The work of Brownell, Potter, and Michelow (1984) and Brownell (1988), has added further support to the Winner and Gardner finding that the RH is involved to some degree in MLP, even if it is not clear what its specific role might be. The picture that emerges from the research, therefore, suggests that the RH is the locus for the content-structure, or ground, of a metaphor. The RH
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has also been shown to be crucial for discourse-related, context-sensitive language. Aphasics, for instance, continue to use intonation patterns correctly (Danly and Shapiro 1982), suggesting a RH location for this function; RH patients, on the other hand, show little or no control of intonation (e.g., Heilman, Scholes, and Watson 1975; Ross and Mesulam 1979). Emotional questions tend to elicit leftward eye movements, thus showing an RH involvement in emotional discourse (Schwartz, Davidson, and Maer 1975). This kind of research has now exposed, as Segalowitz (1983: 41) puts it, "the inadequacy of the notion that one hemisphere can be completely dominant over the other in normal (complex) behavior." In the case of MLP, the RH can be said to control the iconic content-structure of a metaphor and the LH its form-structure and ultimate conceptualization. In novel metaphors it is highly likely that the neurological flow goes from the RH to the LH. As Landsberg (1988b: 212) has put it, from a phylogenetic perspective, "metaphor and related connotational, associational and iconic devices appear to be central" to the emergence of language, because their primary function was to allow the mind to "visualize'' auditory language via the capacities of the RH. Mentation, Narrativity, and Myth The metaphoricity hypothesis implies, finally, that concepts about the mind, in particular, should reveal a metaphorical origin. This means that an etymological probe of any word describing an intellectual activity should uncover a metaphorical layer underneath. A mind attempting to understand itself can only do so from the perspective of Metaphor. Mentation Concepts I will start with a specific example. The PIE word *dheghom "human" is an abstract concept, but its parts reveal a different story. This word literally means "earthly creature" (Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1990: 114). Examples such as this one make it obvious that the first abstract concepts were grounded in the senses or, as Roloff (1973: 163) puts it, that "the foundations of language are physiological." Words about how the mind worksmentation conceptsshow how Metaphor was, and continues to be, our primary means for understanding via modeling. This modeling function of the mind appears early on in childhood. Children attempt to make sense of concepts they have not yet acquired by using sensory analogues that are tied to their immediate environment (e.g., Gardner, Winner, Bechofer, and Wolf 1978; De Robertis 1981; Marks, Hammeal, and Bornstein 1987; Winner 1988; Vosniadou 1989). Metaphor becomes a culturally coded discourse strategy only from adolescence onward (Danesi 1989d). Recently, Sweetser (1990) has argued that visual perception, physical
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sensation, and abstraction are all interconnected. Expressions such as behold and catch sight of implicate abstract thinking through metaphorical modeling. Most of our mentation concepts were forged in this way (< = from): perceive
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ages, look at them, touch them, take them apart, see them from different perspectives, and so on. Not all words for mentation are, of course, constructed from sensory analogues. The word contemplate derives from Latin templum "temple"the temple being the place where one contemplates. And the word mind has referred exclusively to abstract mentation for at least five thousand years (Wescott 1978: 27). But by and large, our concepts for mentation seem to have been forged through a metaphorical modeling process that uses sensory perceptions as vehicles. These so-called root metaphors are no longer recognized as such because they have become conventionalized through protracted usage. Edie (1976: 165) offers the following relevant observation: A word which primarily designates a perceptual phenomenonfor example the perception of lightonce constituted is available for a new purpose and can be used with a new intentionfor example to denote the process of intellectual understanding, and we speak of (mental) illumination. Once established, the metaphorical use of the original word is no longer noticed; its essential ambiguity tends to fall below the level of awareness from the moment that it is taken as designating another, now distinguishable, experience. Narrativity and Myth Deep-level metaphorizing, in tandem with the structuring capacities of the ingegno, generated our first myths. As Frye (1981: 31) points out, myths are products of a purely metaphorical stage of cultural evolution when "there was as yet little sense of deductive inference or abstraction." They provided our early ancestors with a narrative framework for literally "making sense" of natural events and human actions and thus gave meaning and value to life (Eliade 1963; Wheelwright 1974; Lucente 1981; Liszka 1989). Vico (NS: 646) called them examples of "poetic history." The word myth derives from the Greek mythos "word," "speech," "tale of the gods." It is a metaphorical narrative that seeks to give order and coherence to experiences, events, and perceived phenomena. In the "Age of the Gods," myths were genuine ''theories" of the world. And narratives of all kinds continue to form the basis for imparting knowledge to children. There are no cultures without stories, fables, and legends. All cultures have created myths to explain their origins. The Zuni Indians, for instance, claim to have emerged from a mystical hole in the earth, thus establishing their kinship with the land (Milner 1990: 342). Myth-creation and story-telling in general reveal something rather unique about humans. Unlike other animals, humans possess the ingenuitythe ingegnoto invent stories of all kinds, true or not: We can, perverse and wily creatures that we are, speak to intentionally misinform. In addition, our speech may be totally unrelated to anticipated actions or real events. In other words, there are human but no animal story-
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tellers in either sense of that phrase, neither entertainers or liars. (Gaylin 1990: 28) As Lodge (1990: 141) has recently phrased it, narrativity "is one of the fundamental sense-making operations of the mind, and would appear to be both peculiar to and universal throughout humanity." It is a common experience that we remember stories more easily and vividly than we do isolated concepts and words. Lodge goes on further to give a concise definition of this form of human mentality (Lodge 1990: 142): The knowledge gained from or organised in narrative differs from the proposition knowledge in which science and philosophy are interested. The meaning of a narrative cannot be adequately encapsulated in a single proposition, like, say, the meaning of a scientific experiment. It has to be experienced in time, as process. Hence the essentially iterative nature of narrative and narrationfor example, the readiness of primitive or archaic peoples to hear the same stories recited again and again, or the pleasure sophisticated modern readers take in re-reading classic novels, or seeing the plays of Shakespeare performed repeatedly." Narrativity inheres in the structure of dreams (States 1988; Hunt 1989: 15979); of music, of dance, of drama, and of representational art generally. And it is the source of everyday discourse. As Nell (1988: 52) aptly phrases it, we "all share the ability to weave formless experience into narratives, we are all authors." Recent research (Jerome Bruner 1990; Britton and Pellegrini 1990) has made it obvious that narrative thinking is used by all humans everywhere. Leakey and Lewin (1978: 185) even see the structure of stories and language in the built environment. Narrativity is also the source of religious accounts of language origins. In Genesis, Adam is told by God that the names he decides to give the animals around him will be their proper names from that moment on. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field. (Genesis II, 1920) This account requires a few comments. First, it leaves us in no doubt that language is a human invention. God created the animals; Adam named them. Second, it is not true that this account supports conventionalist theorythe view that the connection between a name and an object is arbitrary and dictated by conventionas some would claim. There is no description of how Adam named the animals. He could easily have done so by means of onomatopoeia. Certainly Vico seems to have no doubts about the fact that Adam gave "names to things according to the nature of each" (NS: 401).
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What myths, religious accounts, and scientific theories have in common is narrative structure. Without such structure we would not be able to make sense of the world and to synthesize it into memorable stories. And at the core of narrative structure is Metaphor. Unlike Nietzsche, who saw Metaphor as deception, Vico saw it as the creative force that allows us to understand, codify, and store our images of the world. Nietzsche believed that Metaphor manufactured false knowledge. Vico considered it to be the most important mental tool we have for building the knowledge structures we need to cope with the world.
