The cognitive basis of language

Language – system of communication, which makes use of signs. It reflects mandiknd’s conceptual world.

Semiotics – analyses verbal and non-verbal systems of human communications as well as animal communication.

There are 3 types of symbols, which represent three different structural principles relating form and content:

 indices

 icons

 symbols

Sign system

Sign – form which stands for something else, which we understand as its meaning.

Indexical sign (index) – points to something in its immediate vicinity (latin – “pointing finger). Example: signpost for
traffic pointing in the direction of the next town ; “facial expressions such as raising one’s eyebrows. They point to
a person’s emotional state of surprise or anger.

Iconic sign (icon) – provides a visual, auditory or any other perceptual image of the thing it stands for. An iconic sign
is similar to the thing it represents. (The road sign: children near school, animals on the road)

Symbolic signs (symbol) – does not have a natural link between the form and the thing represented, but only has a
conventional link. The traffic sign of an inverted triangle is one such symbol: it does not have a natural link between
its form and its meaning. Also $ is a symbol, flags and most of language too. People have “agreed” upon the
meaning.

Semiotics – the scholarly discipline that studies systems of signs in all their manifestation. Semiotics looks not only
on language but also other forms of human and non-human communicative behaviour such as gestures, clothing,
keeping distance, baring one’s teeth, etc. Animals have very sophisticated sign system too (they are almost
exclusively indexical).

There is a hierarchy of abstraction amongst the three types of signs.

Indexical signs – the most “primitive” and the most limited signs, as they are restricted to the “here” and “now”. Yet,
they are wide-spread in human communication, for example in body language, traffic and other signs and areas
such as advertising.  Marlboro cigarettes are indexically related to the adventurous life of the American cowboy.

Iconic signs – more complex in that their understanding requires the recognition of similarity. They are probably not
found in animal kingdom. (scarecows (starchy na wróble))
Symbolic signs - exclusive prerogative of humans. We want to talk about things which are more abstract in nature
such as events in the past or future, objects which are distant from us, hopes about peace, etc. This can be only
achieved by means of symbols – we can communicate possible thought. The most elaborate system of symbolic signs
is natural language in all its forms.

Almost all language is symbolic – not based on contiguity or similarity, but on convention.

The principle of indexicality in language

The principle of indexicality means that we can “point” to things in our scope of attention. We consider ourselves to
be at the centre of the universe, and everything around us is seen from our point of view. This egocentric view of the
world also shows in our use of language. If I said: “My neighbour is here now”, my listener would know that “here”
is a place where I am, and the time when we speak is “now”. Spaces other than ours are described as “there” and
similarly the time as “then”.

Deictic expressions – words such as here, there, now, then, today, tomorrow, this, that, come and go as well as the
personal pronouns I, you, we. They relate to the speaking EGO, who imposes his perspective on the world.

The EGO also serves as the “deictic centre” for locating things in space, as in The house in front of me. / The Empire
State Building is right in front of me. – the person speaking, rather than skyscraper, is the stable reference point of
this world. It is also possible to take the hearer’s perspective while looking at things: As we approach St. Paul’s now,
the Tower is to your left.

The ego furthermore serves as the deictic centre for locating thins with respect to other things – The bicycle is
behind the tree.  When the speaker moves to the other side of the street, his deictic orientation changes too and
the bicycle is now in front of the tree.

The inherent orientation that we give the artifacts such as the car is an extension of our human body. The front of
the car coincides with the driver’s front side as does the back, the left and right hand side. Just as we speak of our
bodily front and back, top and bottom, left and right side we conceive of shirts chairs, cars, houses and other
artefacts as having intrinsic fronts and backs, top and bottom, left and right sides.

The anthropocentric perspective – it follows the fact that we are foremost interested in humans like ourselves. We,
as human beings, always occupy a privileged position in the description of events. She knows the poem by heart. /
He would like some more milk in his coffee. / I lost my contact lenses.

