Anthropological Roots of Linguistic Universals

Abstract

This article is devoted to the theoretical analysis of the mechanisms and regularities of origins of languages universals. The universals are treated in the classical interpretation of C. Hockett (1962) include traditional transmission, arbitrariness, productivity/openness; displacement, semanticity, and discreteness of signs; duality of patterning. The universals contrast against the widest variety of features found by linguists in the analysis of languages including those that are very different from the "average European standard". Seven theses present an emerging paradigm in modern studies of glottogenesis, including features of multistage, integrativity, and sociality. Verbal communication appeared as an adaptation, in the course of anthropogenesis as biological, and then as social and cultural evolution under the action of multilevel selection mechanisms and the construction of new technonatural and social niches. The basic conditions of glottogenesis were self-domestication, the formation of joint intentionality, and the formation of basic social norms. Speech abilities and linguistic structures appeared separately for a very long time (hundreds of thousands of years) with alternating breakthrough and long cumulative periods. The stages of increasing linguistic complexity were proto-words, pidgin sentences, and then sentences with syntax and grammar. The universals were formed along with the origin and development of languages, i.e., in the processes of glottogenesis as the most important part of the cognitive evolution of hominids in the processes of sapientation (from Australopithecus and Homo Habilis to Homo sapiens). The ascent to each new level (glottoaromorphosis) was accomplished in response to new challenges and communicative concerns that naturally appeared in the processes of anthropogenesis. This complex dynamic relationship of niches, orders, challenges, concerns, attempts, fixation mechanisms, and multilevel selection serves as the theoretical basis for the proposed explanations of linguistic universals.