On evolution, change, and beyond

This paper discusses Hubert Haider’s target-article “Grammar change: A case of Darwinian cognitive evolution”. I show why such an article is fascinating (and unconventional), although I will mainly concentrate on several disagreements with Haider and will suggest alternative views to those contended by this scholar. My discussion will highlight five main issues: (1) Haider assumes a purely Neo-Darwinian (i.e. genocentric) view of evolution and inheritance, lacking a more pluralistic approach; (2) Haider rejects the idea of language as a biological phenomenon, while at the same time he seems to assume several characteristics related to a biologically seated trait; (3) as opposed to Haider’s suggestion, the computational system does not need to be language-specific; (4) Haider’s divide between the procedural and declarative components of grammar is perhaps too strict regarding (grammatical) change; and (5) Haider considers that there is no scientific way of deciding the question of language origins and evolution and that complex grammars are too recent. However, I show that a language-like computational power (and perhaps complex grammars) already existed many thousands of years ago.

Pantomimic conceptions of language origins

Could pantomime have been the key step in the evolutionary emergence of symbolic communication? Such a possibility has been consistently present in the intellectual reflection on language origins. What makes pantomime interesting from this perspective is its rich expressive potential, since it can convey open-ended, semantically universal and displaced meanings without relying on semiotic conventions, so that spontaneous pantomimes can be recognized as such and successfully interpreted. Definitions are important in classifying a particular scenario as “pantomimic.” In this chapter, the authors employ a “rich” definition of pantomime: it is described as bodily-mimetic communication which is non-conventional, improvised, performed with the whole body, holistic, and communicatively and semantically complex. Based on this foundation, the authors review and evaluate pantomimic accounts of language origins, from the past to the present, and particularly focus on the contemporary pantomime accounts given by Michael Arbib, Michael Tomasello, and Jordan Zlatev.

Conclusion: The Abstractions of Homo Economicus: Now a Stomach, Now an Anus

The modern impasse hails for the Arabic reading subject a crisis in symbolic identification: there is a retreat of the discourse of the master, a crisis in the symbolic and the relationship between language and law comes to fore. The nineteenth century in particular is marked by the emergence of a neurotic subject (Bustani) obsessed with questions of origins (original sin, origins of language, origins of society and habit, origins of culture) and a hysteric subject (Shidyaq) that asks: what do you want of me? The problem of origins does not cease to repeat itself in the corpus of texts from the time, it takes the shape of a compulsive reposing of the questions of beginnings and ends: where does taste come from (inclination, disposition, acquired)? What is the origin of sociality? How does habit originate? What is the origin of language? How to write a history of culture? When and how does culture originate? How does one become a woman?