The human being is given special prominence in other areas of grammar. English has special personal pronouns for
males and females (he and she opposed to it), special interrogative and relative pronouns (who, whose, whom
opposed to which) and special possessive form for humans (The man’s coat but not the house’s roof).

The principle of iconicity in language

Principle of iconicity – we conceive a similarity between a form of language and the thing it stands for, for example
the name of a bird may imitate the sound it seems to make: cuckoo.

Iconicity may manifest itself in three sub-principles, i.e. those of linguistic expressions related to sequential order,
distance, quantity.

The principle of sequential order – a phenomenon of both temporal events and the linear arrangement of elements
in a linguistic construction. It determines the order of two or more clauses. Veni, vidi, vici / Eye it, try it, buy it.

Virginia got married and had a baby. / Virginia had a baby and got married. – before / after

Bill painted the green door. / Bill painted the door green. – different meanings
Now and then, now or never, sooner or later, day and night / cause and effect, hit and run, trial and error, give and
take, wait and see, pick and mix, cash and carry, park and ride + the word order of S, V, O.

The principle of distance – accounts for the fact that things belong together conceptually tend to be put together
linguistically.

A noisy group was hanging around the bar.

A group of noisy youngsters were hanging around the bar.

 “was” pasuje do “group” więc są obok siebie, w drugim nie, więc nie są obok siebie.

Also: a clause with “to”, without “to”, clause with “that”.

Final example of iconic distance: choice between indirect object construction and the to-phrase in English, which is
known as “dative alternation”, as in:

Romeo sent his girlfriend a Valentine card. / Romeo sent a Valentine card to his girlfriend.

The smaller linguistic distance between sent and his girlfriend – means that she actually received the Valentine’s
Day card, while the greater distance between the V and to-phrase leaves the meaning unclear as to whether she
ever received the card.

The iconic principle of quantity – accounts for our tendency to associate more form with more meaning and less
form with less meaning.

Look, daddy; a tree and another tree, and another tree and another tree…..

That’s a loooooong story. – we iconically express the idea

Reduplication: the repetition strategy is systematically exploited in many languages: cow-cow means cows in pidgin
language.

The quantity principle also shows up in politeness strategies, according to the motto “being polite is saying a bit
more”. Thus, the increasing quantities of language forms in the following examples are meant to nonvey increasing
respect to hearer:

No smoking.

Don’t smoke, will you?

Would you mind not smoking here, please?

Or maybe: In my opinion it is a not unjustified assumption that………

The quantity principle also implies that less meaning requires less form.

Charles said that he was short of money and so did his gf. / Charles said that he was short of money and his gf said
that she was short of money too.

The principle of symbolicity in language.

The principle of symbolicity – refers to the conventional pairing of form and meaning as is typically found in the
word stock of a language. The concept of “house” is rendered as house in English, Haus in German, huis in Dutch,
casa in Italian and Spanish etc. There is nothing in the forms of these words that makes them suitable to express the
concept of “house”. They might even express something quite different in another language: for example the form
kaas in Dutch, which sounds like Italian casa, means cheese. The German word dom does not stand for house, but for
“church of a Bishop”. Ferdinand de Saussure  arbitrariness of words
However, while the notion of arbitrariness certainly holds true for most of the simple words of a language, it is at
odds with our general human disposition of seeing means in forms. If we look at the whole range of new words or
new senses of existing words, we find that almost all of them are motivated. New words, are, as a rule, built on
existing linguistic material and, as such, are meaningful to us (for example hardware – both words are arbitrary but
compound is no longer arbitrary, because it leads to more or less transparent meaning).

Software – still a symbolic sign in that there is only a conventionalized connection between the form and its
meaning, but it is not arbitrary, since the pairing of its form and meaning is motivated.

Motivation refers to non-arbitrary links between a form and the meaning of linguistic expression.