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Seven The Sociobiological-Computationist Viewpoint: A Vichian Critique Human language could have evolved only in relation to the total human condition. Lieberman 1975: 1 In this chapter I will discuss what I perceive to be the main alternative to the Vichian scenario sketched in this bookthe sociobiological-computationist paradigm. Although sociobiology and computationism belong to different disciplinary domains, they can be seen to share the same basic viewpointthat (syntactic) language reflects a universal genetic etiology. I will start by revisiting the Vichian scenario by way of synthesis, stopping briefly to consider the question of the sequence of its four events and the question of the monogenesis vs. the polygenesis of language. I will conclude this chapter, and this book, by offering two final reflections. The Vichian Scenario Revisited The main "events," as I have designated them, of the Vichian glottogenetic scenario can be summarized as follows: Language is, ultimately, a product of the imagination, not of genetic mutations. The primitive mind emerged when the imagination transformed the brain's images of sense impressions and affective states into iconic signs. Iconic semiosis is the basis of consciousness. Why human beings are endowed with an imagination is a mystery. Our rational minds will never be able to find out for, as Vico argues, they are themselves a product of the imagination. Indeed, the very word imagination is our
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attempt to explain the mysterious creative capacity that we possess. But all this word really does is to acknowledge our awareness of this capacity. It certainly does not explain it. The imagination is at the core of human thinking. Its primary neurological locus is in the RH. There is a two-level reality to the mind. The deep level is governed by the workings of the imagination. At this level the human being can step away from the world of unreflective, instinctual, and biologically programmed responses (World 1) and move into the world of the conscious self (World 2). The surface level is generated by Metaphor and contains our World 3 concepts and abstract cognitive structures. The fundamental form of thought was, and continues to be, iconic. Langer (1948) calls it a presentational form of mind: i.e., it inheres in the presentation to the mind of units of perception (the iconicity hypothesis). The representation, or externalization, of these units produced the first "languages" which were also iconicindexical, deictic, gestural, pictorial, and ideographic (the visual mimesis hypothesis). This deep-level form of language became speech when our sapient ancestors associated sounds in the audio-oral tract with natural sounds in the environment and with vocal ejaculations made in response to affective states and urges. This osmotic process produced the first words. These were the vocal counterparts of the iconic signs produced at an earlier stage (the audiooral osmosis hypothesis). Metaphor is an epiphenomenal product of the fantasia and the ingegno. It came onto the glottogenetic scene to transform the world of concrete reality into one of abstraction. In so doing, it generated modern conceptual language and what Langer (1948) calls discursive thought. Our first-order concepts were forged through a metaphorical transformation of perceived bodily experiences (the metaphoricity hypothesis). The first attempts to explain reality were structured by the ingegno into the form of myths. There exists no culture without myths. At the surface level of mind, Metaphor continues to make associations among conceptual domains, creating second-order concepts and, out of these, a very abstract system of thought. Through the workings of the ingegno, syntaxthe connecting and organizing of conceptsemerged to stabilize this system, which has become the basis for constructing modern institutions and scientific theoriesincluding theories of grammar. Discursive thought dominates the human mind but continues to rely on Metaphor to make "discoveries." Metaphor helps rational thought literally "look" for connections among things.
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The plausibility of this scenario is supported by evidence coming out of various domains: by large portions of the psychological research on mental imagery, by research on child language development, by findings on hemisphericity documented by neuroscience, by linguistic reconstruction, by the etymological analysis of core vocabularies, and by various bits and pieces of paleographical, paleoneurological, and archeological evidence. The vast research on verbal metaphors in particular lends substantial and substantive support to the metaphoricity hypothesis. Event 4 opened the door to the development of culture in the modern sense of the word. Early cultures were founded on the categories of Metaphor, advanced ones on the categories of syntactic language. This argues against pragmo-cummunicative and sociobiological theories of glottogenesis. There can be no culture without language. The first myths were attempts to communicate what was in the mind in a way that a communal understanding could be reached about physical events. If communication-for-survival were the trigger for language, then our communication systems would hardly have developed narrativity structures which have nothing to do with survival but everything to do with what we now call a "basic urge to know." The Vichian account of how syntactic languagea feature of surface-level cognitionhas come to dominate the mind and culture would explain a host of seemingly disconnected phenomena. It would explain why children go through an iconic-gestural stage, then a metaphorical one, and finally a conceptual one on the way to language. It would explain why we still are attached to our myths, stories, artistic productions, and other products of the imagination. Indeed, we seem to be more protective of these products than of those of the rational mind. We are more likely to protect in its original form, say, a piece of music or a poem from the Middle Ages than a scientific theory from the same era. We may find all these products to be anachronistic, but we are willing only to modify the scientific theory to meet modern standards. Finally, the Vichian account would explain why Metaphor continues to serve a vital mental function. When the mind cannot find a conceptual domain for understanding a new phenomenon, it must seek aid from Metaphor to scan its internal space and to make new associations and "inventions" (the product of the ingegno). There is no innovation in science or art without this capacity. Logic and syntax simply stabilize the rational architecture of cognition, not create new features for it to utilize in some meaningful way. The implications of the Vichian scenario for glottogenetic research are obvious. As Tagliacozzo (1969: 409) puts it: "Vico is not a past to be revoked, but a present to be elaborated, and future to be pursued." First and foremost, the Vichian scenario suggests that gestural communication systems are protosystems for vocal language. It posits that pictorial representations are prior to verbal texts. It suggests that metaphorical meaning is prior to literal meaning, and that the way to find this out is through
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etymology. It proposes that myth is the first example of narrative metaphorizing. In short, the Vichian scenario puts forward a program of research that would help direct future forays into domains already mapped by glottogenetic research in specific ways. The main implication of the Vichian scenario is that the only path to understanding the origin of mind and language is the imagination. Vico does not define the imagination, except to indicate that it is the capacity to form "images" of sensory experiences. He does not tell us why we have an imagination. We simply do. We evolved from a state of unconscious, unreflective, instinctual responses to one of reflective, conscious cognition because of the imagination. The Question of Sequence How legitimate is it to claim that iconic language preceded vocal speech, that iconic thought is etiologically prior to conceptual thought, and that poetic (metaphorical) language is prior to literal language, and, indeed, that the latter is a derivative of the former? Vico showed us how to look for answers to these questions through philology, etymology, and the study of childhood development. He did not make reference to animal communication. Animals belong to a different world order. They share with us the domai of World 1; and some primates may have developed a kind of World 2 mentality. But no animal has ever demonstrated any World 3 characteristics. In having arranged the Vichian scenario into events, I am of course aware of the pitfalls that this creates. The separation into "events" of the parts of the scenario was dictated primarily by the notion that internal iconicity is the basis of external iconicity (visual mimesis), and that this form of representation precedes vocal speech (audio-oral osmosis) and conceptualization (metaphoricity). However, there is no doubt in my mind that overlapping among the stages must have occurred. The metaphorical capacity probably spanned all four events. I have located the metaphoricity hypothesis at event 4 because this was the stage at which it must have triggered the transition from perception to conceptualization in an increasingly productive way. Monogenesis vs. Polygenesis The best-known account of monogenesis is the Bible one. In the Old Testament we are told that the ancient Babylonians decided to build a tower that would reach all the way to Heaventhe Tower of Babel. The Babylonians were of one language and speech. Their plan offended God, who stirred up linguistic confusion among the builders. Unable to communicate among themselves, the workers were scattered across the face of the earth to spread linguistic chaos.
