What made our ancestors put the words together?

Abstract

This article introduces an evolutionary approach to the ontogeny of grammar and establishes a relation between sexual behaviors and mental linguistic mechanisms in phylogeny. Initially, it presents a summary of evolutionary ideas relating to language evolution and the nature of adaptations, and holistically discuss them in terms of sexual selection. Next, generative, hierarchical, gendered, combinatorial and recursive operations are illustrated, explained and discussed in order to unroll the ancestral linguistic characters in the ontogeny of grammar. Finally, the linguistic characters such as generation, symbolism, hierarchy, gender, merge and recursivity in the ontogeny are correlated with other reproductive, symbolic, sexual, combinatorial, hierarchical, iterative, repetitive, recursive experiences in ontogeny and phylogeny in order to identify what mental mechanisms in the phylogeny are recapitulated. The conclusion is that symbolic thought as the origin of several developments in human mental evolution as well as merge and recursivity characters of grammar in ontogeny is the side-effect of sexual pleasure from ventro-ventral sexual experience. In other words, ventro-ventral sex is introduced as the antecedent of symbolic thought and protolanguage. This grounding led to the postulation that generation, symbolism, hierarchy, gender, merge and recursivity in the ontogeny of grammar are regressions to earlier evolutionary stages of copulatory, particularly ventro-ventral, patterns in the phylogeny.