“folk etymologies” – word crayfish is a folk-etymological interpretation of French word ecrevisse, which goes back to
Germanic kreibz.

Linguistic and conceptual categories

Language resides not in dictionaries, but in the minds of the speakers of that language.

The notion of concept may be understood as “a person’s idea of what something in the world is like”.

Conceptual categories – concepts of set as a whole. Whenever we perceive something, we automatically tend to
categorize it. For example, when we hear a piece of music, we automatically categorize it as rock or classical music
or as something else.

Language as a system of signs must include the human “conceptualizer” and the world as it is experienced by him.

There is possibility that different people may categorize the same thing in the world differently and even the same
person may do so at different times: Glass – half full or half empty?  Each person’s choice between various
alternatives is called construal.

The notion of construal becomes even more evident if we compare the names for the same object in various
languages. Thus what English construes as horseshoe (“shoe for horse”) is constructed in French as fer a cheval
(“iron for horse”) and as Hufeisen (“hoof iron”) in German.

Conceptual categories may also show up as grammatical categories. The different ways of saying more or less the
same thing:

Look at that rain! / It’s raining again. / And the rain, it rained every day.

These examples show another important fact of language: in the structure of a sentence, each lexical category is at
the same time grammatical category.

Lexical category – tends to cover a wide range of instances. Think of the many different functions of vases. They
may vary greatly in height or in width, but as long as we can put flowers in them, we are willing to categorise them
as vases. Chairs also come in variety of types (kitchen chair, rocking chair, wheelchair, armchair…  lexical
categories).

The best member, called the prototypical member, or most prominent member of a category, is the subtype that
first comes to mind when we think of that category. When we are asked to draw a picture of a chair, we are most
likely to draw a picture of a kitchen chair, not an armchair.

Peripheral or marginal members: armchair, wheelchair.

Grammatical categories

The structural frameworks provided by grammatical categories include abstract distinctions which are made by
means of word classes, number (singular and plural), tense, etc.

Each word class is a category itself. Depending on definitions used for each word class, English can be said to have
eight or ten different word classes (noun, pronoun, determiner (the, a this), verb, adjective, adverb (happily),
preposition (at, on, during), particle (hang up, conjunction (and, because), interjection (oops!)).

A word such as telephone is a prototypical noun: it denotes a concrete, physical, three-dimensional thing.

The noun company is less prototypical: it denoted a non-concrete existence.

The word afternoon has no concrete existence and is even less prototypical.

What is language?

When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the “human essence”, the distinctive
qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man. ~ Noam Chomsky

For generativists, social life is impossible without lg.

According to the philosophy expressed in the myths and religions of many people, language is the source of human
life and power.

When you know a language, you can speak and be understood by others who know that language. This means you
are able to produce strings of sounds that signify certain meanings and to understand or interpret the sounds
produced by others. But language is much more than speech.

Yet, the ability to carry out the simplest conversation requires profound knowledge that most speakers are
unaware of. A speaker can produce a sentence having two relative clauses without knowing what a relative clause is.
The fact that we may know something unconsciously is not unique to language.

Knowledge of the sound system

The sound system  specific sounds + possible sound combination including stress patterns; comfortable

When I speak it is in order to be heard ~ Roman Jakobson

Knowledge of words

When you know language, you know words in that language; that is, you know which sequences of sounds relate to
specific meanings and which do not.

Eve’s Diary – Mark Twain  arbitrary relation between form and meaning

If you don’t know a language, the words (and sentences) of that language will be mainly incomprehensible, because
the relationship between speech sounds and the meanings they represent is, for the most part, an arbitrary one.
When you are acquiring a language you have to learn that the sounds represented by the letters house represent
the concept >dom<; if you know French, this same meaning is represented by maison, if you know Russian by dom.
The same sequence of sounds can represent different meanings in different languages. Bis means devil in Ukrainian,
but twice in Latin. That shows that words of a particular language have the meanings they do only by convention.

