Language: Mosaic or Special Faculty?

Editorial note Occasionally Sign LanguageStudies features articles that suggest a different way of looking at familiar problems. That below by Douglas McArthur is an elaboration of a paper he delivered at the 1992 meeting of the Language Origins Society in Cambridge. Douglas McArthur, Ph.D. (Sorbonne 1958), a native Australian, is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Manchester. He has taught at the University of Queensland in Australia and at Wellington University in New Zealand. His view that language structure and use is the result of a mosaic of capacities evolved in humans from earlier species is focused, not surprisingly, on the sounds-both instinctive and learned, language and non-language -that human animals make and respond to. But even though he does not give particular attention to primate, and hence human, visual systems with their rich information-processing capacity, his plea that scientists look for more than a single source for language is compatible with looking at visible gesturing as a key factor in the evolution of human language. LANGUAGE: MOSAIC or SPECIAL FACULTY? Douglas McArthur Introduction As Kuhn long ago pointed out (1962), a given general perspective , or paradigm, tends to shape scientists' perception of established data and their search for and perception of new data. Thus ideas about the nature and origin of language are likely to be influenced by such general perspectives, and discussion of language has tended to focus on the relatively narrow question whether language or some aspect of language or language behavior is innate. But we can relate the many diverse views on this topic to more general perspectives that may not always be made explicit and that researchers may not even be conscious of. Although there have been different opinions about the nature and origin of language, I believe that a certain flawed perspective has been dominant in Western thinking which I will call the "special destiny-special faculty paradigm." I describe this paradigm below and present an alternative way to view the nature of language and its possible origin, taking proper account of the range of knowledge we have at present-of course, any decision about the essential nature of language, given the limited state of our knowl- @1995, Linstok Press, Inc. ISSN 0302-1475 McArthur edge, is an act ofjudgment. I will also put forward the view that a language system is in many ways like a technology and the individual 's learning and use of language involves a range of capacities and skills rather than a particular, special, unique "capacity." Thus, this view may be called the "mosaic development paradigm ." The "special" paradigm One idea very prominent in the special destiny-special faculty paradigm is that there is a great and natural gulf between human beings and other living creatures-great emphasis placed on the uniqueness of human beings. In support of this opinion it is common to cite human achievements: complex social organization, scientific and technical successes, artistic creation, etc. These are usually attributed to such conjectured "special human capacities" as superior intelligence, imagination, creativity, symbolic thinking , self-consciousness-and of course-language. Though named separately they tend to be interrelated. Commonly associated with the idea of a gulf between human and other creatures is the idea that human beings have a special destiny in the universe, an idea usually related to and supported by some form of religious belief. This may be a belief in a god, and some religions hold that "Man has been created by God" (and even "in His likeness"). There may also be belief in an eternal human (but only human) soul. In the Western world, at least, even many non-believers hold the opinion that there is a great gulf between the human and all other species and that humans have a special destiny-perhaps a residual of lapsed religious belief . In this traditional conception of the special nature of human beings, language (i.e. spoken language or speech) has always had great importance. Often language is thought of as the paramount aspect of human nature or as the most obvious feature distinguishing human beings from other creatures. Furthermore, language is often seen as the basis of all human achievement...