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This account nicely reflects the view that all languages have diverged from a common source. According to the monogenetic perspective, the existence of differences among languages is explained as a result of people moving apart in waves of migration around the world. Language universals are interpreted as evidence of a common origin. The opposite, polygenetic, view is that language emerged more or less simultaneously in several places. Language universals are explained by pointing to the similar constraints, physiological and environmental, which must have operated on the earliest speakers, and by the fact that languages influenced each other through contact. As mentioned earlier in this book, the question of monogenesis vs. polygenesis is a moot point for a Vichian account of the origin of language. Even if language were generated in different parts of the world by different peoples, the process of generation would have been the same. The source for glottogenesis would still have been the imagination and the universal thoughts that it made possible. The only kinds of language universals are deep-level ones. They are grounded in iconicity, not in surface-level grammar and semantics. Revisiting the Genetic Perspective As mentioned and discussed several times in previous chapters, the sociobiological perspective constitutes an alternative to the Vichian scenario. So, in the next two sections I will revisit sociobiology one last time. Sociobiology Vico lived in a pre-Darwinian age. However, in one way his view of glottogenesis is in line with evolutionary biology. For Vico language is ultimately an extension of bodily experience and therefore tied to our genetic make-up. But the Vichian paradigm is also radically different. For Vico, humans tend to think and speak because they are imaginers. The capacity to think and speak has certainly enhanced survivability in some ways, but in others it has actually made humans much more susceptible to environmental dangers. The domination of behavior by mind has concomitantly attenuated our inbuilt instinctual survival system. The twentieth-century anthropologist Earl W. Count (e.g., 1973) is considered to be the precursor to the sociobiological movement, founded by Edward O. Wilson in the 1970s. Count's scholarly expertise encompassed a broad range of subjectsanthropology, mythology, neurology, animal behavior, paleoneurology. His goal was to apply Darwinian biology to the study of culture. He aimed to do this by tracing the evolution of human social behavior in the animal world. In 1958 he introduced the concept of
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the biogram, which compared the lifeways of various species and more inclusive groups of organisms on the basis of foodgetting, reproduction, anatomy-physiology, and social behavior. His work became the basis for Edward O. Wilson's sociobiological program several years later (e.g., Wilson 1975, 1979, 1984; Lumsden and Wilson 1983), which claims, in a nutshell, that social behavior, like physical evolution, is an adaptive survival strategy. As part of social behavior sociobiologists include the human mind and human culture. Moreover, for sociobiology, there is an evolutionary kinship among all organisms. And in arguing that all life is connected and related, sociobiology has indeed done humanity a great service. The main difference between the Vichian scenario of glottogenesis and the sociobiological one does not reside in seeing language as a survival-enhancing event. The fact that we can use language to think, plan, build, and restructure the environment does indeed enhance our chances at survival. But sociobiology does not stop there. Sociobiologists see even the social trait we call "altruism" as evolutionary survival-enhancing behavior. As Lumsden and Wilson (1983: 31) bluntly put it, "the altruistic act is performed with the expectation that the beneficiary will repay in kind at some future date." They continue as follows (Lumsden and Wilson 1983: 3233): While an individual may give up an advantage, perhaps even his life, the genes that prescribe such behavior give up nothing; on the contrary, they gain in number and influence. The difference is not really a contradiction. It is simply natural selection working simultaneously at two levels, that of the gene and that of the individual organism. The individual can behave in a moral and unselfish manner toward others, but his conduct results in an even greater proliferation of his genes than if he acted with consistent selfishness. In the sociobiological scenario, the mind was simply generated by genes in response to new cultural demands. As cultures became more complex, so did the human mind, which allowed humans to make choices that conferred upon them greater survival and reproductive abilities. Gene evolution gradually gave way to cultural evolution. The body's survival mechanisms were eventually replaced by those of the mind. As Lumsden and Wilson (1983: 118) tersely put it, "culture is created and shaped by biological processes while the biological processes are simultaneously altered in response to cultural change." An early theoretical antecedent of sociobiology is, clearly, the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. In Totem and Taboo (1913 [1962]) Freud was intrigued by certain revulsions, such as incest, which he saw as belonging to humanity's organic heredity. These revulsions reflected, for Freud, moral behavior patterns hat were necessary for the survival of the species. They
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Figure 9. The Central Dogma of Sociobiology (see Casti 1989: 147). could not be interpreted as products of any specific culture, or of culture at all, but must be built into the genetic structure of the species. This sociobiological scenario is deceptively simple. It rests on the assumption that the mind emerges from a genetic blueprint for the species. The genotype is a coded plan for all the individual's characteristics. The phenotype, on the other hand, is the physical body or expression of the code. In the sociobiological scheme, the mind is a kind of phenotypic expression of the genetic code. In Konner's (1991: 109) words, an "organism is, in essence, a gene's way of making another gene." The central dogma of sociobiology is schematized in figure 9. According to Lumsden and Wilson (1983), the good genotypes have been singled out for survival by natural selection, and the bad ones have been eliminated. We have good behavioral traits now (morality, altruism, etc.) because the good genes survived and the bad ones didn't. So, for example, incest avoidance reflects a genetically determined aversion that is meant to increase inclusive fitness, since inbreeding would have a tendency to bring out lethal recessive genotypes. But then, if Lumsden and Wilson are right, Casti (1989: 177) quips, "why does incest need to be illegal?" Sociobiology is also based on a second assumption forged from the conceptual reservoir of Darwinian biologythat of kin selection. Darwin was fascinated by the so-called social behavior of insects. How, for instance, could worker bees have evolved if they are sterile and leave no offspring? To answer such a question, Darwin developed the concept of kin selection. Even though the worker bees do not reproduce, their altruistic actions preserve and perpetuate the species. Darwin's account has given birth to the notion of the selfish gene, made popular by Richard Dawkins (1976, 1987). Dawkins's argument is essentially a metaphorical one (Hyman 1962; Leatherdale 1974; Beer 1983). If reproductive success is the measure of fitness, then evolution boils down to which genes continue to prosper and multiply in a population's gene pool. Genes are enclosed within protoplasmic robots (humans). They are sealed off from the outside world. But they manipulate it by remote control. They created us body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. We, the phenotypes, are their "survival machines."
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Destructive behavior also has a simple explanation, according to sociobiologists. As Wilson (1975) claims, competition and conflict enhance survival, a phenomenon that is not unique in the animal realm. As Konner (1991: 111) elaborates, the ''belief that human beings are rare among animal species in that we kill our own kind is erroneous, and more evidence to the contrary accumulates every year." But, then, why would these same selfish genes also lead humans to invent such superfluous things as law systems to protect themselves against a biologically normal situation? And why would they have invented religions, marriage, and burial rites? For sociobiologists, humans are no more than animals programmed to survive. Konner (1991: 120) summarizes sociobiological epistemology as follows: What religious people think of as the soul or spirit can perhaps be fairly said to consist of just this: the intelligence of an advanced machine in the mortal brain and body of an animal. And what we call culture is a collective way of using that intelligence to express and modify the emotions of that brain, the impulse and pain and exhilaration of that body. Statements such as this have created a severe backlash against sociobiology (for which see Casti 1989, 1990). This is unfortunate because, if nothing else, sociobiology has forced everyone to look more closely at the nature of the relationship between body and mind. But sociobiology has missed an important point made by Vico over two and a half centuries ago: language and culture are artifacts of the human mind. To use these artifacts to understand how the mind originated is a post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument. Sociobiologists have simply replaced the word God with the term selfish gene. In so doing, they have invented an eloquent and persuasive story of human origins with their own ingegno. As Gaylin (1990: 32) has perceptively pointed out, language "supports a world of ideals that transcends the real world of survival." The behavior of all other species is fixed by instinct. That of human beings also involves choice. This leads to the greatest enigma of allwho is the human being? "What bizarre animal," Gaylin (1990: 33) quips, "expends the energy for such an abstract and nonutilitarian purpose as examining the stars?" Gaylin (1990: 34) goes on to suggest that only a "spiritual" animal would do such a thing; and this translates, in actual terms, to an animal endowed with an imagination: Our imagination creates two other, quite distinct worlds for us. First through the application of knowledge, imagination transforms the actual world we occupy into a different world of our own design; second, our imagination will transcend reality and create a world of our own perceptions in which we will be forced to live. One area of mental activity that sociobiologists enlist to make their case is that of color vocabularies. The claim is made that there are deep genetic