The conventional and arbitrary relationship between the form (sounds) and meaning (concept) of a word is also
true in sign language. Signs differ all around the world.

Many signs were originally like miming where the relationship between form and meaning is not arbitrary. Over time
these signs may change, just as the pronunciation of sounds changes, and the miming effect is lost.

There is some sound symbolic in language – onomatopoeic words (buzz, murmur)

The creativity of linguistic knowledge

The number of sentences in language is infinite. Knowing a language means being able to produce and understand
new sentences never spoken before. This is the creative aspect of language.

Creativity is a universal property of human language.

Noam Chomsky – regarded as the father of modern linguistics, argued persuasively against the view that language is
a set of learned responses to stimuli (bodźce). (Scream and grunts are not part of language!)

Knowledge of sentences and nonsentences

Our knowledge of language not only allows us to produce and understand an infinite number of well-formed (even
illogical) sentences. It also permits us to distinguish well-formed (grammatical) from ill-formed (ungrammatical)
sentences. This is further evidence of our linguistic creativity because ungrammatical sentences are typically novel,
not sentences we have previously heard or produced, precisely because they are ungrammatical.

Not every string of words constitutes a well-formed sentence in a language. Sentences are not formed simply by
placing one word after another in any order, but by organizing the words according to the rules of sentence
formation of the language. These rules are finite in length and finite in number so that they can be stored in our
finite brain. Yet, they permit us to form and understand an infinite set of sentences.

Grammar! - These rules are not determined by a judge or a legislature, or even taught in grammar class. They are
unconscious rules that we acquire as young children as we develop language and they are responsible for our
linguistic creativity.

What does It mean to know a language? It means knowing the sounds and meanings of many, if not all, of the words
of the language, and the rules for their combination – the grammar, which generates infinitely many possible
sentences.

Linguistic knowledge and performance

Speakers of all languages have the knowledge to understand or produce sentences in any length. Theoretically there
is no limit to the length of a sentence, but in practice very long sentences are highly improbable. Evidently, there is
difference between having the knowledge required to produce or understand sentences of a language and applying
this knowledge.

It is a difference between our knowledge of words and grammar, which is our linguistic competence, and how we
use this knowledge in actual speech production and comprehension, which is our linguistic performance.
Our linguistic knowledge permits us to form longer and longer sentences by joining phrases together or adding
modifiers to a noun. However, there are physiological and psychological reasons that limit the number of adjectives,
adverbs, clauses and so on that we actually produce and understand.

When we speak, we usually wish to convey some message. At some stage in the act of producing speech, we must
organize thoughts into strings of words. Sometimes the message is garbled: we may stammer, pause, produce slips
of the tongue.

What is grammar?

We use term “grammar” with a systematic ambiguity (dwuznaczność). On the one hand, the term refers to the
explicit theory constructed by the linguist and proposed as a description of the speaker’s competence. On the other
hand, it refers to this competence itself. ~ Noam Chomsky

The way we are using the word “grammar” differs from most common usages. In our sense, the grammar is the
knowledge speakers have about the units and rules of their language:

Phonology - rules of combining sounds into words,

Morphology - rules of word formation,

Syntax – rules of combining words into phrases and phrases into sentences,

Semantics – rules of assigning meaning.

The grammar, together with a mental dictionary (lexicon), represents our linguistic competence. To understand the
nature of language, we must understand the nature of grammar.

Every human being who speaks a language knows its grammar. When linguists wish to describe a language, they
make explicit the rules of the grammar of the language that exist in the minds of its speaker.

Descriptive grammar – does not tell you how you should speak; it describes your basic linguistic knowledge. It
explains how it is possible for you to speak and understand and make judgements about well-formedness and tells
what you know about the sounds, words, phrases, and sentences of your language.

When we say that a sentence is grammatical, we mean that it conforms to the rules of the mental grammar; when
we say that it is ungrammatical, we mean deviates from the rules in some way.

