Darwin and the biological faculty of language

If we wanted to reconstruct the origins of the biological approach to language, we would certainly find precursors of biolinguistics prior to Darwin. Among these, we have been able to consider (Pennisi-Falzone 2016) Aristotle and Vico as the theoretical and epistemological antagonists of Cartesian dualism and Platonism intrinsic to Chomskian bio-linguistics which today dominates the theoretical panorama. Darwin, instead, was a naturalist. He had a professional interest in biology and he was an incomparable observer of animal behavior. The fact that a large part of the philosophy developing after his death, and especially the most recent part, has followed his principles does not make Darwin a philosopher, let alone a linguist. However Darwin is important for biolinguistics. The main merit of the Darwin position on language is the definition of a method that distributes the comparison between human and other animals’ vocality between three key points: production (i.e. how to articulate), use (i.e. pragmatic features, vocalizations pertinent in relation to social context) and understanding (i.e. comprehension of interlocutor vocalizations). Agreeing with this position, we can summarize the specific Darwinian contribution to biolinguistics in the following points: 1. The origin of human language is essentially vocal, and it is derived from vocalizations of preceding animal species («I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals» – Darwin 1871, p. 56; 1874, p. 87 – with some slight but significant syntactic variation between the two editions). 2. The articulated language has been selected exclusively in humans both because it is the natural-biological candidate to realize an expressive ability already existing in other animals, and also because it has allowed the preservation of a specialized use of hands (Darwin 1871, p. 58; 1874, p. 59). 3. Non-articulate vocal productions and non-verbal signs use, both shared with other animals, support vocal language for feeling and emotion expressions, even those socially selected, but they are not connected with higher-level intellectual operations (Darwin 1871, p. 58; 1874, p. 85). 4. Since only physical structures can be heritable, voice articulation increase has caused a structural change in the brains of humans (Darwin, 1871, p. 59; 1874, p. 89). 5. Continuous and totally stabilized use of articulated language in human populations has favoured a strengthening of the degree, not a change of nature, of those cognitive abilities already existing in other animals without the infinite combinatorial forms (semantic and syntactic) that allows human linguistic articulation. In this embryonic sketch of Darwinian biolinguistics, two issues are still absent, but are still being currently debated: the problem regarding the nature of biological constraints and where these constraints exist relatively on the evolutionary timescale. A Darwinian biolinguistic has to find the answers posed by these issues.