Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language

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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

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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

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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

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The Vichian Approach 66 Reconstructing the Primal Scene 76 After the Primal Scene IV. The Dawn of Language: The Iconicity and Visual Mimesis Hypotheses

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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

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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

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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