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From Primate Origins to a Language Ready Human Brain. The origin of language (spoken, signed, and written) and its relationship to human evolution are complex subjects requiring inferences from the fossil record, archeological evidence, contemporary language similarities and differences, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and communication in other animals ...
Unlike Task-Based Language Teaching (Chapter 9), which is motivated by a creative-construction theory of second language learning, TBI, while compatible with theories of learning, derives from a genre theory of the nature of language (see below) and the role that texts play in social contexts.
- The Bow-Wow Theory
- The Ding-Dong Theory
- The La-La Theory
- The Pooh-Pooh Theory
- The Yo-He-Ho Theory
- Will We Ever Discover The Origin of Language?
- The Evolution of Human Language
According to this theory, language began when our ancestors started imitating the natural sounds around them. The first speech was onomatopoeic—marked by echoic words such as moo, meow, splash, cuckoo, and bang. So what's wrong with this theory? Well, relatively few words are onomatopoeic, and these words vary from one language to another. For inst...
This theory, favored by ancient philosophers Plato and Pythagoras, maintains that speech arose in response to the essential qualities of objects in the environment. The original sounds people made were supposedly in harmony with the world around them. Apart from some rare instances of sound symbolism, there is no persuasive evidence, in any languag...
Danish linguistOtto Jespersen suggested that language may have developed from sounds associated with love, play, and (especially) song. As David Crystal notes in "How Language Works," this theory still fails to account for "... the gap between the emotional and the rational aspects of speech expression... ."
This theory holds that speech originated with interjections—spontaneous cries of pain ("Ouch!"), surprise ("Oh!"), and other emotions ("Yabba dabba do!"). However, no language contains very many interjections, and, Crystal points out that the clicks, intakes of breath, and other noises used in this way "bear little relationship to the vowels and co...
According to this theory, language evolved from the grunts, groans, and snorts evoked by heavy physical labor. Though this notion may account for some of the rhythmic features of the language, it doesn't go very far in explaining where words come from.
As American linguist Peter Farb wrote in "Word Play: What Happens When People Talk," virtually all these theories "have serious flaws, and none can withstand the scrutiny of present knowledge about the structure of language and about the evolution of our species." But does this mean that allquestions about the origin of language are unanswerable? N...
Still curious about language? There are several other theoriesabout the origin and evolution of human language. Among other things considered, physical adaptations in humans, such as changes in teeth, lips, and the larynx, as well as theories on the role of gestures and social bonding, contribute to the ongoing debate on the evolution of language.
Mar 28, 2023 · With the present paper, we sought to use research findings to illustrate the following thesis: the evolution of language follows the principles of human evolution. We argued that language does not exist for its own sake, it is one of a multitude of skills that developed to achieve a shared communicative goal, and all its features are reflective of this. Ongoing emerging language adaptations ...
May 2, 2018 · Acknowledgment that the action system has a crucial role in language comprehension and production has provided new views on the involvement of such a system in language evolution, bolstering the gesture-first theory of human communication, according to which human language first originated as a gestural-based communicative system (Arbib 2005; Arbib et al. 2008; Armstrong and Wilcox 2007 ...
- Francesco Ferretti, Ines Adornetti, Alessandra Chiera, Erica Cosentino, Serena Nicchiarelli
- 2018
Over the past 20 years, many in the field of second language learning and pedagogy have become familiar with models of language that emphasize its communicative nature. These models are often referred to as usage-based because they emphasize the notion that actual language use is a primary shaper of linguistic form.
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Thereafter, based on Sapir’s findings, researchers studying language inferred that if there was no word for, say, you in a certain language, then speakers of that language treat you as nonexistent. Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Sapir’s, later suggested that language could, to some extent, determine the nature of our thinking.