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mechanisms that translate the diverse sensitivities of the visual perception system into conscious color perception. As Lumsden and Wilson (1983: 66) confidently assert: "Few brain scientists doubt that a full explanation of color vision at the level of the cell and molecule will eventually become possible." But my reading of the same research points in another directionnamely that perception is universal, conceptualization relative. So, it is instructive to look briefly at the debate on color here. Since color perception is a property of easily observed sense data, it should ostensibly be independent from purely mental activity, like the verbal conceptualization, or labeling, of the different shades. So the question of how color is named by languages is not a trivial matterphysicists point out that almost eight million shades could potentially be discriminated. The main evidence for color universals was provided in 1969 by Berlin and Kay who argued that lexical differences in color coding are only superficial matters which conceal general underlying principles of color categorization. Using the judgments of the native speakers of twenty widely divergent languages, Berlin and Kay came to the conclusion that there were "focal points" in basic (single term) color systems which clustered in certain predictable ways. They identified eleven universal colors, or "focal points," which corresponded to the English words red, pink, orange, yellow, brown, green, blue, purple, black, white, and gray. Not all the languages investigated had separate words for each color, but there emerged a patterning that revealed a fixed coding system. If a language had two colors, then the focal points were black and white. If it had three color terms, then the third one corresponded to red. A four-term system added either green or yellow, while a five-term system had both of these. A six-term system included blue; a seven-term system added brown. Finally, purple, pink, orange, and gray were found to occur in any combination in languages which had the previous focal points. In other words, languages with, say, a four-term system consisting of black, white, red, and brown simply do not exist. Although further research led to minor revisions of the color sequencing (Berlin and Berlin 1975; Kay 1975), this finding has remained virtually unchallenged to this day. Color perception appears to be a property of the brain, not of language (Witkowski and Brown 1977; Kay and McDaniel 1978). The work on color was pursued in the 1970s by Rosch (e.g., 1975a, 1975b), who went on to demonstrate that the Dani people of West Irian, who have a two-color system, were able to discriminate easily eight focal points. By means of a recognition-memory experiment, Rosch found that the Dani were able to recognize focal colors better than nonfocal ones. Moreover, she found that they were able to learn new colors in paired-associates tasks more easily when the names were paired with focal colors. Rosch's data thus seemed to go even further in establishing the fact that color perception is not a property of language. Although languages might
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provide a guide to the interpretation of color, they do not affect its perception in any significant way. In a 1976 review of the color research, Roger Brown concluded that similarities among cultures far outweighed differences, despite considerable variation in how colors are lexicalized. However, the interest in color has not subsided. Recent book-length analyses by Hardin (1986), Hilbert (1987), Westphal (1987), Landesman (1989), and Davidoff (1991) have shown that the debate is far from over. What Sampson (1980a: 98) remarked over a decade ago seems to be still true: "the color researchers might leave one in doubt as to what, if anything, they have demonstrated." Similarly, Mollon (1990: 78) quips that "our colour vision has not yet yielded up all its secrets." For one thing, the fact that the eleven focal points discovered by Berlin and Kay corresponded to the color terms of their own language (English) is bound to arouse suspicion. Could they have been predisposed by their own language to gloss all other terms as indicating what they themselves perceived? Was Rosch similarly predisposed to see English focal points as the only appropriate stimuli to be used in experimental conditions? Once a focal point has been identified to a subject, there is nothing that will stop that subject from perceiving it. Sampson (1980a) also detected a flaw in the Berlin and Kay study which has escaped the attention of many. Berlin and Kay eliminated many terms if they were identified to be borrowings. But as Sampson has astutely pointed out, Berlin and Kay seem not to have realized that many of the terms they listed as basic for Vietnamese turned out to be borrowings from Chinese: "If the Chinese borrowings were eliminated, Vietnamese would be left with the words for black, white, red, brown, purple, and grey, which would be a disaster for their theory" (Sampson 1980a: 99). McNeill (1972) discovered another defect in the Berlin and Kay study. She noticed that the eleven-term Japanese system posited by the two researchers dated only from the time of Japanese contact with the West, beginning in the 1860s. The traditional Japanese system had five focal points: black, white, orange, turquoise, and yellow. These also would not fit in with Berlin and Kay's theory. In a review of the Berlin and Kay study, Collier (1973) raised yet another questionthe fact that hue and tone are not the only variables required to establish chromatic focal points. There is also "saturation"the degree to which a shade of a given hue and tone departs from the gray of the same tone. Color descriptions such as bright and vivid refer to the saturation of color, not to its hue or tone. Collier argued that, other things being equal, a language will encode the most vividand therefore noticeablecolors. So the focal points of Berlin and Kay's theory would seem to be no more than the most noticeable points on the color spectrum. In a key experiment at the end of the 1970s, Lucy and Schweder (1979)
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concluded that if language codability is related to color focality, then the results tend to favor the linguistic relativity hypothesis. They found that communicative accuracy in descriptionan obvious measure of codabilityis a much more accurate predictor of color memory than focality. Basic color descriptions such as light green, military green, pea-soup green, etc. are more easily assigned to memory than focality parameters. Thus, as Casson (1981: 89) has appropriately remarked, it is perhaps best to think of basic color descriptions as "principal vehicles for color memory." Despite such differences of opinion, I believe that the Berlin and Kay study is a valid one. But I read a different story in it than the sociobiologists do. Their adoption of Berlin and Kay's research may have been caused unwittingly by the two authors when, unable to find an adequate explanation for their findings, they suggested that perhaps the answer lay in the innate qualities posited by Chomsky which have biomorphological foundations (Lenneberg 1967). My interpretation of their study is different from their own conclusion. The findings of the Berlin and Kay study suggest a separation between the perceptual and conceptual levels of mindcolor percepts are universal; conceptualizations of color are related to culture and language. In my view, the Berlin and Kay results are highly supportive of Vichian psychology, not genetic determinism. (For a Vichian-type analysis of color, see the recent work by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch [1991: 157171].) As Wescott (1980: 14647) has illustrated, color vocabularies were originally metaphorical. In Hittite, for instance, words for colors originally designated plant and tree names such as "poplar," "elm," ''cherry," "oak," etc. And in many English words, as discussed in chapter 5, color terms turn out to be derivatives of audiovisual synesthesia. Color concepts, like other abstract concepts, are born of Metaphor. In the deep level of mind, percepts are generated to record sense impressions. The number of percepts that the mind can generate which relate to variations in the color spectrum are infinite. These are then transformed by Metaphor into color concepts, which are sensitive to cultural contexts. In the rational mind, a color is just what the language says it is. As Hilbert (1987) has argued, "color" is ultimately in the object, not in the person. What is in the person is a symbolic transformation of color. The Vichian perspective of color would thus posit a universal deep structure to color perception that is transformed by Metaphor into culture-specific color terminologies. Vygotsky (1931) showed experimentally several decades ago how the two might interact at a neurological level. The neuronal connections of the RH which allow for the processing of visual stimuli, such as the perception of color, seem to interact with those of the LH, making the difference between the perceptual input and the ways in which it is coded virtually irrelevant. A color that is verbalized becomes what that language says it is, at least in Vygotsky's neurological assess-
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ment. The interhemispheric model of color processing is supported by a recent statistical study correlating the Berlin and Kay findings with laterality (Armstrong and Katz 1983). To sum up, I cannot but agree with Dupré (1990), Kitcher (1985), and others when they argue that sociobiology is a victim of the power of metaphorical reasoning. As sociobiologists attempt to take away language from nonmaterial reality and put it into the genes, it is therefore not surprising to find that they turn around and use metaphors"genetic code," "letters," ''grammar," etc.for the body that are based on language. Sociobiology can explain the Vichian imagination in "evasive" ways. Dennett (1991), for instance, even tackles the self and narrativity from a purely biological perspective. For Dennett the proclivity to distinguish the self from the rest of the world is a distinction that all living organisms must make, from the lowly amoeba to the rational human being. The self is a principle of genetic organization and response to the world. Telling storiesnarrativityis, for Dennett, no more than a strategy for protection and definition of the self: "just as spiders don't have to think, consciously or deliberately, about how to spin their webs, . . . we do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell and how to tell them" (Dennett 1991: 415). The Genetic Paradigm The sociobiological perspective provides the platform upon which Chomskyan innatism can be inserted. Although, as Sampson (1980b) observes, Chomsky himself may have expressed disagreement with the sociobiological perspective, it is, in my view, only a disagreement of detail. For Chomsky, language has evolved as a species-specific trait because it could not have emerged so suddenly without some genetic event moulding together an array of features that previously had evolved for other purposes. Derek Bickerton (1981, 1990) is the one who has elaborated, so far, the most comprehensive genetic theory based on the Chomskyan perspective (see Dingwall 1988 for a good summary of the main tenets of genetic theory). For Bickerton language is an evolutionary byproduct of brain development and genetic mutation. He pinpoints the origin of the "language organ" to the neural structures that allowed protohumans to manufacture representations from their perceptions of the world. This allowed them to attach meaning to gestures and sounds. From this developing organic capacity they were able to develop a primitive language without syntax. Traces of this presyntactic language, Bickerton argues, are to be found in the gesturing of apes that have been taught sign language and in the language patterns displayed by "wolf children" like Genie (Curtiss 1977). The transition to syntactic language, according to Bickerton, was an inevitable result of evolution. Like any of the organic changes produced by our inbuilt genetic adaptation structures, language was manufactured by these structures to enhance our capacity to survive.
