Pitch syntax as part of an ancient protolanguage

Abstract

Music and speech are both auditory communicative phenomena which may have a common evolutionary origin. Both Pinker and Patel have proposed that the ‘rule-governed arrangements’ found in music are comparable to, and possibly derive from, the capacity for syntax that is found in language. Other scholars, such as Fitch and Charnavel, have alternatively suggested that the arrangements found in dance, music, and language stem from more general cognitive capacities related to hierarchical grouping principles. However, different syntactic phenomena such as rhythm syntax, pitch syntax, phonological syntax, and language grammar, work in a variety of disparate ways, which suggests that they have evolved owing to different adaptive pressures. This paper aims to show that pitch syntax was once part of a protolanguage designed to communicate internal mental states. It is proposed that increased social complexity caused this protolanguage to interact and eventually merge with another protolanguage specialized in communicating propositional meaning. It is also hypothesized that Baldwinian evolution led to the exaptation of combinatorial mechanisms already present in a musical protolanguage to create a new communicative system. As a result, a new capacity evolved that enabled the implicit learning of language grammar.