Every grammar is equally complex, logical and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to express any
thought. If something can be expressed in one language or one dialect, it can be expressed in any other language or
dialect.

Prescriptive grammar

Not all grammarians share the view that all grammars are equal. Language “purists” of all ages believe that some
versions of a language are better than others, that there are certain “correct” forms. They wish to prescribe rather
than describe the rules of grammar.

In the Renaissance a new middle class emerged who wanted their children to speak the dialect of the “upper”
classes:

1762 – Bishop Robert Lowth wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar with Critical Notes. He prescribed a
number of new rules for English, many of them influenced by his personal taste.

 I don’t have none. / You was wrong about that. – Lowth decided that “two negatives make a positive” and
therefore one should say “I don’t have any”. You  were. Many of rules based on Latin and made little sense to Eng.
Because Lowth was influential and because the rising new class wanted to speak “properly”, many of these new
rules were legislated into English grammar, at least for the prestige dialect – the variety of language spoken by
people in positions of power.

Winston Churchill – credited with this response to the “rule” against ending a sentence with preposition: “This is the
sort of nonsense with which I will not put.”

All human languages and dialects are fully expressive, complete, and logical, as much as they were hundred or two
thousand years ago. Linguistically, prestige and standard dialect do not have superior grammars.

Writing follows certain prescriptive rules of grammar, usage and style that the spoken language does not. Writing is
not acquired naturally as language is.

Teaching grammars

The descriptive grammar of a language attempts to describe the rules internalized by a speaker of that language. It is
different from a teaching grammar, which is used to learn another language or dialect.

Teaching grammars can be helpful to people who do not speak the standard or prestige dialect, but find it would be
advantageous socially and economically to do so.

Gloss – the parallel word in the student’s native language.

Such grammars might be considered prescriptive in the sense that they attempt to teach the students what is or is
not a grammatical construction in the new language.

Universal grammar

There are rules that hold in all languages. The universal rules are of particular interest because they give us a
window into the human “faculty of language” which enables us to learn and use any particular language.

Idea of general grammar – reveal those features common to all languages.

Chomsky’s view: there is a Universal Grammar that is part of the biologically endowed human language faculty. We
can think of UG as the blueprint that all languages follow that forms part of the child’s innate capacity of language
learning. A major aim of linguistic theory is to discover the nature of UG.

The linguist’s goal is to reveal the “laws of human language”.

The development of Grammar

Linguistic theory is concerned not only with describing the knowledge that an adult speaker has of his or her
language, but also with explaining how this knowledge is acquired.

All typically developing children acquire (at least one) language in a relatively short period with apparent ease. They
do this despite parents and other caregivers do not provide them with any specific language instruction.

Children can acquire language they are exposed to. They do so, because they do not have to figure out all the
grammatical rules, only those specific to their particular language. The laws of lg = their biological endowment.

Sign languages: Evidence of Language Universals

The sign language of dead communities provide some best evidence to support the view that all languages are
governed by the same universal principles.

The major languages of the deaf community in the US is American Sign Language (ASL). ASL is an outgrowth of the
sign language used in France and brought to the US in 1817 by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet.

ASL – fully developed, unlimited numbers of new sentences.

Deaf children who are exposed to signed language acquire them just as hearing children acquire spoken language.

Neurological studies show that signed languages are organized in the brain in the same way as spoken languages,
despite their visual modality.

In short, signed languages resemble spoken languages in all major aspects. This universality is expected because,
regardless of modality in which it is expressed, language is a biologically based ability. Our knowledge, use and
acquisition of language are not dependent on the ability to produce and hear sounds but on a far more abstract
cognitive capacity.

What is not (human) language

Most animal species possess some kind of communication system. Humans also communicate through systems
other than language such as head nodding or facial expressions.

