Combinance in the Evolution of Language: Overcoming Limitations

For early pre-language hominins, the vocal-auditory channel of communication as then organized may have been unable to accommodate any enhancement in the transmission of conceptual content due to three limitations: comparatively low degrees of parameter diversity, iconicity, and fidelity. We propose that these limitations were overcome by an evolutionary development that enabled an advance from the fixed holophrastic calls of earlier species to the open-ended spoken language of our own species. What developed was a “combinant” form of organization.Such combinance is a system in which smaller units combine to form larger units. At its smallest scale, this process yields a “clave”. In a clave, generally, units from an inventory at a lower tier combine to form the units of an inventory at the next higher tier in accord with a particular set of constraints. In turn, such claves function as the smaller units that combine to form a larger unit, a concatenation, where the higher tier of one clave serves as the lower tier of the next. The longest such concatenation in language consists of six successive claves. Phonetic features combine to form phonemes under the constraints of feature assembly; phonemes combine to form morphemes under the constraints of phonotactics; morphemes combine to form complex words under the constraints of morphology; morphemes and complex words combine to form expressions under the constraints of syntax; expressions combine to form a single speaker’s “monolog” under the constraints of discourse rules; and such monologs combine to form an exchange between speakers under the constraints of turn-taking.Our analysis characterizes communication at its most general and contrasts different channels of communication. In particular, the vocal-auditory channel of spoken language is extensively contrasted with the somatic-visual channel of signed language, whose classifier system largely lacks the three limitations of the former. To show this difference, the limitations are analyzed in detail (e.g., iconicity is shown to be based on six properties: prorepresentation, covariation, proportionality, proportional directness, cogranularity, and codomainality). In accord with this difference, the signed classifier system demonstrates the cognitive feasibility of communicating advanced conceptual content with little combinance, but the vocal-auditory channel is seen to have needed the incorporation of combinance for spoken language to evolve.