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What such a genetic scenario ignores is the fact that no "primitive languages" have ever been discovered. If Vico is right, no such stage of language will indeed ever be uncovered. Language is the end result of an iconically motivated process. As Bickerton also points out, before language there is visual mimesis. But his link between mimesis and language is genetic adaptation. Vico's is Metaphor. Who is right? According to Bickerton and others the language organ equips humans by the age of two with the ability to use the rules of a universal grammar to develop the specific languages that cultures require of them. Pinker (1990: 23031) elaborates this idea eloquently as follows: A striking discovery of modern generative grammar is that natural languages all seem to be built on the same basic plan. Many differences in basic structure but different settings of a few "parameters" that allow languages to vary, or different choices of rule types from a fairly small inventory of possibilities. . . . On this view, the child only has to set these parameters on the basis of parental input, and the full richness of grammar will ensue when those parametrized rules interact with one another and with universal principles. The parameter-setting view can help explain the universality and rapidity of language acquisition: when the child learns one fact about her language, she can deduce that other facts are also true of it without having to learn them one by one. Pinker's analysis is correct. He has, in fact, described how the surface level of mind comes to take shape in the child. But he has at the same time ignored a much more fundamental creative force in the child. The progression from iconic to conceptual thought that the child literature has documented makes it clear that there is a developmental link between perception and conceptualization. Grammar emerges at the end point of this progression, not at its starting point. Vico's theory explains the progression from starting point to end point; the Chomsky-Bickerton-Pinker paradigm explains the end point alone. It is therefore not a matter of who's right or wrong, but of whose perspective is the more inclusive one. In my view, Vico wins out on this count. Computationism Sociobiology and genetic linguistics are products of the rational mind in this "Age of Humans." They reflect the literal mind's attempt to rationalize its own existence. Perhaps the most salient product of the rational mind's efforts to understand itself is computational theory. Realizing that it is hopeless and futile to gain direct access to the workings of the mind, the computational agenda seeks to reproduce the mind in mechanical ways. In so doing, it hopes to be able to understand what the mind can do by observing what the machine cannot. As Johnson-Laird (1988: 52) has re-
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cently put it, the strong version of the computational hypothesis rests on the assumption that only theories of the mind that "can be expressed in a form that can be modeled in a computer program" are relevant to cognitive science. In another sense, computationism in cognitive science is a counterpart to genetic linguistics. Arguably, the principle goal of computationism is to describe the characteristics of the universal grammar which is present in the neural structure of the brain and which is part of the genetic birthright of all children. Computational Models of Mind The focus on computation as the essence of mind, as mentioned in the second chapter, reflects the long-held view that the mind's activities could be understood if they were to be simulated, reproduced, or modeled in mechanical ways. From Thomas Hobbes's (1656 [1839]) idea that ratiocination was a process akin to the addition and subtraction of numbers, and David Hume's (1749 [1902]) notion that the mind could be studied by the laws of physics, to Alan Turing's (1936) ground-breaking work on finitestate automata the assumption has been made that, in theory, machines can carry out thinking processes, and that the brain should be studied as an information-processing device. The classic expression of humans as machines was La Mettrie's L'homme machine, published in 1747 (Vartanian 1960). As the title of his book suggests, La Mettrie was convinced that humans were machines. In many ways, his book is the ideological antecedent to both sociobiology and computationism. Hobbes's and La Mettrie's machine analogies captured the fancy of many scientists. In the nineteenth century, the study of anatomy came to be marked by mechanical metaphors. So powerful was this association that even today we say that we are coming apart, in pieces, broken up, etc. In 1949 Norbert Wiener published an influential work in which he defined communication theory as inclusive of machine and humans. That same year, John von Neumann built a rudimentary computer which allowed him to point out the remarkable similarities between the computer and the brain (Neumann 1958). By the 1960s, metaphors of mind using computer vehicles became the fundamental mode for talking and thinking about cognition (MacCormac 1976; Sternberg 1990: 11261). Today there is even a whole movement within cognitive science that has been forging the metaphor that human beings are no more than protoplasmic robots in the service of their genes (Konner 1987). While this alternative stands in stark opposition to the Vichian conception, there really is no way to make a convincing counterargument against it. The reason for this, as Vico pointed out, resides in the nature of our "logical" surface minds. For the rational mind logic = truth. If we were to present an argument or a story which we know to be a falsehood, we would be able to persuade our interlocutor that it is true by simply clothing
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it in a "logical" texture. So natural is the connection that we make between logic and truth that if the "truth" did not make logical sense, then we would risk not being believed. The whole legal system of trial and jury depends upon making "logical sense." The computationist and sociobiological paradigms, based on the conceptual metaphor the mind is a machine, are logical ones, and therefore cannot be rejedted on logical terms. Charles Peirce (quoted in Crowe 1986: 552) made a similar observation when he said that there ''is no greater nor more frequent mistake in practical logic than to suppose that things that resemble one another strongly in some aspects are any more likely for that to be alike in others." As Sheehan (1991: 262) has put it, the "fact that both humans and machines can learn to play chess may suggest a number of interesting things about the human brain and mechanical intelligence, but it does not suggest that the two are necessarily alike in any other ways." The only counterargument I can muster up is simply to point out to the reader that computationism is a product of Metaphor. Computational theory attempts to make good on the sociobiological claim that we are "survival machines" by investigating the cognitive features of these machines. Aware that this is indeed an effective counter-argument against computationism, Allen Newell (1991)one of the founders of modern cognitive sciencehas recently attempted to reject it by claiming essentially that the use of mechanical metaphors for mind has allowed us to think conveniently about the mind. Computers, on the other hand, have allowed us to see the true mind in action. He summarizes his case as follows (Newell 1991: 194): The computer as metaphor enriches a little our total view of ourselves, allowing us to see facets that we might not otherwise have glimpsed. But we have been enriched by metaphors before, and on the whole, they provide just a few more threads in the fabric of life, nothing more. The computer as generator of a theory of mind is another thing entirely. It is an event. Not because of the computer but because finally we have obtained a theory of mind. For a theory of mind, in the same sense as a theory of genetics or plate tectonics, will entrain an indefinite sequence of shocks through all our dealings with mindwhich is to say, through all our dealings with ourselves. Computationism has found its way even into the study of what our culture has traditionally viewed as noncomputable. Marvin Minsky (1986) has offered computational models for conflict, pain, pleasure, the self, consciousness, genius, infant emotion, foreign accents, and freedom of will. His view is that the mind is an abstract machine that manufactures symbols on the basis of neurologically programmed codes. But Terry Winograd (1991: 220), a leading researcher himself in artificial intelligence, has spotted the main weakness of the computational argument. In a concise but accurate critique of computationism, he states: Are we machines of the kind that researchers are building as "thinking machines"? In asking this kind of question, we engage in a kind of projection
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understanding humanity by projecting an image of ourselves onto the machine and the image of the machine back onto ourselves. In the tradition of artificial intelligence, we project an image of our language activity onto the symbolic manipulations of the machine, then project that back onto the full human mind. In his now classic "Chinese Room" argument, John Searle (1984) attacked computationism from another angle. He argued that a machine does not "know" what it is doing when it processes symbols. Just like a human who translates Chinese symbols in the form of little pieces of paper by using a set of rules for matching them with other symbols, or little pieces of paper, knows nothing about the ''story" inherent in the Chinese pieces of paper, so too a computer does not have access to the "story" inhering in human symbols. Searle's is a profound Vichian argument. The human mind can process symbols at a rational surface level in the same way that a computer does. But only at a deep level of consciousness does it put them together into a narrative whole. This is beyond the capacities of a machine whose operations are defined completely by formal syntactic structure. In a computational framework, creativity too is relegated to the workings of grammatical machinery. It is defined by Chomsky (1966a: 10) tersely as "the speaker's ability to produce new sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers." Creativity for computationists inheres within a system of rules and principles that allow for the generation of an infinite class of symbol combinations and permutations with their formal semantic properties. At the rational level of mind, one can indeed think of these operations as "creative." The goal of research on language, according to Chomsky (1982), is to study creativity as a syntactic phenomenon inhering in the development of general logico-propositional principles that specify the types of rules and representational apparatus underlying language. This view of mind is, needless to say, a Cartesian one. Chomsky acknowledged this as such when he referred to his approach as Cartesian Linguistics (1966b). The idea that the mind is an abstract machine which manufactures well-formed strings of symbols on the substrate of neurologically-programmed codes is a long-standing one in Western science and philosophy. This view has had, of course, remarkable applications in the area of computer programming. But it has told us little about the deep level of mind. The tendency of modern cognitive science is to view the mind as a computerno more, no less. This viewpoint was eloquently stated by Ulrich Neisser (1967: 6) a few decades ago: The task of the psychologist in trying to understand human cognition is analogous to that of a man trying to discover how a computer has been programmed. In particular, if the program seems to store and reuse information, he would like to know by what "routines" or "procedures" this is done.