Many species have non-vocal system of communication. Male spider – gestures, which are invariant. One never
finds a creative spider changing or adding to the courtship ritual of his species.

Crabs – forty species, each uses its own claw-waving movement to signal to another member of its “clan”.

An essential property of human language not shared by the communication system of above is its discreteness.
Human languages are not simply made up of fixed set of invariant signs. They are composed of discrete units –
sounds, words, phrases – that are combined according to the rules of the grammar of the language.

Displacement – the capacity to talk (or sign) messages that are unrelated to here and now.

Displacement and discreteness are two fundamental properties that distinguish human language from the
communication system of birds and other animals.

One respect in which birdsongs resemble human languages is in their development. In many bird species the full
adult version of the birdsong is acquired in several stages, as it is for children acquiring language.

Critical period – for acquiring the language.

Bee danced – discrete at some time, but unlike human language the topic is always the same: food.

Word formation

Neologism – new word in a language

Etymology – the origin and history of a word

Borrowing – taking over words from other languages

Loan translation (calque) – special type of borrowing; there is a direct translation of the elements of a word into the
borrowing language (wolkenkrabber, grate-ciel, skyscraper).
Compounding – joining two separate words to produce a single form (bookcase, fingerprint, textbook)

Blending – the combination of two separate forms to produce a single new term (smoke + haze = smog)

Clipping – when a word of more than one syllable is reduced to shorter form (gasoline=gas + imiona)

Hypocorisms – particular type of reduction when –y or –ie is added; toaste (toasted sandwich) brekky (breakfast)

Backformation – a word of one type is reduced  emote (emotion), donate (donation)

Conversion – a change in the function of a word  Have you buttered the toast?

Coinage – invention and general use of totally new terms, not common in eng (aspirin, google it)

Acronyms – new words formed from the initial letters  CD (compact disc), NATO, NASA

Derivation – the production of new words; un-, mis-, -ful, -ish……

Prefixes – un-, mis-……

Suffixes - -less, -ish, -ful…..

Infixes – affix incorporated inside the word (unfuckingbelievable)

Semantics

Semantics – the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences. There is always an attempt to focus on what
the words conventionally mean, rather than an individual speaker might think they mean, or want them to mean.

Meaning

Our main interest is in what we might describe as the widely accepted objective and factual meaning of words and
not their subjective or personal meaning. This distinction is generally presented in terms of referential meaning as
opposed to associative or emotive meaning.

Referential meaning covers those basics, essential components of meaning that are conveyed by the literal use of a
word. It is the type of meaning that dictionaries are designed to describe. Some of the basic components of a word
like needle in English might include “thin, sharp, steel instrument”.  referential

Different people might have different associations or connotations. They might associate needle with pain, illness,
blood, drugs, hard to find  not referential

According to the basic syntactic rules for forming English sentences, we have well-formed structures.

The hamburger ate the boy. – syntactically good, semantically odd.

Semantic features

Semantic features – nie każdy rzeczownik może logicznie połączyć się z każdym czasownikiem (np. Hamburger nie
może zjeść chłopca).

Words as containers of meaning

For many words in language it may not be easy to come up with neat components of meaning (advice, threat,
warning – if we try to think of components to differentiate them, probably not successful). This approach of
containers seems to be too limited in terms of practical use. There is more to the meaning of words than these basic
types of features.
Semantic roles

Instead of thinking of words as containers of meaning, we can look at the “roles” they fulfil.

The boy kicked the ball. – the verb describes an action (kick). The noun phrase in the sentence describe the role of
entities, such as people and things, involved in action.

Agent and theme

The boy kicked the ball.:

The boy - Agent

The ball – Theme

Agent and theme – most common semantic roles.

Instrument and experiencer

If an agent uses another entity in order to perform an action  instrument

The boy cut the rope with an old razor.  old razor – instrument

When a noun phrase is used to designate an entity as the person who has a feeling, perception or state 
experiencer.

If we feel, know, hear, enjoy something we are not performing an action.

Location, source and goal.

On the table, in the room – location

From Chicago – source

To New Orleans – goal

Lexical relations

Words can have relationships with each other. 

In everyday talk, we often explain the meanings of words in terms of their relationships. (conceal=to hide)

 synonymy

 antonymy: gradable, non-gradable, reversives (undress, enter/exit, lengthen/shorten)

 hyponymy – meaning of one form in included in the meaning of another: flower/rose ; animal, insect, vegetable
– superordinate (=higher level)

 Prototypes – as it is robin for the word bird – more characteristic than dove or canary

 Homophones – two or more differently written words have the same pronunciation (meat, meet)

 Homonyms – one form (written or spoken) has 2 or more unrelated meanings (mole – on skin/ animal)

 Polysemy – 2 or more words with the same form and related meanings (foot, date, to run)
Why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 789  - homophones

Mary had a little lamb, some rice and vegetables – the polysemy of lamb allows 2 interpretations.

 Metonymy  crown – queen, bottle – water, The White House has announced……

 Collocation – which words occur with other words – salt + pepper, butter + bread

Corpus linguistics – by database they can find out how often specific words or phrases occur and what collocations
are most common.

The origins of language

In Charles Darwin’s vision of the origins of language, early humans had already developed musical ability prior to
language.

We don’t know how language originated. We do know that the ability to produce sound and simple vocal pattering
appears to be in ancient part of the brain that we share with all vertebrates (kręgowcami).

We suspect that some type of spoken language must have developed between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, well
before written language (about 5000 years ago).

The divine source

In the biblical tradition  God

Hindu tradition  Sarasvati, wife of Brahma

Herodotus (Greek writer) – reported the experiment with new born babies whose company were goats.

King James the Fourth – similar experiment, babies were reported to have started speaking Hebrew. About a
century later, Akbar the Great also arranged such experiment – children produced no speech at all.

Very young children living without access to human language in their early years grow up with no language at all.

There is no “spontaneous” language.

The natural sound source

The human auditory system is already functioning before birth (at around 7 months). That early processing capacity
develops into an ability to identify sounds in environment. This leads to the idea that primitive words derive from
imitations of the natural sounds that early men and women heard around them.- Jepersen called this the
“bow-wow” theory

Early human tried to imitate the sounds of the sounds and them used them to refer to those objects when they
weren’t present.  onomatopeia

The “Pooh-Pooh” theory

Another of Jepersen’s theory, which proposed that speech developed from the instinctive sounds people make in
emotional circumstances. That is, the original sounds of language may have come from natural cries of emotion
such as pain, anger and joy. Although, we normally produce spoken language as we breathe out, not inhale.
The social interaction source

“yo-he-ho” theory – the theory that the sounds of a person involved in physical effort could be the source of our
language, especially when that physical effort involved several people and the interaction had to be coordinated.

It is a social context of human language development.

Apes and other primates live in social groups and use grunts and social calls, but they have not developed the
capacity of speech.

The physical adaptation source

Based on our locomotion – this changed how we breathe. The rhythm of breathing is not tied to the rhythm of
walking.

The human brain

The human brain is not only large relative to human body size, it is also lateralized – it has specialized functions in
each of the two hemispheres.

Left hemisphere – those functions that control the motor movements involved in speaking and object
manipulation. It is the area of motor cortex that controls the muscles of the arms and hands is next to the
articulatory muscles of the face, jaw and tongue.

The genetic source

At birth, the baby’s brain is only a quarter of its eventual weight and the larynx is much higher in the throat, allowing
babies to breathe and drink at the same time. In relatively short time, the larynx descends, the brain develops, the
child assumes an upright posture and starts walking and talking. It seems to indicate that human offspring are born
with a special capacity for language.

The innateness hypothesis

Something in human genetics, possibly a crucial mutation or two  the source.