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Given this purpose, he will not care much whether his particular computer stores information in magnetic cords or in thin films; he wants to understand the program, not the "hardware." By the same token, it would not help the psychologist to know that memory is carried by RNA as opposed to some other medium. He wants to understand its utilization, not its incarnation. However, Neisser realized that the computer metaphor, if brought to an extreme, would actually lead cognitive science astray. So, only a few pages later he issued the following warning (1967: 9): "Unlike men, artificially intelligent programs tend to be single-minded, undistractable, and unemotional . . . in my opinion, none does even remote justice to the complexity of mental processes." Computational theory has now found its way into the mainstream. The proof for this can be found in the fact that little workcomputationist or noncomputationistis conducted today in cognitive science without reference, for instance, to the computational theories of Marr (1982) on perception, of Kintsch and van Dijk (1978) on the comprehension of texts, of Anderson (1983) on concept-formation, of Raaijmakers and Shiffrin (1981) on memory, and, of course, of Chomsky on language acquisition. The first serious challenge to Chomsky's view came in 1971 when Dell Hymes pointed out that the larger human and social context contributed to shaping the rules of grammar. These were not immune from external forces. The capacities of people to organize their thoughts for socially defined purposes determined, according to Hymes, the actual form of grammatical behavior. There is also some evidence that certain phenomena which linguists have traditionally assumed to be syntactic are, instead, dependent upon the ways in which we understand the world around us (e.g., Langacker 1987, 1990; Ruwet 1991; Heine, Claudi, and Hünnemeyer 1991). One way to see this is to consider the ways in which different languages treat weather verbs (Ruwet 1991). In Italian, for example, the verb fare "to make" is used to convey a weather conditionfa caldo (literally) "it makes hot," fa freddo (literally) ''it makes cold." The condition of "hotness" and "coldness" is conveyed by the verb essere "to be" when referring to objectsè caldo "it is hot," è freddo "it is cold"and by avere "to have" when referring to peopleha caldo "she is hot," ha freddo "she is cold." Theories of syntax have no way of accounting for such phenomena. Indeed, examples such as this suggest that the development of grammatical categories is influenced by pragmatic and cognitive factors. One of the most ardent proponents of computationism is Jerry Fodor (e.g., 1975, 1983, 1987). For Fodor the mind is essentially a manipulator of formal symbols. Because the symbols take on the structure of propositions in discourse and so serve thought during speech, he refers to them as "mental representations." For Fodor the mind possesses a kind of computer program that determines what operations are performed on
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these representations. These correspond to the rules of inference people are purported to be deploying during discourse. Fodor goes so far as to consider these representations as constituting a "language of thought." The proof for the existence of this form of thought is to be found in: Rational behavior. Humans contemplate their actions by representing their behaviors as "having certain properties and not having others" (Fodor 1975: 30). Concept learning. Fodor claims that we can only learn a concept by proposing an hypothesis about what that concept might mean and then testing its adequacy. Perception. Fodor treats perception as a problem-solving activity in which the perceiver must advance a hypothesis about what is being seen. Fodor sees the language of thought basically as syntactic processing. The mind manipulates symbols without considering what these might mean. Computational theory à la Fodor holds essentially that the cognitive system operates primarily on the basis of rules and representations (see also Pylyshyn 1984 for a compatible view). But as Dennett (1977: 279) has astutely observed, this is like saying, in effect, that syntax and mind exist a posteriori to each other: Fodor seems to suppose that the only structures that could guarantee and explain the predictive power of our intentionalistic calculations must mirror the syntax of those calculations. This is either trivially true (because the "syntactic" structure of events or states is defined simply by their function) or an empirical claim that is very interesting, not entirely implausible, and as yet not demonstrated or even argued for. The computational approach takes language out of its experiential and social context and transforms it into a grammatical artifact. Vico reacted to this precise view by pointing out that formal theories can give us precise information about the nature of physical phenomena, but the study of human beings and of the way they communicate necessarily must involve individual, social, and cultural factors. He pointed out that knowledge of mathematics, for instance, did not exist independently of the creative abilities of the mathematician. In 1931, when Kurt Gödel showed rather matter-of-factly that there never can be a consistent system of axioms that can capture all the truths of arithmetic, he showed, in effect, that the makers of the axioms could never extricate themselves from the making of axioms. Gödel made it obvious to mathematicians that mathematics was made by them, and that the exploration of "mathematical truth" would go on forever as long as humans were around. The final map of the mathematical realm will never be drawn. Like other products of the imagination, the world of numbers lies within the minds of humans.
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In completing this schematic assessment of computationism, it should be mentioned that neuroscience has also come under its metaphorical spell. Like other cognitive scientists, neuroscientists are working more and more on the development of computational models of neurological processes as a means for gaining understanding on how language is processed by the brain. And in many instances this kind of work has allowed neuroscientists to study the mind fruitfully. By trying to figure out how to build a computer program that simulates the neurofunctional processes that underlie mental activities, neuroscientists have been forced, as never before, to pose a set of specific and concrete questions about the nature of the symbols and processes to be manipulated. As Kosslyn (1983: 116) points out, computational models of the mind have often produced unexpected heuristic results: The computer model serves the function of a note pad when one is doing arithmetic: It helps keep track of everything so that you don't get a headache trying to mentally juggle everything at once. Sometimes the predictions obtained in this way are surprising, which often points out an error in your thinking or an unexpected prediction. But as Gardner (1985: 388) has cautioned, this kind of reasoning has been so coercive that it has been leading some neuroscientists astray, impelling them to ignore the deep differences that exist between biological and mechanical systems. It is indeed distorted to conceive of human beings apart from their membership in an organic species that has evolved from the interaction between genetic tendencies and environmental influences: "To the extent that thought processes reflect these biodevelopmental factors and are suffused with regressions, anticipations, frustrations, and ambivalent feelings, they will differ in fundamental ways from those exhibited by a nonorganic system." Arnheim's (1969: 73) two-decade-old caveat is still valid today: "There is no need to stress the immense practical usefulness of computers. But to credit the machine with intelligence is to defeat it in a competition it need not pretend to enter." To summarize, there really is no way to refute either the sociobiological or the computational paradigm at a logical level. If nothing else, the NS teaches us to be suspicious of all theories and models made by humans. The work of Sperry and his associates discussed in previous chapters suggests that the RH generates intuition. We cannot "explain" intuition, because it occurs in our nonverbal hemisphere. When we have a hunch or some inspiration while solving, say, a problem in mathematics, it is an answer that the RH has transferred to the LH. Intuition is the capacity to know things without having deduced them logically. While we accept the arguments of sociobiology and computationism at a logical level, at an intuitive level we tend to feel that they are wrong. As Lewontin, Rose, and Kamain (1984: 249) have argued, sociobiology involves a process of talking etymologically backward, so that "human
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social institutions are laid on animals, metaphorically, and then the human behavior is rederived from the animals as if it were a special case of a general phenomenon that had been independently discovered in other species." Physicist Roger Penrose (1989) recently also made a relevant point by arguing that computers can never truly be conscious because the laws of nature will not allow it. As Kant (1790 [1951]) pointed out, when the mind comes up with such things as scientific models it uses "theoretical reasoning." This is a third-person perspective that seeks to comprehend all aspects of reality, including mind and consciousness, in terms of physical theories. The other side of our mind inheres in a "practical reasoning" ability that is in the first-person perspective. This allows us to apprehend the feelings and desires that inform the structure of human existence. Sociobiology and computationism are constructs of theoretical reason. As Nadeau (1991: 194) aptly puts it: "If consciousness is to evolve on this planet in the service of the ultimate value, we must, I think, quickly come to the realization that reality for human beings is a human product with a human history, and thereby dispel the tendency to view any 'product' of our world-constructing minds as anything more, or other, than a human artifact." The computer is our greatest intellectual achievement. It is an extension of our rational intellect. We somehow wish intuitively that it would take over all the arduous work of ratiocination. This could then leave the imagination much more time to roam the mental universe and search out associations in poetry, art, and music which we still find to be much more fundamental to our nature, and to our origins, than solving a problem in logic. Two Final Reflections There are two final loose ends that I wish to tie together. The first one concerns the validity of the whole exercise of drafting a Vichian primal scene in the first place. The reader might legitimately wonder if this scene is no more a product of Metaphor than is the sociobiological-computationist viewpoint. I have indeed used my own imagination and ingegno to construct a narrative about the origin of language. I have taken the material for my plot from Vico's NS. My inbuilt metaphorical capacity guided my search for connections and configurations of thought. But the lesson to be learned from Vico is that all theorizing and model-building proceeds in this way. My primary goal in writing this book was to pique the reader's interest to read the NS. In having taken a metaphorical journey through this fascinating book I have come away more convinced than ever before that the imagination and Metaphor are the essence of mind. Perhaps, as Vico might put it, we can only understand these two things by turning them on themselves. If nothing else, I hope the narrative in this book will have convinced
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glottogeneticists to make the NS a basic point of reference for future work in the field. In the words of Di Pietro (1979: 449), the main implication for the language sciences emanating from the NS is that the "human imagination can be studied formally through an approach that focuses on creative language." My second, and final, reflection can be phrased in the form of a question: If a Vichian scenario rejects a genetic theory of language, does it then propose a Divine plan? As mentioned at the outset of this book, the Vichian scenario is a descriptive one. It aims to explain how, not why, language came about in terms of a handful of basic notions. Where does the imagination come from? Is it tied to a human spirit, as Gaylin (1990) asserts? Unlike sociobiologists, Vico did not ignore or dismiss this fundamental question. He did not, however, tackle it head on, for he claimed that we can only understand what we ourselves have madethe verum-factum principle. We can systematically study history, language, and culture. They are products of our own minds. But we can never know what is for certain. Il certo, as he called it, forms an inexplicable given. We can, of course, develop religious philosophies, mythical narratives, scientific theories (such as sociobiology) to explain il certo. But these are of our own making. Nevertheless, Vico saw in the universal conceptualization of what we call spiritual and moral notions basic human tendencies. This is why all cultures have developed religious, marriage, and burial rites. They are "expressions" of our humanity. This does not mean that there is no conception in Vico of a design to the universe or of a purpose to human life. On the contrary, the underlying massage of the NS bespeaks a deep respect for the idea of a Divine Providence. The fact that Metaphor is at the core of human consciousness is not to deny a spiritual existence to the human being. Even St. Thomas in his Summa Theologica identifies Metaphor as the only way we can come to understand spiritual things (quoted in Davis and Hersh 1986: 250): It is befitting Holy Scripture to put forward divine and spiritual truths by means of comparisons with material things. For God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature. Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible things, because all our knowledge originates from sense. Hence in Holy Scripture spiritual truths are fittingly taught under the likeness of material things. An implicit theme that runs throughout the NS, and which ties together all its thematic strands is, in fact, that in pursuing their own particular ends, human beings have unconsciously served wider ends: Our New Science must therefore be a demonstration, so to speak, of what providence has wrought in history, for it must be a history of the institutions by which, without human discernment or counsel, and often against the
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designs of men, providence has ordered this great city of the human race. (NS: 342) As Bergin and Fisch (1984: xlv) perceptively point out, in being makers of things, Vico believed that human beings were themselves made to do just that: "Men have themselves made this world of nations, but it was not without drafting, it was even without seeing the plan that they did just what the plan called for."
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Index A Age of the Gods: defined, 43 type of language of, 64 and the development of culture, 80-81 Age of Heroes: defined, 43 type of language of, 64 and the development of culture, 80-81 Age of Humans: defined, 43 type of language of, 64 and the development of culture, 80-81 Alliteration: as a feature of audio-oral osmosis, 110 Alphabet: the origin of, 103-104 Animal communication: as a precursor of language, 62-63 experiments on, 90-91 Anomalous strings: experiments on, 114 Aphasia: defined, 87 Apperception: defined, 66 Archetype: defined, 53 Aristotle: description of Zeno, 35 and Western science, 46-47 views of metaphor, 119-20 Audio-oral osmosis: as sound symbolism, 8, 10 as an event in the primal scene, 72-73 as a glottogenetic hypothesis, 105-20 Audio-oral speech: defined and described, 106-11 Australopithecus, 15 B Babylon, 146
Bacon, F., 44 Bergin, T. G., 31 Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, 32 Boole, G., 47 Bow-wow theory: as a theory of language origin, 6 Broca, P., 85-86 Bruner, J., 36, 49 C Cassirer, E., 49 Center for Vico Studies, 32 Cerebral dominance: defined, 86 Child language: development of, 109-10 research on, 113-16 Chinese Room argument, 158 Chomsky, N., 4, 14, 23-25, 79, 118-19, 153-54, 158-59 Cognition: as a surface-level form of thinking, 55-56 Cognitive science, 36-37 Color: controversy over, 150-54 Common vs. communal sense, 48 Comparative psychology, 91 Comparison theory of metaphor, 123-24 Computationism: historical outline, 34-37 as a theory of mind, 155-62 Concept: a Vichian model, 51 Concept-formation: as tied to metaphor, 121-36 Conceptual memory, 54-55 Conceptual metaphors, 131-36 Consciousness: and the fantasia, 48-59 and the right hemisphere, 69 and art, 97 Core vocabulary: defined, 19 as a mental dictionary, 69 and the origin of language, 111-13 Corpus callosum: definition, 88 Jaynes's view of, 98
Course of history, 45 Critical period: defined, 88 Croce, B., 32 Cro-Magnon, 22 Culture: early, 63-64 origin of, 80-82 and metaphor, 140 Cuneiform writing: as symbolic writing, 68, 98 D Darwin, C., 65, 90, 147-49 Deep level of mind, 52-54 Deixis, 90 Descartes, R., 35, 45 Determinative sign: defined, 101 Ding-dong theory: as a theory of language origin, 7 Diversification, 16 Divine Providence, 45, 51, 163 E Eccles, J. C., 57 Echoic theories: as theories of language origin, 7-10 Egypt, 103-104 Emory Vico Studies, 34 Endocranial casts: use in glottogenetic research, 22, 24, 25 and the origin of language, 107 Epiglottis, 107
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Etymology: as used by Vico, 39 as part of Vichian method, 63-64 Euclidean geometry: and visual sensation, 45, 131 Evolution: theory of, 57-58, 147-50 F Family tree, 16 Fantasia: in the Vichian model of mind, 44 defined, 50-51 and iconicity, 70 Fisch, M., 33 Frederick II, 5 Frege, G., 47 Freud, S., 148 Frozen metaphors, 127 Frye, N., 81-82 G Genetic theory: as hypothetical primal scene, 3 as a theory of language origin, 25-27 critique of, 147-55 Genie: as a wild child, 3, 24 and development of syntax, 76, 149 Genotype, 149 Gentile: in Vichian terminology, 68 Geometry: as iconicity, 102 Gestural theories: as theories of language origin, 10-12 Gesture: as visual mimesis, 70, 89-95 research on, 98-100 Glottochronology: as a glottogenetic method, 19-20 Glottogenetic scenario, viii, ix Glottogenetic theories, viii Glottogenetics: defined, vii, viii current state of the science of, 22-29 Grammar:
development of, 77-80, 114-16 Ground of a metaphor, 124-25 H Heisenberg, W.: and the uncertainty principle, 48 Herodotus: account of Psamtik's glottogenetic experiment, 5 Hieroglyphic language: as the characteristic language during the Age of the Gods, 80-81 and the development of writing, 103 History: in a Vichian account of cultural evolution, 76 Hittite: discovery of, 18 color terms in, 153 Hobbes, T., 47, 156 Holophrases: defined, 13 and Homo sapiens, 27 in language development, 79, 114-15 Homer, 45 Homo erectus, 23, 28, 66-68, 85, 89, 107 Homo habilis, 28, 57, 66-68, 89 Homo loquens, 72, 113 Homo sapiens (sapiens), 22, 26-28, 66-68, 77, 92, 107-108 Humboldt, W. von: and linguistic relativity, 132 Hume, D., 156 I Iconicity, 84-89 Iconicity hypothesis, x, 69-71 Iconic representation, 100-104 Iconic sign: and the fantasia, 52-53 and representation, 69-71 Image schema: defined, 69, 100 and metaphor, 125-27 Imagery: research on, 93-98 Imagination. See Fantasia Imaginative universals: defined, 39 as deep-level features, 50 Vico's definition of, 96-97 and the mental dictionary, 117
Indexicality: as an instantiation of visual mimesis, 89-93 Indexical sign, 89 Ingegno: defined, 49, 50-51 and creativity, 66 and the emergence of syntax, 101-102 Institute for Vico Studies, 33 Interactionist theory of metaphor, 123-25 Interjections, 8, 10, 109 Intonation: development of, 115-16 Invention theory, 2-3 Irony, 74-75 J James IV, 5 Japanese, 8 Jespersen's typology, 6-7 Joyce, J., 40 Jung, C. G., 53 K Kant, I., 35, 162 Kin selection, 149 L La-la theory: as a theory of language origin, 7 Language phylogenesis, vii, 23, 116-20 Language vs. speech, 10, 28, 119-20 Larynx: role in language origin, 106-108 Left hemisphere of the brain: and memory, 54, 67 and language, 85-89, 97-98, 108 and metaphor, 136-38 and color, 153 Legend, 80 Lenneberg, E., 87 Lévi-Strauss, C., 49-50, 80 Lexicostatistics. See Glottochronology Linguistic relativity hypothesis, 132-44 Linguistic Society of Paris, vii, viii, 7 Literalist semantics, 123 Lobachevski, N., 136 Locke, J., 35 Logos, 1 M
Markedness theory, 135 Memoria: defined, 50-51 Mental dictionary: defined, 72 and imaginative universals, 117 Mentation concepts, 138-40 Metaphor, viii, 11, 34, 53-56, 73-76, 121-38 Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 123 Metaphorical capacity, viii, 56, 68-70
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Metaphorical language programming, 122-23 Metaphoricity hypothesis, x, 73-76 Metaphorology, 123 Metaphor Research Newsletter, 123 Metaphor research, 127-31 Metonymy, 74-75 Monogenesis, 21, 146-47 Mouth gesture theory, 11 Myth, 49-50, 63-64, 80, 140-42 Myth of Vico, 32-33 N Narrative mode of conceptualization, 138-42 Nation: Vico's definition of, 69 Neanderthal, 22, 27 Neurological coordinates of metaphor, 136-38 Neuroscience, 85-89, 161 New Science, viii, ix, 37-40, 43-46 New Vico Studies, 33-34 Nietzsche, F., 124, 142 Nostratic, 20-21 Novel metaphors, 127 O Onomatopoeia: as sound symbolism, 8 as audio-oral osmosis, 72 Vico's use to explain the origin of Jove, 103 Ontogenesis as reenactment of phylogenesis, 6, 22, 46, 65-66, 116-17 P Peirce, C. S., 69 Percept, 52-54 Perceptual memory, 54-55 Pharynx: role in language origin, 106-108 Phenotype, 149 Philological Society of London, vii, 15 Philology, 63-64 Philosophy: vs. psychology, 35-36 in Vico's conception, 61-64 Phoenicians, 103 Phoneme, 106 Phrygian, 5
Pictographic writing, 102-103 Plato, 44, 48 Poetic language, 11 Poetic logic, viii, 53-54 Poetic wisdom, 52 Polygenesis, 21, 146-47 Pooh-pooh theory: as a theory of language origin, 6-7, 10 Popper, K., 56-57 Pragmo-communicative theories: as theories of language origin, 12-14 Presentation, 69-70 Primal scene, viii, 24, 66-76 Primitive mind, 51-59 Proto-Indo-European, 16 Protolanguage, 16 Prototypicality theory, 134-35 Protoverbs, 14 Proto-World, 20-21 Psamtik, 5 Psychology. See Philosophy R Reconstruction, 16-21 Recourse of history, 45 Religious views of language, 2, 3 Representation, 69-70 Right hemisphere of the brain: and memory, 54, 67 and language, 85-89, 97-98, 108 and metaphor, 136-38 and color, 153 Root metaphors, 138-40 Rousseau, J.-J., 11 Russell, B., 47 S St. Thomas, 163 Sapir, E., 132-33 Saussure, F. de, 18, 118 Schlegel, A. von, 16-18 Science, 34-37, 46-48 Sebeok, T. A., 1, 58-59, 92 Selfish gene, 149-50 Semiosis: defined, 57 Shannon, C. E., 47 Skinner, B. F., 128
Sociobiology, 24, 56-58, 147-54 Sound symbolism, 8-10, 15, 72 Speech phylogenesis, vii, 119-20 Sperry, R., 88 Split-brain experiments, 88-89 Substitution theory of metaphor, 123-24 Sumer, 103 Surface level of mind, 55-56 Swadesh, M., 9, 14-16, 19, 26 Symbolic language, 80-81 Synapse, 57 Synecdoche, 74-75 Syntax: 26, 52 a Vichian definition, 54 development of, 79-80, 115-16 T Tagliacozzo, G., 33 Tenor of a metaphor, 124 Thought experiments, 2 Tower of Babel, 146 Traditional glottogenetic theories, 5-14 Turing, A., 47 U Uncertainty principle, 48 Universal grammar, 26, 79, 119, 155 Ursprache, 16, 19 V Vehicle of a metaphor, 124 Verene, D. P., 33-34, 40 Verum-factum principle, 31, 48-49, 55, 163 Vico and Anglo-American science, 31-32 Visual mimesis, x defined, 11-12 as an event in the primal scene, 70-72 and iconicity, 83-104 Vulgar language, 81
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W Wernicke, C., 86 Whitehead, A. N., 47 Whorf, B. L., 132 Wilson, E. O., 58, 147-50 Wolf Children, 6, 25 Writing, 70-71, 102-104 Y Yo-he-ho theory: as a theory of language origin, 7 Z Zeno, 35
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MARCEL DANESI is Professor of Semiotics and Italian at the University of Toronto. His previous publications include Applied Psycholinguistics, Robert A. Hall and American Structuralism, and Loanwords and Phonological Methodology.
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